So what can you do to set yourself up for the new year with a sure bet at success, continuing to follow through long after the resolutions have faded to the back. Set yourself a few achievable blogging goals.

Create a list of short and long term goals complete with milestones meant to keep you on the right track. These are not resolutions, these are real and entirely possible business goals for you blog. Chances are if you are realistic in your goal creation you will achieve the majority if not all of them by the end of the year.

Start by creating a 3 month goal that is entirely within reach and relies solely upon your efforts. For example: “ I will commit to writing 2 posts a week by mid march.”

Next set yourself up with a slight more difficult to achieve goal that will be completed or on it’s way to completion by the 6 month mark. “I will have X number of subscribers by June 15th.”

Moving on to 9 months out. “With a number of new subscribers and a substantial traffic increase due to my previous goals, I will commit to publishing a newsletter in order to share additional tips and ideas with my dedicated and knowledge hungry readers.”

Finally set your end of the year goal. This one is your reward goal. If you have been diligent in achieving your goals up to this point you need to set the bar a bit higher for you final goal of the year. “I will find ways to monetize my blog and start producing a nice supplementary income from my efforts, I deserve it.”

Put each and every one of your goals down on paper with a big bold milestone marker next to them. Below each goal outline 2 to 3 steps necessary to keep you on track throughout the year, these are goals mind you not resolutions, no slacking! Feel free to adjust these goals to taste as well as set yourself a few intermediate goals to be sprinkled throughout, but make sure you keep your eye on the milestones and do everything you can to achieve them as planned. Sure it’s going to take a bit of work to get there but putting them down on paper as steadfast goals, leaves no room for letting them slip. Just think by the end of the year you will be producing a nice supplementary income!

I would recommend planning your posts a few weeks out. Depending on your topic you do not of course want to disappoint your readers with stale or out of date content. Before the holiday rush ensues grab yourself a little notepad and jot down 2 to 3 ideas that might make for good holiday reading. Don’t put it off, get to writing as soon as possible while the content is still fresh in your mind. Whether you compile your post directly in the WordPress editor or using another publisher such as Mars Edit, get something down and ready to go.

Now doesn’t that feel better, believe me you are now way ahead of the game.

Within a few days of “breaking for the holidays”, sit down and edit. Craft your masterpiece and get it into WordPress if you have not already. Now for the good stuff, getting ready to schedule your post.

If you navigate to the post editor you are more than likely familiar with the publish options located on the upper right of the editor screen. Here you will notice a small calendar icon followed by the words “Publish Immediately”. Go ahead and click Edit. You should be presented with date and time options. Set the time and hit the schedule button.

Sit back, relax and breath easy over the next few days or weeks while the WordPress magic takes care of your blog for you.

Note: Some of you may have recently upgraded to WordPress 2.9 and are possibly experiencing problems with this post scheduling feature. The WordPress developers are working hard to push out another release fixing some of these issues as soon as possible. I just tested 2.9.1 Beta 1 and it looks as though the scheduling issues have been fixed among other items. With that this post is still relevant to you as a blogger whether these tips get you ahead over the holidays or through those times that you are just too busy to post. Enjoy!

Having a boring blog means readers won’t come back. Tell them the same thing over and over again and they’ll be gone.

Instead, look back at the content you’ve recently posted and make sure that you’re changing things up. Make sure that you’re making an effort to keep your content fresh. This may mean having to come up with new ideas for posts, well tough. If you want readers to stick around, you need to be fresh.

Some quick tips to help you do this as a part-time blogger are the following:

• Keep a running list of post ideas handy, possibly on a draft gmail email that you can open quickly and type in your latest idea, run through the list and organize the list so the content doesn’t repeat too often
• Reread your post titles every few weeks and look for patterns of repeats. You may get in a groove that could hurt your audience
• Skim other popular blogs. Popular blogs repeat content but they’ll make sure to either tie those repeats together, or they’ll space them out.
• Don’t post repeats just to post. Sometimes posting nothing can be the best thing for your blog.

Use these little tips to help keep your readers engaged in your content and coming back wanting more.

Well I was looking for a good design for my recently re-released blog, Aloha Update, and stumbled upon one in the oddest of places. My own family. You don’t need to live in Wisconsin, or even the midwest to hire him, look at me, I’m in Hawaii, did all communication via phone and email, and the site cam out great. So good I’m going to use a spin off of the design from my whole network.

The good thing about his designing is that not only is he artistically inclined, he also has the coding down and can make your new website design whirl. Do pretty much whatever you want.

So if you need new design for your space on the internet check him out.

A better option is to go to a dedicated web hosting site like the one listed here Web Hosting Geeks. This site lists tons of hosting solutions, Top Ten lists, multiple domain hosting, free domains with hosting, hosting based on programming languages, etc etc. The list goes on. They also include reviews with all these hosts that customers have posted to help you get a real customer review of the service.

Another nice feature is that they offer informational services as well with a comprehensive listing of web hosting articles like this one, a web hosting guide. Take if from me, someone who’s been through several hosting companies. Read as much as you can about hosting so you’ll be able to better predict your future needs and choose a host that can grow with you. Transferring sites and domains around to different hosting accounts can be a pain.

The tutorial details how you can put multiple adsense code blocks into your posts, and how you can use if statements to have total control over the situation. Hope it helps wordpress users out!

But how do you get more backlinks?

One easy way to get backlinks is to be active on the following two kinds of blogs. Those that have nofollow disabled in their comments section and those that have a top commentators or top commentors list in their sidebar.

I’m not promoting spamming these blogs with nonsense comments. You should find blogs that interest you and have nofollow disabled, as well as those that have top commentors sections and provide useful comments to their blogs that help them and in return you get a link back to your site.

There’s tons of lists out there, here’s one for example, and just googling the term no nofollow brings up a lot of good resources.

However, you really should take the time to learn 5-10 good SEO techniques and then apply them to your blog or all the blogs you try and setup. Taking the time to do this will utilize your time better because you won’t be wasting your time building links, or adjusting you tags, or writing content, in ways that won’t help you in the long run

The best resource I’ve found and I found it over at Digital Point Forums is an eBook by Brad Callen and he’s allowed it to be freely distributed. That’s why I say DP forums because it’s in about 10 posts over there.

I’ve uploaded the book to my servers and will allow you to read it or download it at SEO Made Easy PDF by Brad Callen.

Read it and develop a good plan. It will optimize the time you spend link building for sure.

I just put up a great article over at Board Shorts and Business Suits listing 41 links to help you start your blog network.

Ever since Jason Calacanis sold his blog network to AOL people have been trying to start their own blog networks. Both successfully and unsuccessfully. I’ve also been trying to start my own blog network and in the process have taken from each of the articles in the list some great piece of information.

I hope this list can help some other people get ahead with their blog networks.

You get some strong backlinks from other sites.

But you need to know what backlinks are strong and what links aren’t, especially if you’re going to be doing recipricol link exchanges. The better the site that’s linking to you and the stronger the sites backlinks are the better that link will count towards your overall PageRank.

So, in order to utilize your time wisely as a blogger, especially a part-time blogger, you need to use an all-in-one service to check those backlinks. I found just that service in a free website at backlinkwatch.com. It checks all your links in all the search engines out there and then looks at those links as well.

You can easily see and compare possible link exchanges by using Back Link Watch and determining which exchanges will yield higher quality links.