Before You Even Think About Starting a Blog
If you're like one of the thousands of people who are considering starting a blog with some kind of commercial intent, there's a few things you should do before you potentially waste hours, days, weeks or even months of effort on an isolated blog that attracts little or no visitors.
The first thing is to check your motivation.
Ask yourself the question "What is the purpose of my blog?".
This will help you get absolute clarity so you can then plan accordingly and keep a nice structured approach with your goal in mind at all time.
This will enable you to be the most productive and not get side tracked on non-value adding activities.
The next thing you should do is some keyword research for your chosen niche.
This is where you can assess if your chosen topic is actually being searched for by like-minded people.
Google offer a free analysis service called "Keyword Tool" (just Google it!).
Here you can type in the key phrases that you think your target audience would type in to the search engines to find your blog, then you can see if the amount of potential traffic is going to be enough to meet your goals.
Be careful when using this tool to assess the "Exact Match" count, which can be altered on the left hand side of the screen.
Automatically, the results are set to "Broad Match", which means the results returned contain your keywords, but not necessarily in the correct order and may include other words.
The Exact Match count will show the search volumes of people who typed in your exact phrase, with words in the correct order, without an additional words.
For example, if I searched in Google for "start a blog", the Broad Match results would include any results that had the words "start, "a" and "blog".
So this may include results that say "how to START A BLOG", "A bad START for my BLOG", "I never want to START A BLOG", etc.
You can see in the last example, some results may be the complete opposite of what someone is looking for, but include all the keywords.
With the Exact Match result "START A BLOG" would return "START A BLOG" only.
There is a third type of result called a Phrase Match, which returns results that have your keyword phrase in the correct order, but can include other words at the beginning or the end.
So now you can see if there's any traffic looking for your blog, the next thing to do is assess the strength of your competition.
So simply type in your keyword phrase into Google, and have a look who pops up in the top 10 results.
Then you can use a free tool, such as SEO Quake, to check the page rank, number of backlinks, etc to those sites, and assess the amount of work that would be required (link building etc) to beat their position.
More important than the number of backlinks, is the quality of those backlinks i.
e.
are those links coming from low page rank sites, or from high page rank sites? This makes a huge difference! The next 'exciting' task is to go and register your domain name! This is where you chose and register you web address.
There are two options for this.
Firstly, you choose a domain name that is relevant to your blog or business i.
e.
joebloggsblog.
com or bestfootballblog.
com However, my advice would be to select your web address relative to the keywords you want to be ranked for.
So, for example, if you're blogging about strawberry ice cream recipes, and you're pretty confident those are the words your target market will be searching for, your absolute best bet (in ranking terms) is to try and register strawberryicecreamrecipies.
com Google would love that! There are literally thousands of domain registrars, just Google it.
Do shop around though as prices can tend to vary massively.
As long as you don't want a "premium" domain name, then you should pay no more than around $10 for a domain name for a year.
Once you have your domain name, you have to go and set up a hosting account, assuming you are setting up a dedicated, personal/business blog and not one of the cheap/free blog sites with restricted functionality.
Again, there are thousands of providers out there.
Just chose the cheapest that offers 'cpanel' and 24/7 support in your native language and you can't go far wrong.
Next step is to change your name servers to point to your domain name to your hosting account, and install WordPress.
You change your name servers from your domain name account, and install WordPress from your hosting account.
It's actually very simple and the link at the end of this article will take you to a free website that has training videos on how to do this yourself, with no technical skills required.
I'll be writing more articles soon about managing WordPress, but again, there is tons of help out there if you simply Google the word "WordPress" followed by the topic you need help with.
The first thing is to check your motivation.
Ask yourself the question "What is the purpose of my blog?".
This will help you get absolute clarity so you can then plan accordingly and keep a nice structured approach with your goal in mind at all time.
This will enable you to be the most productive and not get side tracked on non-value adding activities.
The next thing you should do is some keyword research for your chosen niche.
This is where you can assess if your chosen topic is actually being searched for by like-minded people.
Google offer a free analysis service called "Keyword Tool" (just Google it!).
Here you can type in the key phrases that you think your target audience would type in to the search engines to find your blog, then you can see if the amount of potential traffic is going to be enough to meet your goals.
Be careful when using this tool to assess the "Exact Match" count, which can be altered on the left hand side of the screen.
Automatically, the results are set to "Broad Match", which means the results returned contain your keywords, but not necessarily in the correct order and may include other words.
The Exact Match count will show the search volumes of people who typed in your exact phrase, with words in the correct order, without an additional words.
For example, if I searched in Google for "start a blog", the Broad Match results would include any results that had the words "start, "a" and "blog".
So this may include results that say "how to START A BLOG", "A bad START for my BLOG", "I never want to START A BLOG", etc.
You can see in the last example, some results may be the complete opposite of what someone is looking for, but include all the keywords.
With the Exact Match result "START A BLOG" would return "START A BLOG" only.
There is a third type of result called a Phrase Match, which returns results that have your keyword phrase in the correct order, but can include other words at the beginning or the end.
So now you can see if there's any traffic looking for your blog, the next thing to do is assess the strength of your competition.
So simply type in your keyword phrase into Google, and have a look who pops up in the top 10 results.
Then you can use a free tool, such as SEO Quake, to check the page rank, number of backlinks, etc to those sites, and assess the amount of work that would be required (link building etc) to beat their position.
More important than the number of backlinks, is the quality of those backlinks i.
e.
are those links coming from low page rank sites, or from high page rank sites? This makes a huge difference! The next 'exciting' task is to go and register your domain name! This is where you chose and register you web address.
There are two options for this.
Firstly, you choose a domain name that is relevant to your blog or business i.
e.
joebloggsblog.
com or bestfootballblog.
com However, my advice would be to select your web address relative to the keywords you want to be ranked for.
So, for example, if you're blogging about strawberry ice cream recipes, and you're pretty confident those are the words your target market will be searching for, your absolute best bet (in ranking terms) is to try and register strawberryicecreamrecipies.
com Google would love that! There are literally thousands of domain registrars, just Google it.
Do shop around though as prices can tend to vary massively.
As long as you don't want a "premium" domain name, then you should pay no more than around $10 for a domain name for a year.
Once you have your domain name, you have to go and set up a hosting account, assuming you are setting up a dedicated, personal/business blog and not one of the cheap/free blog sites with restricted functionality.
Again, there are thousands of providers out there.
Just chose the cheapest that offers 'cpanel' and 24/7 support in your native language and you can't go far wrong.
Next step is to change your name servers to point to your domain name to your hosting account, and install WordPress.
You change your name servers from your domain name account, and install WordPress from your hosting account.
It's actually very simple and the link at the end of this article will take you to a free website that has training videos on how to do this yourself, with no technical skills required.
I'll be writing more articles soon about managing WordPress, but again, there is tons of help out there if you simply Google the word "WordPress" followed by the topic you need help with.
