How to start a blog?

Sunday, 25 April 2010

Don’t move too quickly, don’t buy your hosting & get a domain before you think through your blog. The first thing to think about is your blog topic. What will you talk about on your blog? I usually break it down into a few categories.

Discover your interest

What are you interested in? What do you love? Think about these questions; find out what inside of you, that you really love. When you come up with your interest, it could take a few weeks to come up with the idea, and then you can move on to discovering the market.

Discover the Market

Is there a market for your topic? Look around at blog’s on that topic. If you notice there are already many blogs on that topic, it’s probably not smart to write about it because you will find yourself losing traffic due to the amount of other blog’s in that niche. It’s best to choose a very unused niche that has a good amount of traffic though.

Investigate the current market

Look around at forums and blogs on that topic. Join the forums and discuss the topics, get used to talking to people who are into it. These people will later become your target audience. Comment on blogs about the topic, and discuss discuss discuss, get your name out there so people see you are an expert on the topic.

Use it.

Now that you have your blog topic, you can use the topic and the way you look like a guru in it to everyone on those forums. So let’s get to part two of this article.

The Domain, Hosting, Software

First of all you need to pick out a domain name, I recommend going with Name.com or GoDaddy as they are trusted domain name registrars. For your domain name choose something that will reflect the topic. It is widely accepted that a domain name with a keyword in it will usually get better rankings on Google (However names like carlocab.com, which is on top of the keyword “make money online” are exceptions). When you come up with your name, purchase it in .com as it is recognized as the most professional name.

Hosting – Choose a web host that is the best, look at different web hosting reviews before choosing one that you love. When you come up with the best host, go ahead and buy there hosting, and set up the domain to point to their host.
Software – Instead of just going Basic HTML, you are going to want a CMS system, which makes it easier for you to add new articles to your website; some systems include Wordpress, Joomla & others. Many of the top blog’s use Wordpress, which has many of the best themes available for it. Once you have chosen software, use the set up guide and set it up.
Next, add many blog posts, an about page, and a contact page.

Let’s use that reputation we got on forums

You started posting on forums, a while back in the article, and made yourself out as an expert on your topic, now add a link to your signature on these forums with your new blog address, this is sure to get some traffic from the older posts.
Now, keep commenting on those old blogs, but slowly insert your blog link into the Site: option, so your comments still get accepting, you’re going to get clicks from those who have seen you comment before and want to see what this website of yours is all about.