We don’t mean to lie to you. It’s just that we think blogging is the best thing since sliced bread, and our enthusiasm tends to overwhelm our sense of reality from time to time. Here are some of the things we say, and the truth behind the exuberance.

1. “Blogging is …

This is a guest post by Steven Snell. Mr. Snell designs websites and maintains a blog for Vandelay Website Design. You can read more of his writing and see his portfolio at www.vandelaydesign.com.
Social media websites such as Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and Stumble Upon send thousands of visitors to blogs and websites everyday. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of articles about becoming a top user of these sites to build your traffic. While they are all tremendous sources of traffic, getting a significant number of visitors from these sites can take a lot of effort—especially with Digg, Netscape, and Reddit.

If you’ve avoided social media marketing because you don’t have hours every day to spend submitting articles and voting on those submitted by other users, you are missing out on countless potential visitors.

For the average user the main problem with the most popular social media sites is that it can be difficult to generate any kind of traffic to your site. Most of us are completely overlooking the opportunity to benefit from 2nd tier social media sites that send decent levels of traffic and can make it easier for the time-starved blogger to succeed.

Literally hundreds of lesser-known social media sites exist that present far less competition for the top spots. Yes, they will send less traffic than Digg, but if you choose the right ones to use you can see substantial results.

Many good writers get stuck when they decide to start blogging, mostly because they aren’t sure what they’re shooting for in a blog post.

I’ll write another post about how to choose a post topic in the near future, but regardless of the specific topic, there are some common characteristics of good posts. You’ll come across plenty of exceptions, but it’s one of those “know the rules before you break them” things.

As you know, creating a blog can be lots of fun. It’s also a lot of hard work, though, and that’s why it’s important to generate plenty of traffic to your site. After all, there’s nothing worse than pouring your heart and soul into your blog, only to discover that nobody is visiting!

So now for the $64,000 question. How does you effectively attract people to your blog? How do you actually do this and build up a blog site that will be known to many within a relatively short amount of time?

It’s a fact that writing for the web is entirely different from writing for print. When it comes to writing your blog articles, you need to keep in mind a number of rules that make it easier for your readers.

You’ll need to forget (or at least temporarily ignore) some of what you’ve learned about writing for print, because as you will soon discover, writing for the web is a totally different game altogether!

To prove my point, think for a moment about the material you read online. What do you find most attractive? What turns you off? Seriously, take a minute to think about it.