Most successful blogs are about a niche, a specific topic. People go to those particular blogs to find out about one subject and that’s what keeps them coming back. They know they’ll be able to find information about blogging, or movies, or whatever the blog is about. Most of the time, if the blogger writes consistantly, they’ll also provide the reader with the newest information for that particular topic.

If that’s what some of the best bloggers do why aren’t you? Are you blogging about everything under the sun but hoping that you’ll keep to your subject? That isn’t the way to build traffic and build your readership. For one thing search engines will rank you higher if you have more and a higher percentage of keywords related to your niche. If you write about anything that dilutes your keyword percentage and essentially puts you lower in the search engine rankings. Something you don’t want.

Keeping on topic and forming your sentences and thoughts into a way that supports the overall theme or niche of your blog will allow you to more easily build your traffic and readership. People will want to come back because they know what they’ll find and they’ll know that they’ll get the most recent infromation from that niche.

If you’re strapped on time but want a top blog that everyone reads here’s one thing that can help you gain blogosphere fame, Build up content.

Launching a blog or even promoting a blog or blogs with little or no content may create some initial buzz, but you won’t get any return or regular readers. You’ll get some people stopping by initially, and then nothing. You’ll go back to your three or four unique visitors per day and be frustrated as to why that is. It’s content. Unless you’re putting up pictures of half naked women all over your blog you won’t get people coming back.

You have to build up content.

What I suggest first is to just blog for your friends. Start putting up content, tell your friends about it and put up some more. Having a few readers will be enough to keep you going through the initial phase of building content. Then as you have a good base of articles, maybe 30 or 40 spanned over a month, start stock piling. With just 30 or 40 minutes a day, rather than 15 or 20 minutes you can write two articles. Save one, (I suggest the non-time-sensative one you save), and post the other.

Once you have about 30 articles saved, you can then launch a blog to the masses. The time you spend promoting your blog will be well spent, and you’ll always have something new for the readers to read with your stockpiled articles, and you’ll have your content from your month or two of content building blogging. People will see that your blog is serious and ready to stick around and will for one thing keep you in their blog roll and for another, keep you around their regular reads.

I’ll say again, don’t launch or promote without content up, more than 30 articles, and content waiting in the wings, more than 30 preferrably. It’s like insurance in case you get bored, then your launch won’t be for nothing.

With the recent launch of blogtown press, the network home of Blogging On Empty, I have begun to see “The Power of the Network.”

With the Link to a Coconut Contest helping gain traffic to individual blogs, I’ve been tracking visitors behind the scenes and noticing that the network helps! Having that nice little block of links in the bottom right of every blog in the network, I’ve noticed that one visitor will be linked into the network ultimately see the network box and click through to another blog, and do the same on the next.

This just continues to build awareness of other blogs in the network, building traffic, page impressions and repeat visitors with subscribers to their RSS feeds.

With each blog that I add to the network that’s another blog that I don’t have to link exchange with for the blogs already in the network and another link for each of those blogs as well. That will ultimately build pagerank in Google, which will increase my traffic hits, subscribers, so on and so forth. It’s great!

Being an individual blogger, getting 12 links into your blog would take a lot of emails and a lot of link exchanges with other blogs. These links are now automatic within my network and will continue to grow as my network grows, 12, 15, 20, 100 links! Just like that.

At first I wasn’t sure what the impact of having a network would mean. I’ve heard it’s great just to get linked exposure from a network. But if you can build a brand from the network, which I hope to do with blogtownpress and it’s many contests that are going to be coming up, you can have exposure on every blog and every site in the network that builds traffic to every other blog or site.

It’s an exciting process to be going through and I’ll for sure keep you all informed on what the contest has done for Blogtown Press and just what being part of a network does.