3 Important Things to Know Before Starting a Blog
So, you’re thinking about starting a blog and want to make some money off it too. Well there are three important things you have to consider before you start. They are content, technology and marketing.
Content
Content is the most important part you have to consider before you start a blog. You have to know what you want to write about that people will want to read. Many people start with a personal blog - basically an online journal of their daily thoughts and views. While this might be a good way to start, it won’t make much money.
Ideally, you want to write about a particular topic (sometimes referred to as a niche) that you are passionate about. This can be anything - cats, fishing, vacations, etc. just as long as you stay on topic throughout your posts.
Once you’ve decided on a topic, I would recommend writing at least 20 articles before you even have the blog ready. Just create one a day and save them as word documents. If you’re able to write 20 articles and not get tired or bored of doing it, you might be ready to move on to the next step - technology.
Technology
Now that you have some articles ready, you’ll have to consider where you want them to be hosted, and what blogging software you want to use. I would advise on getting your own host, rather than using a free hosting service, such as blogger or livejournal. You may have to pay for one, but at least you’ll be able to get your own domain name (e.g. www.yourdomain.com) which will help brand your blog better.
Next, you’ll have to consider the blogging platform or software you want to use. Examples include Wordpress, Moveable Type, Typepad and Expression Engine. My preference is to use Wordpress - mainly because it’s free and has so many great themes and plugins for you to customize your blog.
To make things simple, I would recommend finding a host that has one-click installs of your blogging platform. This saves you from having to manual upload and configure your blog software on the server. Dreamhost would be my choice for this, as it’s a fair price at $9.95 a month plus it has huge bandwidth allowance and a 1-click install of Wordpress. With one click, you can be ready to start blogging in 5 minutes of getting your web host ready.
Marketing
The final step you will need to know is how to market your blog. If you don’t market your blog in some way, it’ll just sit there lost in cyberspace and no one will know it exists. You’ll have constantly market your blog and will spend quite a lot of time doing it. Expect that writing articles will account for 50% of your time and marketing the other 50%.
Fortunately, there are many services and tools that will help you spread the word. There are many blogging community directories you can join to search for similar blogs to exchange links with. You will be spending a lot of your time reading other people’s blogs and commenting on their articles to make yourself known.
Some of the better blog directories include:
You can also use social networks to promote your blog such as myspace and facebook.
Also, it’s important you track your blog stats and the keywords that people are using to find your site. That way, you can make intelligent decisions when you create your next articles.
Now that you know the 3 most important things about blogging, you can concentrate on how to make money from your blogs. That will be for another article. 
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Filed under: Blogging on January 21st, 2008
thats for sure, bro