For the next little while, I’m going to start a series of posts on how to start a brand new blog from nothing, walking you through the steps. This will probably take a few weeks, but we’ll walk through every step using a real live blog as an example. I believe I’ve already got someone who’s willing to work with me on their very first blog, so we’ll have a real life case study!

Now before you even begin blogging, you need to first pick a topic. There’s a lot of debate online going on about how you should do this. Many people say focus on topics that generate you a lot of money. Others say focus on topics that interest you, that you’re passionate about. If you can get both, that’s the best of both worlds! Of course more often than not this is not the case.

So what do you do? I generally suggest writing what your passionate because that will be more interesting for people to read, it will show in your writing. Plus you’re much more likely to continue writing than just go for a quick sprint like most people. The rule of thumb is that it takes time for a blog to be successful, so pick a topic that you can stay with.

What you can do though is look for ways to “optimize” your topic. That is, if you’re going to talk about dog grooming, why not search online if there are other similar terms that pays better (assuming you’re using Google Adsense as your main revenue stream). We’ll talk much more about monetizing your blog later, I just wanted to let you know for now that it can be a part of your decision making process. Anyways, if there are better paying keywords (we’ll define this better later), it might be worth mixing in those terms in your blog because Adsense is contextual, which is to say Adsense determines which ads to display on your blog based on the context of your blog (for example if you’re blog is about dog grooming, odds are that your Adsense ads will be about dog grooming). One quick note, it’s important to realize when looking for optimized versions of your topic to look at the total revenue, not just the highest paying ad. To put in other words, I’d rather have a topic that lots of people are interested in that’s paying $1/click than a topic that virtually no one is interested in that’s paying $5/click. At the end of the day, it’s the total revenue, not the price per unit that matters. One great tool to use to search for this is Symbiotic.com

If this last paragraph confused you a lot, don’t worry about it for now. We’ll be talking about it in detail later. I just wanted to give you a quick idea of just how complex this can be (if you want to absolutely maximize your earnings). In the seminars we offer we dedicate between 25-50% of the total time on how to optimize your blog for the right monetization techniques. And yes, I’m suggesting that you ignore this at first, and this is mostly because I want to avoid information overload, and of having you spend all your time analyzing versus acting on your goals. This can always be fixed later (or not, I don’t optimize FollowSteph.com for example), so don’t be too stressed if you miss out now, think of it as a growth opportunity for later!

In anyway case, uou might have also noticed that I’m glossing over a lot of other details of how to pick your blog, and you’re right. I’m only alluding to Google Adsense as a monetization technique. I’m doing this because at this point in the series I’m going to assume you’re more interested in just starting a blog and learning from your experience than getting overloaded with details. Trial by fire if you will. And you can always monetize it better later. Like I said before, think of it as a growth opportunity for the future. As well, this is a very large topic that would take me another full series to publish which I’ll leave to another day.

Some of the other points you might be noticing that I’m glossing over when making a decision is planning how you’re going to monetize it. If you’re new to blogging, let’s assume the simplest techniques and work our way up. We could also very easily get bogged down here as there’s a plethora of choices. So for now we’ll assume two main revenue sources, Google Adsense and Amazon affiliate links which most bloggers use.

After having chosen a topic, the first thing you need to do is get a web address. Now many people will say that you can just use a service like WordPress.com or Blogger.com, but I strongly suggest that you buy and host your own domain. Assuming you become successful, this will greatly help, more than I can say! As well, the cost of buying your own domain is less than $10, and hosting can be had for as little as $100/year. If you’re not willing to invest $110 in yourself, then in my personal opinion, you probably shouldn’t be blogging. Why would I want to read your blog if you don’t even think you’re worth $110? Value your time and yourself!

So your first task is to pick a domain name. This is probably harder than you think because there are millions of names registered. Pretty much every dictionary word is taken, every 2, 3, and 4 letter combination is taken. If memory serves me right, 80% of all 5 letter combinations are also taken. So don’t be stressed if it takes you time to pick a domain name. The key is to find a domain name that isn’t too long, that’s easy to remember, and is not likely to be mispelled. Don’t obsess over the perfect domain name, they don’t really exist, but get something your comfortable with. Yes you could always buy a domain name from someone else, but that’s beyond the scope of this series. Think creatively, you’ll come up with something I’m sure! Just don’t spend an innordinate amount of time, many people get stuck at this stage, or spend weeks trying to find the perfect name. I’d say that you should limit it to 1-3 hours at the upmost! Anything beyond that is a waste of time.

You can search for domain names at registrars such as GoDaddy.com or use a service like Whois.sc which gives you alternative options to your domain if it’s taken.

Once you’ve chosen your name, we’re ready to move on to step 2, which is to register the domain, and is the topic of the next article in this series…