The single most important factor in determining whether you will have a successful blogging experience is this: Know what the intended personality of your blog is.

Blogging requires skill and talent in the human dimension. What kind of tone or voice do you want your blog to have? Determine whether your blog supposed to be funny or sad or serious or angry or inspirational.

You were thinking that the first thing you needed to think about was software or hardware, right? Wrong! First, you need to think about the human dimension of blogging. Anybody can pick up blogging software for free online. If you are considering blogging and you spend time thinking first about software, you are making a terrible mistake.

A blog must convey clearly a specific and definable sense of the person or persons writing the blog. Blogging must first and foremost be about flesh and blood, heart and soul people like you and me. If you fail that, your blog will be a complete and utter waste of time for you and your audience.

Who’s going to write your blog? You can write it yourself. You can have another person write your blog. Or, you can have several different people writing a blog individually or by committee. All that matters is that you end up with a distinctive and human sense or essence that comes across obviously and clearly in the blog no matter whether it’s written by one or one hundred.

Not all people can write for publication. That needs to be said. Even though you are someone who knows a lot about your particular subject area, this does not automatically bestow upon you the necessary skills or talents to write about what you know. Sometimes, the smartest people who know the most about a particular subject area are the worst writers. That needs to be said, too.

It therefore follows that not all people can write a blog. If you have a lousy writer, you will end up with a lousy blog. It’s really that simple.

Get someone who can write well and you will end up with a worthwhile blog. No matter how intelligent or how passionate you might be, if you cannot write well for a blog, all that intelligence and passion will go nowhere fast.

(Web Guru Woody Goulart wrote this advice & help and originally posted it on AmericanBlogging.com not long ago.)