Alright, I'm still thinking about the blogging conference that I went to this weekend. Let me throw out five minutes of advice. 

1. Content is king. Yes, a nice blog layout is nice, but you know how many pretty blogs with boring content that I return to the following day? Zero. Sure, it's good to advertise your blog on Twitter and Facebook and you may have thousands of friends, but if your content is boring, nobody is reading it. Even your twitter friends who faithfully RT your posts are not reading it. 

2. How do you write good content? You have know a lot about something. You have spend five, eight, even ten hours a day thinking about it. Maybe it's yoga or running or politics or gardening. Whatever your topic, you have to live it and breathe it and write about it. Also, if you write often, your writing tends to improve. 

3. You have to pick an unusual topic. I have seen zillions and zillions of blogs that have the "Bad Mommy" theme. You couldn't pay me to read another blog post about a mom who throws caution to the wind and lets her child watch TV for A WHOLE HOUR. God, what a rebel. I might read a blog post about a mom who throws caution to the wind and has an affair with the contractor. That would be different. But better yet, how about a mom who writes about her deep knowledge of Hostas or libraries or wind currents? 

4. Notice how Twitter spent years developing a great product before monitizing. That's smart. Advertising, especially annoying advertising, decreases your street cred. A little is fine, but keep it in control. 

5. Think about your long term goals. A blog should be a means to an end. A friend blogged at a political blog for a couple of years. Her topic was very narrow, so it didn't build a huge audience. Still, she cornered the market on that narrow topic and the other experts on that topic knew all about her. A good thing. Other people use their blog to promote their other work – seminars, artwork, journalism, novels.