Blogging for Fun and Profit

My friend Melissa called me the other day with questions regarding how to setup a blog with profit in mind. Since I obviously don't have any experience with this (I've never had, nor do I ever intend to place ads here) I wasn't sure if I could really be any help, but I offered the following. If you have any ideas of your own, or think that I'm wrong, please comment below:

Here are some good Vancouver blogs:

• http://www.miss604.com/
• http://hummingbird604.com/
• http://www.beyondrobson.com/

And here are some excellent Toronto blogs:

• http://torontoist.com/
• http://blogto.com/

There are also a number of blogs out there that specialise in a subject rather than a particular location:

• Spacing
• Worldchanging
• TreeHugger
• icanhascheezburger
• FailBlog

These are off the top of my head but there are literally thousands, if not millions of them out there. All of the above however are profit-driven while the majority of blogs out there are not.

Some of the things I know they do:

• Focus on readership:
  • Post every day to keep your site fresh, this keeps search engines happy.
  • Don't do anything too personal, but don't be too professional either.
• Link to everyone else in your sphere
  • If you have an environment blog, link to other environment blogs.
  • If you have an urban blog, link to people who blog in your city.
• Tap into the multiple other social networking tools out there:
  • Twitter
  • Flickr
  • LinkedIn
  • Technorati
  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • In each of these sites, link to other bloggers in your sphere.
• Advertise using a tasteful ad broker.
  • Suite66 (my old employer)
  • Google AdWords
  • RealMedia
• Collect statistics on your traffic.
  • Google Analytics
  • Sitemeter
• The trick to all of this is to:
  1. Be interesting. No one will read your stuff (or link to it, thereby increasing your search engine rank) if what you're writing isn't either fun or witty, or accurate.
  2. Be current. Your search engine rank is based partially on how often your content changes.
  3. Use Wordpress. It's a software package designed explicitly for blogging. I don't use it because it's not as powerful as I like (and I'm a control freak, I like to roll my own code) but most of the big bloggers out there use it. Either that or Drupal.

So, did I miss anything?