10 easy steps to blogging

This is how you get started in the world of blogging and I have done some research and come up with a list of 10 things to do when considering starting a blog:

1. Motivation. What motivates you? Ask yourself that. If it’s money, to voice your thoughts or to input to society, whatever it is, use that motivation to motivate yourself to start your blogging journey. When you start blogging, you don’t want to be on and off which is why this motivation is important.

2. Niche/Topic. Now you have to think of a topic to start writing about, it can be broad or specific but it has to be one OF INTEREST TO YOU (very important). Some blogs are very specific and some are not… like mine. Either way they both can be successful. There are blogs on just about everything, my advice look around first, see what catches your attention.

3. Your blog/website. After finding your motivation, you must figure out where you will start your blog. In my opinion the easiest way for a beginner is to start on blogger.com (which is what I use) or wordpress.com since it is implied that you haven’t started blogging and those two blogging platforms are very easy to use. You don't need your own domain because it costs you money and you are just a beginner. You need to start walking before you start running, well you need to start blogging before you start pro-blogging... if you catch my drift ^^

4. Name your site. Come up with a clever name for your blog (preferably), don’t put too much time and effort into this because in blogger.com you can change it. You can also change the URL, surprisingly.

5. Submit your site to search engine. Do it through this site http://www.submitexpress.com/ because it’s probably the most convenient. The reason this is step number 5 is because it takes some time for these submissions to be actually recognized by spiders even though they're submitted.

6. Forums. Check forums such as bloggingforum.com (this is my favourite one) for tips, advice and ideas and also do further research occasionally to find out interesting information that can help. Check out other ones if you want such as problogging.com, bloggeries.com, there are ple

7. RSS. Turn on RSS, the acronym doesn’t matter. Be sure to select the RSS option to set up a Web feed when you're configuring your blog. (This may also be referred to as a subscription option.) Make it available for readers to utilize it. By the way if you don't know how to do this, ask in forums or go to the help section in your blogging site. These are some useful sites (this has info on RSS) http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/archives/page9194.cfm (feedburner to send your feed to) Feedburner.com

8. Content. Start posting good content. Remember, content is king, and then is promotion. For your first post, introduce yourself, your intentions, reasons, etc for starting this blog.

9. Appearance and revenue. This is to make money Okay, now that you’ve written a few articles (around 3 or 4 ish), pretty up your blog a bit, add some ads, Adsense is what I use and what most people use, go to Adsense.com register, then add it to areas which are accessed the most (top-ish areas, side bar, in between posts). Add some pictures and voila you most likely have a half decent blog. NOTE: Don't click on ads in your website, you will get banned! Btw, if your topic is on movies, type movie affiliate programs on google, you might find alternative advertising programs for your niche this way.

10. Promotion. Now that your blogs half decent, it’s time to promote your blog. Go to blogging forums, post threads to attract attention to your blog (also put your site in your signature and info about it). Comment on other noobies blogs (constructive feedback though, don’t spam or comment for the sake of it). Advertise your blog through social networks such as Myspace.com, Facebook.com, etc and post your BEST, yes you heard right. Post your best blog entries to sites such as Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com because if you don’t and post some dodgey crap, you might have a bad rep later on. AND also you won’t get many visitors if it isn’t good which defies the purpose.

11. Link Exchanging. Exchange links with other bloggers or websites helps to improve ranking in search engines.

By the way, don’t be discouraged if you don’t start of with many visitors, we all start off with none at some stage or another! Good luck.

If you wish to contact me, email me