Making a blog and money the real and sure way.

First off, if you are looking into making "money fast" the easy way or any other hair brain scheme, you can forget about it. All those ebooks that people try to sell are facts and tips that you yourself can find on the internet and implement yourself. Most of us that are beginning simply do not know how to start our way to making a blog, so I will help you as much as I can. Before starting a blog, we have to have "master plan" among the other things that we should consider. We have to plan that blog of ours or it will more or less be a failure. Here are some of those few things that should help us on our way to choosing and setting up our first blog or second if the first didn't work out. This will be part 1 of my "Master Plan". Every week I will post the other parts, so stay tuned and shall we get started? This is the "Master Plan" layout. Each topic will be covered individually, since I cannot touch basis on each one here at one time. It's just too long!!

I. Setting up our blog
a. Finding a niche
b. Manually setting up our blog
c. Choosing colors
d. Adding widgets etc.
e. Setting site up for SEO
f. URL submission of site

II. Monetizing our blog
III. Optimizing our blog
IV. Traffic building
V. Re-check of I.-IV.



Master Plan: Part I.

A. Find a niche:

Finding a "niche" blog. What that means is that we should start a blog that has high demand with low supply. If we try to compete with the more established blogs or popular blogs right off the back, we will have a hard time. Find something that you enjoy blogging about. Something that you are a pro at whether it be "sports statistics", "repairing cell phones", "how to's", or "backyard mechanics" etc., the list goes on and on. Choosing our "niche" according to our skills and knowledge would give us an optimal head-start. Google the keywords for our niche to see how much competition we have and what other types of websites are out there. If we have a feeling that we can compete, then it's a "go" signal. if there is too much competition, back to the drawing board until we can find that "niche".

After we have found our "niche" we have to ask yourself, will it be profitable for us (if we would like to make money from our blog)? Or if money is no concern and we just want to spread our knowledge, that's great. Now, we have to set-up the blog. But, before we can set up our blog, there are some preparations that we should undertake! Write about 10 articles (300-500 words) on our "niche" with either Notepad or Word. A couple
"how-to's", "interesting facts" or any knowledge based articles should do the trick. If you
cannot write 10 articles, then research the net and deepen your knowledge on the subject. Your articles should also be "keyword rich". What I mean is, the articles that we write should contain the main keywords for our niche at least 10-12 times in the article. Article writing will make or break a blog. Learn how to write well and definitive. Set those articles aside.

B. Setting up our blog:

You can either choose to set up your blog with Blogger or
Wordpress if you would like. These two would be good platforms to start with as you don't have to have any/or very little knowledge of HTML encoding and they are free. We can check these two out and find the one that we would like to use. It all depends on you. If you are serious about starting a "real" blog or site, then opt to host your blog and buy your own domain name. A domain name and hosting can be had for very little these days. Just check which hosting services can accommodate your budget. Now, after you have your blog set up, it's time to incorporate these articles into your blog. Depending on your platform and hosting of course, add these 8 articles that you wrote into your blog. Notice I said eight (8). Save the other two. The method for this is, you can write two more articles. Once you are done writing those two articles, submit the last two (leftover from the original 10), that way, you always have 2 articles for a back up!

C. Choosing colors for your blog:

Choosing the right color combinations for your blog, or a premade template should be easy. Go for the "easy on the eyes" color combination when coloring your blog. After all we want our readers to be able to easily read our text, I mean who wants to read yellow text on a hot pink background, right?

D. Adding widgets and other cool stuff:

Here, we can add widgets of other stuff like Adsense ads (for serious money making), lists of other websites, our blog roll (favorite blogs), links etc. Once you have those set up, you are almost ready to go. Placing ads, hmmmm...this one's a toughy. Depending on the layout of your blog, you should have it either to the upper left or upper right. Experiment with placements and see where you can get the highest average of clicks. Placement of our other widgets is all a personal choice as to the order or place that we want them. Just make sure that they are easily accessible!

E. setting up our site for SEO

Now, we can set up our SEO (search eng!ne optimization). This is kind of tricky, so I will refer you to my OTHER article when you get to this part. Meta tags are the keywords that search eng!ines will be looking for when they crawl your website. keep it to a maximum of 20. You can also look for other SEO tips from my Blogging Tips section.

F. Submitting our site to search engines:

Search engine submission is where we can finally see our finished site on the web searches! Just go here to submit your sites to all the major search eng!nes. Here we can submit our site to all the big engines in one fell swoop, saving us time from manual submissions. Manual submissions to other directories is another SEO trick, but that's another article!

Wow, ok, if I didn't scare you away yet, congratulations on setting up your blog. We are now on our way to becoming part of the blogosphere and contributing to it. I wish you good luck on your ventures and may you succeed with your ambitions. Moonburst.