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Ok so you have your topic or topics selected, you have your platform chosen and now you have your theme picked out. Great so you have a blog, well not quite, now you need the hard part, the content.

Deciding what to write and when to write it is one of the hardest parts of creating a blog and one of the primary reasons blogs are abandoned. People just run out of steam, they get stuck with what to write and feel that they no longer have something of value to say.

So before you start posting, map out a few weeks worth of posts. Pick some topics and sub-topics that you want to write about and create a few posts, save them as drafts. This is an especially valuable exercise as it will get you into the habit of creating more content than you need at anyone time and that way if you are ever unable to blog, you can just publish one of your back up posts.

The secret as with any undertaking in business is to plan. A strong blog will have a well thought out blogging plan behind it and the writer or writers will ensure that they stick mostly to the plan. Doing it this way means you will have to spend less time thinking about what to write and more time actually writing.

Next: How Do I Make Money?

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Having chosen a platform and decided on the domain name, it’s time to set your blog up. This is again not a straightforward process. Again you have choices to make about your blog and what you want to invest in it. For the most part I suggest that new bloggers start out with a free theme and then as they develop the blog think about upgrading to a premium theme.

The major difference between the two is flexibility. Free themes tend to be more basic and because they are free the likelihood of another blog looking very similar to yours is high. However, premium themes are also unlimited in use, in that anyone who can afford the price can download it so your blog could still end up looking like someone elses.

An advantage here lies with anyone with even rudimentary coding skills who is prepared to put in the time and effort to learn php and css as these are the languages most themes are built on. Learning these will put any blogger ahead of those who dont know them as you can adapt the themes, whether free or premium and make them less generic.

Next: What To Write, When To Write It.

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We are going back to basics today with a how to for people who are seriously considering blogging as a business. If your interest is purely to keep an online journal you might not find all of this information relevant but you will still find some good tips.

The first thing to decide is what you are going to blog about, this might be a single topic or a group of topics that you set up several blogs to cover. Some of the best places to find topics are the trending areas of the search engines and social media sites like google, twitter, yahoo etc.

Having found your topic you need to decide whether you are going to self host or use a free host and which platform you want to use. The choices are pretty varied, WordPress, Blogger, Typepad are all popular, all have their pluses and minuses.

The last piece in this puzzle applies whether you are self hosting or free hosting - domain name. If you are free hosting your domain name is controlled in part by the host, e.g. www.YOURNAME.wordpress.com if you are self hosting or you buy an upgrade you can pick your own domain name. It pays to be thoughtful with this. Especially if you see your blog as an income stream. Pick a domain that has keywords in it that relate to your blogs niche, e.g. if you are going to create a pet focused blog, calling it something like Tom’s Blog wont help you, calling it PetReviews.com definitely will.

Next we will look at setting your blog up.

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Having attended quite a few now here are three things I think of as essentials for making the most out of any conference:

1. Lightweight laptop or Netbook: The first time I went I took a normal laptop, the morning of the second day I could hardly move, my back ached so badly from having lugged around my laptop all the previous day. If ever you needed the justification for a back up machine this is it!

2. A Backpack not a messenger bag, you will acquire a lot of stuff walking around a conference, having a good well placed backpack will help you and your back. If you do end up taking a fullsize laptop this is even more essential. It also means you can stuff lots of water or soda or whatever you drink and your favorite snacks and avoid paying the outrageous costs that the conference centers charge.

3. Good walking shoes. Over the course of the day you will find yourself, at some of the bigger conferences, walking several miles. Bearing in mind that you are also carrying a few pounds of gear, drinks and food around you want to be comfortable.

What do you take to conferences to survive?

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Every now and then I will come across one of those “newbie” mistakes that reminds me there are a lot of new bloggers out there and many of them make the same mistakes the rest of us made when we first started out. One of the most popular, especially with business bloggers is to write their post in Microsoft Word and then simply cut and paste it into the editor window of whichever blogging tool they are using.

This is a disaster. The reason being, Word attaches a whole stream of XML tags and meta data to any document, when you cut and paste from Word you bring all of that with it and WordPress etc don’t know what to do with it, so they display it.

In some cases it is even worse, because instead of just displaying it the blogging tool will attempt to use the tags and perform formatting on your post. The best way to remove these tags is to cut and paste to a simple editor like Notepad and then cut and paste again into your editor.

What early stage mistakes do you still see?

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How much affiliate marketing do you do ? A lot of people have questions about affiliate marketing, does it really work? Isnt the niche dominated by big names? How much work does it take?

Affiliate marketing is often sold as a get rich quick scheme, as I am sure you know, there is no such thing. You will see supposed “scans” of checks on websites with people claiming to have made $10,000 in a day but in this age of photoshop I have very strong doubts about those claims.

What I do know is that lots of organizations from the Fortune 500 down to your local restaurant want other people to promote their products for them. This is really the heart of affiliate marketing. That said, there is a lot of work involved in adding affiliate marketing to your blog. Firstly, you need to find things that will be attractive to your readers, secondly you need to give them a reason to click those links.

One idea that I have seen work well, is to give away a bonus item for anyone who clicks the affiliate links, this takes a little bit of work, working with your affiliate partner but its a good way to get your readers to click.

There are plenty of networks out there looking for new partners, a quick google search will bring you a good list. Commission Junction is one of the top affiliate marketing companies in the world and they work with premier brands. If you are thinking of getting into affiliate marketing checking out their programs is a good place to start.

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Darren Monroe has published the results of his survey of bloggers (634 responded). The survey asked where the bloggers saw their traffice coming from, the results are very interesting.

The majority of respondents said that they received most of their traffic from Social Media, the second highest source was Search Engines.  Between these two sources, 20% of respondents said they received between 20 - 50 % of their traffic from Social Media and the same amount from Search Engines.

This really shows the power that Social Media has in driving traffic to your blog, when combined with a strong Search Engine strategy there are obvious gains to be made in being able to drive additional traffic to your blog.

You can see the full results here.

Are you combining both Social Media and Search Engine strategies?

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When you first start out blogging you might be tempted to go the completely “free” route for blogging. Host your blog at wordpress.com or on blogger and just start putting your content out there.

While there is nothing really wrong with doing that if you are unsure of where your blogging will take you it can limit you and your blogs expansion and cost you money in the longer term.

The best advice I have for anyone thinking of starting a blog that they believe will make them some money is to plan out at least a year in advance. Think about where you want your blog to be a year from now. Do you intend to have ads running? are you going to seek sponsorship for certain content? Are you looking to build a niche following?

If you answer yes to any of these questions then going with a self-hosted blog is probably going to be in your future and moving a blog can be a painful process, not just from a technical perspective but from a link perspective.

If you change the location of your blog, you will lose pagerank temporarily and you will have to ensure that you have all your existing inbound links accounted for. Getting this wrong can really hurt your blog. So why go to all that trouble?

Do you self host or use a free hosting service?

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