Face the fact – your blog needs to be regularly updated to maintain its readership! Face another fact - you must always find fresh topics to write about. It's called "creating content". But, how do you keep up a steady flow that will keep readers interested and maybe make a living at it?

If you want to be popular and make money, the only topic that you should be writing on is a topic that you are passionate about and are intensely interested in. Seem pretty obvious? Well, many bloggers miss this crucial point. They load their blog with disjointed topics, even nonsensical topics, that are all over the map. They try a "shotgun" approach rather than a "high powered rifle approach" (sorry anti-gun lobby!).

Many bloggers hoping to make blogging a career because they want to escape a mundane job, force themselves to write about something that they are not interested in. Blogging then becomes as torturous as their mundane job! It becomes work. And, trust me on this, you will never be successful at this if it feels like work. Why? Because you will need to devote hours upon hours to make your blog stand out and generate enough income for you to quit your day job. It can take months of initial work. Can you sustain that level of committment? Not likely if you are not interested in your topic. There is a bright side to this hard work aspect. Once the mechanics of your blog are set up, adding content is then easy and fun.

The other reason you must write about something you’re passionate about is because your thinking process and emotions show through your writings! If you feel indifferent to a certain subject but still write about it just for the sake of it, your readers will notice it. It's all about writing with your personality showing. It's putting your Self out there for everyone to see. Some will reject you but many will like you and come back for more of your words.

Forcing yourself to write will not allow your personality to show through at all. Blogging is about being yourself in print. Write like you are telling a story to a good friend about a topic you love. If you are excited, your readers will catch that excitement and come back for more.

Once you have chosen your main theme, start posting to your blog about it and make it a habit to post at least once every day, even if it’s only a comment on the newspaper article you read today. Think of yourself as a long train, pulled by an old fashioned steam engine. You know the kind of train I'm talking about. Just think - The Polar Express! It takes a lot of effort to get you moving. First, you might just budge inches as the wheels spin on the rails gaining traction. You gain momentum until you finally reach your cruising speed.

No matter how well you know your topic, your engine is bound to run low on steam over time, the engine will need more coal in the firebox, so here are methods to generate new content for your blog.

1. Brainstorm. The very best way to brainstorm is to see what other bloggers have to say about stuff happening in your field of discussion. And the very best way to find related blogs is at: blogsearch.google.com or technorati.com. There are other decent search tools too, you just have to look around. From other blogs, you can gather more knowledge on your subject. You can leave comments on what others have to say or you can use their comments by writing about them on your own blog! You can give their comments your own "spin".

2. Stay in touch with the world. Once you’ve established contacts with other bloggers in your field, you will have quite an inexhaustible “conversation” going, so you should not need to actively search for content to write about. However, if you are still stuck, search for news articles related to your niche in the local newspaper or online through sites like: news.google.com and news.yahoo.com.

3. Nurture relationships. You should develop relationships with people with the same interest as you in the particular niche you choose, so you will eventually build up a bank of questions and answers and interesting discussions to write about in your blog. To do this, join forums related to your niche, but don’t join every forum. Stick with one or two with the biggest number of members or the one which is most focused on your niche. This will also come in handy much later in gaining traffic and, if you want to quit that day job, in generating profits.

4. Wash, Rinse, & Repeat. Keep up a schedule of posting at least once per day so that the major search engines will know that your blog has fresh content everyday. This will attract the search engines to spider your page on a more frequent basis and you will begin gaining that extra traffic that you need to be profitable.

One word of caution: If you are using Blogger.com and you post too many articles in one session, Blogger may see your blog as spam and block it for review. I run 15 blogs and this happened with 8 of them. It took over a week to get them cleared by Blogger. Now, I try to post only a maximum of 2 items per 24 hour period on any single blog.

Now here is the hardest part of generating readers and profits: Generating traffic through search engines! I write about Optimization for Profit in a 6 part series on one of my blogs. See the link in my Author Box. For now, remember, it takes consistent effort everyday to build up momentum like that of The Polar Express!

Yours for success in life.

Jim DeSantis

P.S. - Please forward this article to someone who can use it.