The other day, my eight year-old daughter handed me her notebook she practices her times tables in and declared, "Mama, this is not easy." My daughter is actually a very bright little girl. She just made her first bad grade in her short school career so far, and she cried like she had lost her best friend. That's why I was shocked when she seemed ready to give up so easily. Granted, having only so far made it to third grade, she hasn't really had all that much difficult school work. Usually, though, she is a little more proactive in her educational endeavors. I explained to her school is not supposed to be "easy", that it is about learning, which means being challenged and tested.

That conversation with my little got me to thinking late that night. I see a lot of blogs come and go. I have seen many blogs come to the scene with a bang, then fizzle out like a journey-belabored star. What gives Darren Rowse and Jennifer Mattern their staying power? What do Deb Ng and Seth Godin know the rest of don't? While I won't pretend to know those blogging superstars' secrets of success, I will tell you there are some basic principles that will lay the ground work for a relevant, enduring blog.

Know what you want to accomplish
v Entertain
v Inform/Educate
v Enlighten
v Propagandize
v Sell

Establish goals to help yourself reach milestones to measure your progress
v Certain number of posts/day-week-month
v Certain number words/post
v Certain number followers by certain date
v Building amount of commentary

Establish a routine with regularly scheduled tasks
Each day of the week, do routine maintenance:
v Link check: check for broken links
v Culling your ______ list
v Checking for any aesthetic mishaps
v Promotional maintenance
v Re-tweeting old post at least once a month
v Advertising for guest bloggers every month

Always be on the lookout for creative ways to improve your blog
v New kinds of ads
v Add your own white papers, e-books, etc on sidebars
v Don't crowd too much on blog-makes it too busy and difficult to read

Now that you have taken care of the aesthetic and technical details, what about the stuff you actually write?

*Keep it fresh-Don't do what everyone else is doing (ok, everyone does this one, but it's practically a requirement on a list like this, and I would be remiss to leave it out).

Seriously, is there anything that hasn't been written about? According to an advertising executive interviewed for a television show a few years ago, there truly is nothing new under the sun. We just have to learn how to keep improving everything. If you are one of those that buy into the theory everything has already been written about then maybe you could try jazzing up some of your old posts with updates from new information that has been discovered since you first published it.

*Don't decorate to compensate-Keep it simple:

With all the pretty colors and cool fonts available to computer users these days, it’s hard to control the urge to decorate to compensate. While you do, of course, want visual appeal to draw the readers' eyes, after that you just better be a darn good writer. Keep in mind some basic facts about Internet readers. They generally have such a plethora of information available to them and so people have lost the ability to just read. Now they scan headlines, bullet points, and emboldened & italicized print to get the crux of the work. However, remember using all sorts of different font and paragraph formatting is going to clutter the view. Highlight your high points, but *keep it simple*.

*Even if you feel like you have nothing to say, stick to your schedule:

Try typing the most mindless rhetoric possible. For example, as a freelance writer for my blog I might start out with the following: "Freelance writing is when people pay you to writer but you only work for yourself and you have to pay self-employment taxes." Not exactly Shakespeare, right? That's ok because since I have allotted the time from my schedule to blog, then I'm going to blog.

What are some ways you made your blog into a successful blog? What are your suggestions for someone new to blogging? Leave a comment and tell other readers what your methods are.