Start Your Blog Train To Fortune

Introduction

Hi! my name is Jude Uche, I am a blogger with five years experience.I have made a few bucks from blogging, though not upto my expectations but am working hard to achieve more success. Actually someone called me and asked "how much will it cost him to start a blog?" I wanted to give him a straightforward verbal answer which I felt was descriptive enough but I thought it was very much more important to write this guild to assist bloggers accros the globe to start their Blog Train To Futune.

Blogging has become a household name and more and more people are venturing into it. Millions of people across the world have broken even through blogging while even more people are are being frustrated out of blogging. Blogging is a way of life to help the world more through your knowledge. Blogging is a profession, blogging is money. The purpose of this write up is to give a more detailed orientation to bloggers and blogging enthusiasts. So that you can plan well to succeed. I will make this write up as short as possible for easy comprehension.

Why Should You Blog?

I honestly think this is one of the most important question anyone who has intention to start a blog should ask himself or herself. Many people go into blogging because they heard mouth watering figures bloggers earn, they rush into blogging and in most cases got frustrated and quit.

Blogging is basically your own personal journal where can share your experiences with the world. You start blogging if you have knowledge you passionately want to share. Don't just follow the trend, you should have interesting information you want to share with the world. Google.com ranks number one in the world, this is a clear indicator of how much people are seeking for one information or the other. popular sites like Facebook.com has become search engines due to the high number of visitors making use of the Facebook search component. The two scenarios above says it all that if you have valuable information to share you will make money blogging.

Define Your Goals

Now that you have some reasons to start blogging, the next step is to define your goals. You need to know what you want out of blogging. Offcourse this will be to make money, but that doesn't necessarily gives you a clear definition of what you want from blogging. You should blog with set out rules and goals you hope to achieve. Setting out your goals is one thing and working hard to achieve this goals is where success lies. You should be ready to work it out.

Choose A Niche

The next step is to choose what you want to blog about. This step is a very dicey one. When I started out as a blogger, I made big errors choosing the wrong niche. The problem most people make is choosing a niche just because another blogger somewhere is making money from the niche or choosing a niche based on what your instincts tell you. In very disastrous cases, you see new bloggers jumping into the entertainment and news niche. I am not saying that you can't start a blog in a competitive niche and rank high. If you are really serious about making money blogging, then you should choose the niche that's averagely competitive with a high search volume globally. In other words don't just start a blog without through keyword research.

Choose Your Preferred Blogging Platform

There are two major blogging platforms; Google's Blogger and WordPress.

Blogger: I wrote a post sometime ago titled "WordPress or Blogger; which is better" that post contains a lot on Blogger and WordPress. Google's is very popular amongst new bloggers, due to obvious reasons, like it's cheap, no paying for hosting, no diving deep into technical stuffs. is a good choice for new bloggers who want to give blogging a try without risking too much.

WordPress :

WordPress on the other hand is more advanced and a perfect solution for bloggers to explore all the intricacies involved in blogging. Though, you will have to pay for hosting and so on, but it's a good choice for blogging. There are other blogging platform that might still interest you, but the above mentioned are the most popular blogging platforms and have lots of resources to assist you. WordPress is perfect for bloggers who want more freedom and be more professional.

Start Your Blog

Register A Domain Name

Once you have chosen your preferred blogging platform ,it's time to register a domain name. You should choose a domain name that relates to what your blog is all about. The domain should be easy to memorize. You can choose a country specific domain name to target audience living in your choice country. One other trick to apply why choosing a domain name is to make a long tail keyword with low competition volume in your chosen niche your domain name. This works like magic.

Buy Web Hosting Plan

If your preferred blogging platform is WordPress, then you will need to pay for hosting. You can relate further with my post on top ten WordPress hosting companies.

Create A Blog

At this stage, we will design our blog. On the Google's blogger platform there are many templates you can customize to fit your dream blog. Likewise also on the WordPress platform there are thousands of WordPress themes to choose from, customize it to your satisfaction. There are posts to this effect on how to setup a blog and how to create a WordPress blog. You should remember to make your blog classic and professional. Add logo, important pages like privacy, terms, about and contact pages. Make your blog navigation as simply as possible. Also create your blog with SEO in mind, optimize the titles of your blog pages, add h1,h2, etc headings.

Start Blogging

Once you are done creating your blog the next thing to do is to start creating posts on your blog. Yeah, try to be original, create qaulity posts. Do your keyword research before creating any post. Also endeavor to add long tail keywords of your target keyword in your posts. You should refer to my post on how to create quality contents for your blog.

Manage Your Blog

As a blogger, your blogging arsenal is incomplete if you can't manage your blog yourself. Even if you want to outsource the management of your blog, you should have basic knowledge on your preferred blogging platform. Respond to comments on your blog as quick as you can. Optimise your blog to be search engine friendly. Submit your blog to Google's webmaster tool. Build backlinks to rank higher on SERPs. Search engine (organic ) traffic is the best traffic to your blog, It's less stressful and much more targeted with high visitor return rate. About 13% of herokeys.com traffic comes from Google alone. I am working harder to increase it.

Monetize Your Blog

Now the rule in blogging is "no traffic, no money" Yeah! that's why lots of bloggers use all means even those unhealthy for their blog to draw traffic. If you work hard building quality content that is well targeted and sharing your blog to almost every site you can thereby building more back links, you will surely make money blogging. The saying goes "faith without work is fruitless " The contents in your blog is the faith part while the sharing and distribution of your blog contents is the work part. So if you really serious about making money blogging then you should create high quality seo-rich contents and keep sharing as much as you can by commenting on other blogs, writing contents for other blogs, commenting on forums, sharing on social media and bookmarking sites.

You can make money from your blog in three major ways which are Pay per click (ppc) advertising, Affiliate marketing and selling your own product or ads.

PPC advertising : is a good way to monetize your blog if you have the traffic and your traffic is well targeted. Google AdSense is the best and most trustworthy PPC advertising merchant for blog owners. They pay on time and never disappoints. Google AdSense is the best choice for blogs with genuine high traffic .

Affiliate Marketing : For blogs with low traffic , affiliate marketing is good and can earn even higher money than blogs with high traffic especially when the traffic are well targeted. Amazon affiliate is a good affiliate network to start with. The "weight loss" niche with it's low competitiveness is a good niche in this regard.

Selling Your Own Product or Ads: This option is a great choice if you have very reliable readership on your blog or a blog with very high traffic. If your visitors gets to trust your blog and your views they will want to buy your products. One necessity in this case is that you have to really walk hard to achieve this.

Source: http://herokeys.com/steps-to-starting-a-successful-blog/