The problem is when you’re really new to blogging, you don’t have the perspective and experience to really have internalized this. That’s why I recommend a starter blog that you don’t get too invested in. Don’t think of it as your “real” blog. It’s a practice blog on which you learn the ropes. After you get more of a feeling for what blogging really is to you, then you can get serious about a topic and have a purpose for your blog. This way, you won’t regret your earlier steps as you learned.

Subject Matter> If you have been watching the trends you will find many of the big blogs are going to expanded coverage because the niches they have been blogging for a long time are becoming over saturated and/or dry wells for them. While the days of just blogging whatever you want to certainly aren’t back tight niches aren’t going to make it either. If you vary to widely talking about blogging, your exciting trip taking the dog to the groomer, SEO, cooking, your kids, then back to blogging you will certainly have trouble keeping readers. On the otherhand if you are just rewriting what as already been said by yourself in the past or countless other bloggers on recent trends you will lose people just as fast.

I will agree with you that your blogging persona is important especially in multi-author blogs which is certainly becoming a popular trend.

As far as demographics go new bloggers should be thinking of target a certain demographic rather than a particular niche. This was Darren Rowse own advice on last weeks video post.

You definitely need goals and you need to write them down. Even if you get into blogging with the goal of making money, then you need to write it down with a plan on how to make it. For me this has become the case. I want to blog less so I put together a blog network http://www.hartblognetwork.net I can write on my own blogs less because I get adsense revenue sharing from all the blogs in the network and all I have to do is cover hosting, admin, and promotion.

Clarifying your blogs purpose. You need to be careful with this one. Too many popular blogs who have done this well over the years are now shark jumping because they have said pretty much everything that can be said. you can only write about how to increase your PR, entrecard drops, or diggs so many times before you just repeat yourself. If set a clear purpose and start running out of new material it is time to either expand your subject pool, change your subject altogether, or bow out gracefully. If you are going to bow out flipping your blog isn’t a bad option

I’ve been worried that my purpose wasn’t clear enough, but hope to solve that by having different days being devoted to different kinds of posts. Some will be more “show and tell” and some will be more introspective, and they’ll all focus on the topic of gaining control of my stuff and my life.