By: Jennifer Slegg | Source: ypnblog.com

Everyone wants his or her blog to become wildly popular, spurning comments galore and being linked to by the most influential names in the blogosphere. Sadly, some easily correctible but all-too-common mistakes doom many blogs to failure before the first entry is ever made.

To give bloggers a beginning point of reference, Jennifer Slegg outlines the things she looks for in a good blog:

Looks Count
Yes, call me vain, but looks count. You have to be writing some pretty spectacular blog entries for me to keep reading a blog that is supremely ugly, uses a design that breaks in certain browsers, uses a trendy but hard-to-read font face, or uses the “out-of-the-box” blog design with zero customization (if it still says “Just another WordPress blog,” you are on shaky ground). Jeremy Zawodny could change his background to migraine-inducing black, change the logo to some hideous dripping blood goth design, make the text lime green with hot pink links, and I’d still read it. But for some blogger who might post a single gem every other month? RSS exile it goes.

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