Believe it or not, the first steps you take creating a do-it-yourself blog can have a dramatic effect on when you can begin to make decent money blogging.
Yes, you can find lists of 100 things a beginning do it yourself blogger should do. But let’s face it, if you are a do-it-yourself blogger, you can’t do them all during week 1. Besides, it turns out that there are some you really should do first.
In reality, if you want to make money blogging (or just start building and maintaining an audience) there are certain specific things to do on week 1. So, what should you do?
Well, the complete answer partly depends on resources. My advice is premised two assumptions:
1) You are a one person do-it-yourself blogger. You don’t have a whole bunch of money to hire a ghost-blogger who knows how to write “the perfect posts”.
2) Many revenue generating programs limit participation to blogs that use their own domain names. They also limit participation to blogs that have been posting at that specific url at least three months.
Ok, so what do you want to do first? Well assuming you know how to do these things (or can find someone to help you), do these things in this order:
- Pick a blog topic. This can be a large niche or a small one, but blogs should be about something. Big Bucks Blogger is is about blogging and making money blogging.
- Dream up a few domain names associated with your topic.
My domain name is “bigbucksblogger.com”, which is pretty good for a blog that is about making money blogging. The name does affect whether or not people can remember your blog address and more importantly it will eventually affect your rank in search engines. So, for example: if your site is about dieting, get the word diet in the domain name: dieting.com is a good domain name for a diet site, it is not a good domain name for a site about turtles.
Check availability or the names you dreamed up by googling something like domain availablity. You’ll find tons of places with little boxes that let you check whether the domain name of your dreams is available. Write down which domains are available with ‘.com’ or ‘.net’ addresses. (If your in the US don’t consider buying anything other than a ‘.com’ or ‘.net’ address. Just don’t. )
Write down the prices each place asks and bookmark. Don’t buy yet.
- Find a web host that provides decent services at a relatively decent price. I use Dreamhost because they are reliable, provide all the services you need to blog, and are easy to work with. However, you’ll be able to find others by googling “web host”.
If you are a beginner and reading this, I recommend finding a service that offers either “fantastico” or “one click installation” for WordPress. If you can’t tell, email the sales staff and find out if they have this feature. Also, look for a service that gives you at least 2 mysql databases, lets you host at least 2 subdomains. (You may not end up using these, but if you really get into blogging, you’ll find the extra database and subdomains are very useful.)
- After you get a web host, you can select a domain name and buy it. If you are a beginner, I recommend buying through your hosting service because this makes the next step easier. You can go back and buy from one of the registration services you found by googling, but I wouldn’t unless I already knew what I was doing. (And if you do, you probably aren’t reading this article!)
- Get your domain name up and running at your web host. If you bought your domain name through your web host as I did, getting it hosted at your web host will be nearly automatic. You just tell them you want them to host it and they will have all the name servers pointed for you. (In fact, you won’t need to know what a name server is, or anything else. That’s why beginners should buy from their web host.)
You can often save $1 or $2 a year if you buy the domain name through a separate registration service but then you need to spend little time figuring out how to get the name servers pointed to the web host. (Once you’ve blogged for a while, this will be trivial. But it’s difficult when you are clueless.)
- Select install blogging software. I selected WordPress, which is free. It’s widely used so you can get lots of advice on features. But, even more importantly, my host (Dreamhost) provides “one click installation”, which lets me install this with one click.
You can either install your blog in a directory naming it what you like, or install it at the top of your blog. There are advantages to either method of installation. I installed in a directory called “blog”; this is why my blog address starts with “http://www.bigbucksblogger.com/blog/…”
{Update: I changed my domain name 10 days after I started my blog because a new Pay to Blog had a new requirement. Read Smorty: Why I changed my domain name.)
To use “one click installation”, I found “goodies” at Dreamhost, and installed WordPress in a directory called “blog”. I did this by filling in a few buttons and clicking. Ten minutes later, I got an email telling me my blog was installed.
- After I got the email, I visited the admin panel, made key decisions about perma-links and set up to start pinging. I’ll discuss this in a later blog post.
- Write your first post, read it over, spell check and click publish. Check that permalinks are fine.
- Start posting at least once a week. Bear in mind, you can’t make much money the first month, so don’t bother publishing more than once a day. Just start regular posting. As you do this, begin to think about what you really want to do wit your blog.
I know you are worried about a whole bunch of other stuff. Spam filtering, SEO, tagging, meta tags and a whole list of things you’ve heard about. Well, don’t worry about all that yet; worry about that after you start posting.
Note that I’ve done 1-5. If for some mysterious reason, you have wandered onto this blog in late April 2007, you’ll see I’m using a standard template, have no blog roll etc. I’ve just clicked “publish” on three posts.
I’m now working on step 6: post at least once a week. And what will I blog about for step 6? Well, I plan to do two things: 1) explain how I did 1-5, and also describe the next group set of things you should do!
Your goal is to start creating a relatively decent blog, with content you like and using permalinks you plan to keep!