Creating and maintaining a blog is one of the best things you can do to drive people to your web site, have killer SEO, and create content on a regular basis. It's fairly simple to create a blog; the critical part is maintaining and publishing content on a regular basis. That was on my biggest hurdles when I started this blog. You must commit to writing either once a week, a few times week, or almost everyday. You have to be producing high-quality content on a consistent basis.

Quality is always more important than quantity. Content must keep the reader wanting more. Content should spread on it’s own via linking, sharing, or communicating. Once you can create high-value content you won't see results right away. There will be a time period of experimentation, changes, and waiting until you start to see people finding the blog through searches or links. I’m in that period right now with this blog.

Another skill you must have is time management. To produce really high-quality content doesn’t come quickly. It could take a few hours to write a blog post that will leave an impact with the reader. Align that with other forms of content and you're talking about several hours of creating and editing content. Then you need to start spreading the content through different social conversation channels such as: other blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, or the other thousands of places you can share your content. You must keep it focused so your audience will be interested in what you’ve created. Commenting on other peoples work and linking to them is a great way to start the conversation and begin engaging.

When starting a blog you should have a narrow focus and only discuss a few topics. I started out with just two and in one month it has grown to five. Staying focused to begin with, will help you produce higher-quality content. Reading other blogs will help you create content and start sharing. You can never stop listening, and having quality versus quantity will give you much better results.

Mark K.