One of the biggest misconceptions I have seen in the blogging world is people think there is a correlation between the number of readers a blog has and the amount of traffic. This is not the case for several reasons. Both readership and traffic are important to a blog, but if you want to have a successful blog either one of these will be just fine. It would be very possible to build a blog without a readership and become ranked very nicely in the search engines and therefore have the ability to build an income from the traffic. The other extreme would be to write without any internet marketing and rather than being ranked well in the search engines grow a readership with social bookmarking. Both of these are prime examples of how a blog can succeed with only readership or traffic. Now to succeed online with a blog it is best if you have a mix between these two ranking well in search engines and being well liked by readers.

If you want to rank well in the search engines then there are a few things you will need. The first thing you will need is good unique content. This is by far the best way to rank well within the search engines, but by itself will not let you succeed. After creating many articles on your blog you will also need backlinks both to your main page as well as some of your top posts. Backlink building will help Google find your main blogs index, but what it also does is shows Google the importance of your blog among the web. If you are linked to by many different websites and blogs across the net then Google will see your blog as popular and rank it higher in their index. The last thing you will need to rank well in Google and the other major search engines is time. This is one of the biggest factors when Google is deciding where to place your blog. If your blog is still new then it has not had adequate time to build trust with Google so don’t expect to see huge results until after the first year or so at least this was the case for my blog that covers online business.

As you rank higher in the search engines you may want to think about how to increase your blogs readership. When someone hits your blog and they really enjoy reading it more than likely they will want to subscribe to future updates. This is how a blogs readership grows from 0 to 100,000. Now this does not happen overnight you must be really patient, but there are some simple steps you can take to ensure when someone wants to subscribe they have the ability. The first thing you need to do with any blog is go to feedburner.com and burn a feed for your blog. Once you have the feed burned feed burner will give you the address to your feed. This is the address that allows people to click and subscribe. You take this address and make it a link in your blogs side bar. With feed burner you can also allow people to subscribe with email all you need to do is enable and copy and paste the code into your blogs side bar. There is no magic way to get people to subscribe to your blog all you can do is increase traffic, write good content, and make it easy for the people who want to subscribe by adding links or the email box.