Blogging should be a great experience for those people and companies. Be passionate about what you write about and be sincere about really wanting to connect and converse with your audience. What else do you need to be successful?

Be Lucky
You can work hard and have more talent than other bloggers, but luck does play a main ingredient in success. Luck can include:

  • Bumping into the right people at the right time.
  • Discovering and implementing best practices that actually work.
  • Getting links from others blogs that led to a snowball effect of incoming links from elsewhere
  • Choosing the right team for your project.

The key is to run with it and to make every lucky instance last as long as possible.

Work Hard
To be successful you need to be willing to work hard. This can mean to be willing to do things you’ve never done before. You might also need to leaving your comfort zone and plunging ahead, you’ll never know until you try!

Be Different
The downside of starting out now is that for every topic there seems to be many blogs already (the web is becoming more and more congested as people discover personal publishing). This means, you’ll need to build a blog that is more different, new, and valuable than all the others out there.

Provide Value
Value can be about many things including entertainment, education, community, information, companionship, etc. Without it you’re not likely to get people returning to your blog, linking to it or participating in it over time.

Cultivate Relationships
Lots of times its another person (or more than one) that can either help or partner with you. Try to put time aside every day to seek out and build relationship with key bloggers, team members, company product evangelists, managers or anyone you can work with or want to work with – it’s amazing how these connections can pay off in so many unexpected ways.

It’s OK to Make Mistakes
It doesn’t feel that good when you make a mistake, but you might be able to turn those those blunders into that opportunities. The key is to learn from the mistake, to make the most of what follows and to see it as an opportunity to improve what you do and make the most that comes out of it.