Without a doubt, the most often used and sought after medium of communication in the Internet is no other than the ever popular blog.

While there are still individuals who have no idea what a blog is exactly, those who are regular web surfers know that this popular medium is a very effective tool for bringing one’s thoughts or ideas across to the surfing public.

Why are blogs so popular then when not everyone can define exactly what they are? Well, you just said it. People do not exactly know what a blog is and therefore this leaves room for a lot of things that one can do with it. Moreover, the blog is accessible, honest and, more importantly, it allows for a wide exchange of ideas with its readers which it does through the comments posted on each article it carries. This is one feature not all web sites carry and which makes the blog an effective communication medium.

Precisely because you can leave comments on a blog, you are able to test your ideas or, if you are selling a type of service or a product, you are provided a feedback mechanism that will enable you to receive reactions on your product that you can use to make improvements on it. On the other hand, if it’s just an exchange of ideas you are after with your blog, then you can just post your articles and wait for people to stop by and leave a comment. Soon you will have a community of people who share your interests and ideas coming over to read your blog on a regular basis. The most fulfilling part of maintaining a blog is seeing how many people are actually bridging distance and time zones to reach out and communicate with you through your blog. This is what makes the blog an extremely powerful communication medium.

At present, there are over 40 million blogs in existence online and more are being developed each day. Each of these blogs carry topics and ideas of interest to the blog writer and its community of readers. Blog topics may range from teen diaries to campaign platforms of U.S. presidential candidates. There are no hard and fast rules with regard to choosing topics for a blog. The only rule that one needs to strictly adhere to (if this can be regarded as a rule) is to always keep your blog content fresh and interesting. Like all published materials, reader interest can only be sustained if you keep giving him new and interesting articles to read. Otherwise, he will go and read something else. Bear in mind, no matter how nicely laid out or attractive your blog may be, if your content is stale and uninteresting, your blog will certainly die a natural death.

A blog may be a potent communication tool but it can only be this with your active participation and commitment.

Blogging is fun and potentially profitable, but finding the right blog platform to get your blog really going is a PITA at best. So, what do you do? First of all I highly reccomend using Wordpress. Out of the box it’s the best blog software I’ve used. It’s got tons of great themes and extensions to make it an absolutely killer blogging tool.

That being said Wordpress out of the box also requires a lot of tweaking before I would consider it “optimal”. For me, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few months tweaking various blogs to see the outcomes of all kinds of different optimizations.

Overall, I’ve had a lot of success and I’ve come up with a good set of strategies to use when building a blog. Yet, when I put up a new blog I find myself spending a couple hours tweaking the blog template and adding in various plugins just to make it work the way I need it to. Now, obviously I run a fairly specialized group of plugins, settings, etc to get my blog “just so”, but it occurs to me that most people are going to run into the same basic problems and time-consuming changes for their blogs.

My solution? I think the best way to manage creating new blogs is to have a list of plugins that you want to install on each blog. Then, you also should get a list of elements that you want in each theme that you use. When you install run through your list as quick as you can and then see how you can improve your list. I’ve done this and I’ve found that there are some things that are not something I need to do right away for my site to succeed.

For example, there is no point putting DP Co-op or Link Vault on your sites right away because you get no benefit until your site is indexed. Thus, just wait a month before spending time on that. Getting your AdSense ads on your site is important to do right away, but spending the time to make them optimized might not be a good way to spend your time until you start getting traffic. There are going to be other things like this, but you get the idea.

The point in all of this is to realize that your time is valuable and that you should want to be as efficient as possible when developing a new site. Not every blog you develop is going to be a winner or even profitable…ever. So, instead of trying to optimize everything right away, you should get the basic optimizations in right away and then spend the rest of your time developing content and links. If you already have your content, then just worry about grabbing links. Once your blog is indexed and getting traffic, then go back and optimize ads and add link networks if that is your thing.

By spending on things that need to be built before you get traffic, then you have a better chance of your blog being a success earlier on. Also, the sooner you get your blog up, the sooner you can start working on another blog. More blogs == more money. Good luck!