As soon as you register at LivingstonTalk, you can start blogging.

It really is that easy. All your blogs will exist on a site that is yours, with a URL of http://livingstontalk.com/author/your user name/. With your own URL, fans, friends and family members can subscribe to your RSS (real simple syndication) feed and get notices whenever you post a new piece.

The site editor reviews all posts, choosing the best for “Front Page Pick” status and getting the rest into rotation.

All new posts get listed on the front page, moving farther down the list as newer posts get filed. All posts get promoted on LivingstonTalk’s front page one way or another.

We want LivingstonTalk to be a lively, respectful, fun, provocative, enlightening and informative forum for discussions about the issues that affect us all.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

We write; therefore, we want to be read. After all, what’s the point of crafting a hard-hitting or heart-wrenching blog post if no one reads it or reacts to it?

In the blogosphere, there are things we can do to help ensure our words find an audience. One of those things is to find a cool site on which to blog, a site with a built-in audience, like here at LivingstonTalk.

While posting on LivingstonTalk is a great way to get read, there are other things you can do to nudge your post out farther from the nest. Here are some strategies:

1. Write about what people are talking about. If you want to get folks reading what you write today, you might want to write about the Michigan gubernatorial race, or the oil spill on the western side of the state, or the new coffee shop in Brighton with lingerie-clad baristas serving up espresso.

2. Use keywords. Check out Google Trends for the latest popular keywords. The more keywords you use in your post, in your headline and as tags, the higher up your post will land in searches.

It’s believed that it works like this: Your headline becomes the URL of your post. If your headline (and, thus, your URL) contains a keyword or two, then you’ll likely end up higher in searches.

3. Always, always, always add tags to your post. These keywords help readers and search engines alike find your post. I can’t stress strongly enough the value of appropriately tagging your material.

4. Write good headlines. It’s the frosting on your blog-cake. Tell people what it is you’re writing about. You want to be creative and clever, for sure, but you also want to get read by others, as well as picked up by search engines.

5. Be friendly and spread your cheer. Get to know your fellow LivingstonTalk bloggers. Be friendly. Comment on their posts. They’ll return the favor. And as more people get to know you and your writing, the more you’ll be read.

Participate on social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon. At the end of each post on LivingstonTalk is the “share this post” pop-out that makes it quick and easy to make your piece available to others.

It only takes a minute or two, and it will help your blog get read.

Any blogger worth their salt does one thing without fail: they post their pieces on Facebook and Twitter. It’s even easier than you might think. You can set up your Facebook account to automatically shorten and reconfigure your FB post to Twitter standards AND post it to Twitter for you. One posting on two sites!

6. Post regularly. Good bloggers put up new posts at least once a week.

7. Pay attention to the basics. Before you file your post, run a spell check program on it, and give your piece one last read to catch any correctly spelled errors. Nothing turns off readers quicker than bloggers who don’t care enough to do at least the minimum polishing.

There you have it: Blogging 101. Now, relax, have fun, and get writing!