Before You Start A Blog – Part 1

You may have heard that you can make some money blogging and you would be right. However becoming successful enough to where you can quit your day job and be a full time blogger is akin to an actor going to Hollywood and becoming the next $20 million a film mega star. You have millions of people competing out there and you have to carve out a name and space in the internet for yourself.

You don’t have to look for business plan writers when trying to start a blog, you just need to sit down and have a basic idea, layout and theme in mind. I myself would have saved a few months of initial headaches and trouble had I learned and followed the basic outlines below.

• Monetary Investment

You will know right off the bat that to become successful or start any business, there will be some monetary investment. It costs far less to start a blog than most business, but know that you should spend the investment and get a self hosted blog. Using DreamHost, HostGator, BlueHost or any number of web hosting providers, but choose the best one and get a monthly plan that works with your budget. Many companies are no longer accepting free Typepress, Blogspot or WordPress.com blogs, so to be taken seriously and professionally you need to be self hosted.

Budget about $200 for your first year of blogging, this would include your hosting fees for a year, plus some initial spending capital for advertising, promotion and such. Many hosting providers will give you an AdWords credit to get you started, so leverage some of this. $100 in AdWords credit can get you hundreds of thousands of impressions for free.

• Topic of Interest (aka Niche)

The most successful and high ranking blogs are ones that cover a very niche market, though you only target a specific audience you will be higher rated in Search Engine rankings, earn more from AdSense and have a better job of capitalizing on KeyWords for that niche. Note, you can’t niche in “Technology, Health” you must be very specific about your niche. If you want to run a blog about Giraffe’s that would be a niche market. If you want to blog only about Google Android, that would be another niche market.

I recommend you keep your blog categories (these are general topics) to no more than 5 on your blog, unless you have a broad scope blog like a personal diary or are covering a huge category like Technology which I do with one of my blogs. Once you decide on what you will blog about, you must include the fact of the following: If I write 100 posts about this topic, 1 year from now will I still be interested in blogging about it?

Don’t just do product reviews and don’t just spew information on new gadgets coming out, know that to capitalize on blog paying programs they want to see your own opinions, stories and writing come out in your articles.

Stay Tuned, there will be more to come with Before You Start A Blog – Part 2 which will be published soon. Subscribe to my RSS so you don’t miss the next article in this installment.

-Justin Germino