Today’s guest poster is Damien Riley, host of the Online Diarists Forum. You will find more about Damien at the end of this post.

Blogging is like a Gestalt image:
One person sees the vase while another sees the two faces. The trick is
knowing what to look for and how to make it look that way!

In this post, I name 5 blogging challenges for any blogger and simple tactics to be successful.  At the end I share what I measure success by:

1. Ideas:
I keep a small pad in my pocket. When I get ideas for blog entries,
I jot them down. Sometimes I’ll be on my way to work or even relaxing
on a lunch break when inspiration strikes.

I have learned that
a one word entry in my book is quite sufficient to recall good ideas
later. I get many of these one word entries in a given day.

When
I actually sit down to blog however, only one, or even none, gets
through. In the long-term picture, even if only a small number of these
"from the field" ideas get blogged, then you know you aren’t
missing the best.

2. Photos: Every photo you take off
your camera or save from the web, put in a dedicated folder. This makes
it easy to retrieve them. Don’t just scatter them on your desktop.

When
you get a lot of photos in there, archive that set into an "archive"
with the date as the title. This way you always have a small number of
photos to work with when you open the folder.

Be saving
photos all the time. You’d be amazed how even boring pictures can be
used as illustrations when they might apply to a future post. (For the
advanced: Get a copy of ADOBE Photoshop and learn how to make drop shadow and frame effects.)

3. Upgrades and maintenance:
SAVE YOUR BLOG FILES! Blogs can be taken down and can fail for all
sorts of reasons. If you have a backup, you can sleep better at night.

Give
yourself the necessary time to upgrade your software and to perform any
backup/ maintenance related activity. Take the time to research backup
methods for your blog software. There are several excellent foolproof
ways to backup and upgrade a WordPress.org self-hosted blog which is the blog software I personally use at Riley Central.

(For the advanced: Go to the library or shop Amazon.com for the latest books on blogging!)

4. Feeds and comments:
It has been said rightly that you should do more time commenting and
reading other blogs than you do writing your own. Blogs are not like
books, they are like blogs! The author of a blog will be read only in
as much as she/he comments on other blogs.

If your blog’s "voice" one day becomes famous and you get a ton of traffic that way, (Photo Matt
comes to mind) you may find you don’t need to "comment out" as much.
But let’s be honest with ourselves, this happens in one out of
thousands. For most who want to be read, they must also read and
comment.

-and that segues well into my last item:

5. Networking: use services like Blog Catalog, MyBlogLog, and 9 Rules
(there are others, but those are 3 GREAT ones I use) to provide
snippets of your posts with links to your articles. Don’t overdo this
or you will turn people off. BUT, if you do it occasionally, people who
matter will hear about your blog and your "voice."

Blogging
is a complex hobby and for some a demanding job. As you work through
it, make notes of how to organize your time and thoughts. In doing so
you are giving yourself an advantage over the majority of bloggers who
don’t think about what they do and unfortunately it shows in the low
quality of their content.

I want to thank Blogging Blog for the opportunity to guest blog this month. Bloggers need a place to gather information and Blogging Blog is the place just for that!

About the guest blogger, Damien Riley:

I’m a 38 year old married blogger from Southern Caliornia with three
kids aged 9, 3 and 6 months. I’m a 4th grade public school teacher and
avid online diarist. My blog’s url is http://rileycentral.net.

I
have been posting diary entries since December 2006. Blogging is a
passion of mine. I measure my blog’s success on a non-monetary scale,
mostly by the comments I receive as well as my Google Page Rank. Currently I have a 4 ranking and I am very proud of how far my little blog has come.

I
also measure success on whether I like my writing three months later or
not!  I am also a musician who plays out locally and a regular
writer/contributor to Blog Critics online magazine.