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Question 1: Why are you starting a blog?

It’s the most profound question you will ever ask yourself, but also the most important. Why are you doing this? What do you hope to accomplish? Do you want to make money? Do you want to help people? Do you want to make people laugh? Do you want to vent about something (society, politics, your love life)? There are no wrong answers here, but you do need to have one. You need to know why you are doing it, but more than anything you need to be passionate about doing it, whatever it is. If you love Spam and you want to sing the praises of Spam on your blog, then you will be successful. But if you’re a Vegan and you hate spam and someone offers you a ton of cash to blog about Spam, it’s just not going to work. It’s a job at that point, and you’ll hate doing it, and more importantly, you’ll hate yourself for doing it.

Question 2: What’s your niche?

Everyone needs an angle. Whether you’re a writer blogging about being a stripper, or a stripper blogging being a writer, you need a hook, pure and simple. You can’t be all things to all people and you shouldn’t try. You will fail. You can only succeed if you can identify a portion of the market that is being underserved (ideally, they won’t be getting served at all) and then speaking and marketing to them. This isn’t as hard a question to answer as it might seem. Once you answer the first question, the second question will largely answer itself.

Question 3: How will you set yourself (and your new blog) apart?

Here’s the really tricky question. You know why you’re blogging, you know what your niche is, now what? How do you stand out in a sea of endless bloggers? What’s your angle on your angle? Maybe you’re giving relationship and dating advice from the Born Again Christian perspective, for example. Or maybe you’re a divorced dad offer dating and parenting tips. The point is, whatever your niche, there is probably someone already there serving it as there are very few new ideas under the sun. What makes you worth listening to? Tricky question, to be sure, but an important one.

Once you have the answers to these three questions, you’re good to go. Just be aware that the answers, may change over time, and probably should. Your answers to these three questions represent a snapshot of where you are at the time you answer them. If you have a vision and a goal of say, getting ten people a day to visit your blog, and then that happens, then what? What happens is your answer to these three questions will probably change. You’ll need to re-answer them, and that will affect why you are doing this and how you go about doing it.

Don’t worry about this. Don’t wait to have the perfect answers. You won’t. You’ll not only never get it “right,” but you never even get started either. It’s all about progress, not perfection. You must repeat “Progress over perfection” in your head one million times. Okay, actually only three. But you get the point, hopefully. Perfection is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. It robs people. Of their hopes, of their dreams and of the chance of actually making those hopes and dreams a reality. If you don’t get in the game you’ll never get a chance to win it, but there are some that endlessly practice and attempt to perfect whatever it is they working on before they show it to the world. But it’s never perfect. Ever. I don’t even know if anyone knows what that means.

It’s vitally important that you have a plan, vision and something to shoot for. But don’t let the prep work consume you to the point where things are unhealthy. That’s as much a life lesson as it is a lesson about blogging, but it certainly applies here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Content Is Key

You may have the best SEO keywords on your website or blog, but without quality content, the search engines are going to start overlooking you. You may get an influx of site traffic for awhile, but it will quickly cease as the search engines realize that people aren’t staying on your website very long. If you’re not offering people anything of value on your website, you won’t be getting traffic for long, if you ever got it at all. The key to a successful blog or website is to produce quality content that people want to read on a regular basis. Search engines will pick up on regular publishing and start taking a better look at your website or blog. If there’s good stuff on there that people are interested in and searching for, the search engines will start sending them to you. It’s as simple as that.

Search Engine De-Crappers

Search engines, especially Google, spend millions of dollars every year on technology that allows them to filter through websites that publish what is known as Internet “crap.” Search engines don’t want to send traffic to websites that don’t offer people anything of value. You can only fool search engines with SEO tricks and keywords for so long, if at all these days. Search engines are continuously working on ways to weed out the bad and useless content, regardless of how many fancy keywords and SEO there is. If you don’t produce quality content on a regular basis, search engines are going to figure it out and fast. Without quality content, you’re not going to get the traffic you need for a successful blog or website.

Regular Publishing

To take this #1 tip on blog and website success a little further, you must continue publishing good content that people want to read on a regular basis. You may have a great article up on your site or blog, but if you’ve only published one or two articles, the search engines aren’t going to know to look in your direction. Search engines want to send people to websites and blogs that regularly publish good content, not a website or blog that published one or two good articles. Search engines such as Google love websites that stay relevant and stay in the game by continuously posting content.

Yeah, the whole “make money with eBay” thing was and still is a great opportunity for some, but it’s become more of a fad. Starting a blog is a solid way to make long term income – just for doing some writing on stuff you actually like and care about. Imagine that!

Between Google AdSense, affiliate marketing, sponsored reviews, and the dozens of other site monetization options, you can make a lot of steady, passive income with a blog.

That means you’re making money while you sleep. Seriously, how would you like to make money 24/7, not just when you’re selling your time to an employer?

What’s even better, every blog post you make will be making you money for years to come. Search engines find and cache those posts, and over time each post is “worth more” to the search engines. That means they’ll be sending you’ll get more web site traffic with every passing month.

So what’s stopping you? We did it, and so can you. In just a few months, we went from making $200 per month to $2,000 per month from our blog.

And if you do this right, you too can walk away from that job and be free! Or just make a bunch of extra money.

Hang on tight and let’s do it together!

Here are 10 EASY steps we’ll take together to get your blog started, and make your blog Ultra Successful.

Decide to start today

TODAY. No, not tomorrow, not next week, and not next month. Tomorrow always feels “safe” because you’re not having to make a decision. The power of today is that you make that commitment to yourself. And that is the first step to success.

This step is the most critical one, and it’s where most people get stuck. Don’t dream about doing something. Just get up and do it.

“The best way to live the life of your dreams is to start living the life of your dreams Today, in every little way that you possibly can”. – Mike Dooley, www.Tut.com

Choose a niche for your blog – the niche that YOU will dominate

Choosing the right niche for your blog is perhaps the most important choice you can make BEFORE starting a blog. Choose the wrong niche, and it’s very unlikely you’ll ever succeed.

Some questions to help you choose the right niche

• The most important question you have to ask yourself is this: What are you passionate about?
  It’ll be very hard for you to write regularly and authoritatively and be a go-to industry expert on a topic you don’t really care about. Passion tends to make the difference between amazing success and quiet failure.
• Do you intend to make money with this blog? Would you like it to be your primary income source?
  This makes a big difference. If so, you’ll have to choose a nice that is not overly crowded. Regardless of the crowding, you’ll need to research your niche thoroughly and develop your own value proposition.

Research your niche and learn the landscape

Find the popular blogs and websites in your niche, study them closely, and visit them regularly.

Get to know the authors and regular contributors. Comment on these blogs regularly so they can get to know you too.

Find the right keywords to target with your blog

Once you choose your niche, it’s crucial to find just the right keywords to target. This is a delicate balance between finding keywords that get enough search traffic and keywords that don’t have too much competition.

Don’t wait until your blog starts getting popular to figure out which keywords to target, or you’ll waste a lot of time and effort and end up starting from scratch.

While you can do a lot of research the manual, old fashioned, and time consuming way, we recommend you get a proven keyword research tool to find your keywords quickly and accurately.

Get a web hosting account for your blog

Your blog host should be reliable, responsive if you have questions, and inexpensive. $7 per month is reasonable for a reliable host; less than that and the service tends to go down a lot.

Many people try to save those few dollars and instead start with a free blog platform like Blogger.com. But we strongly advise against it. It’s virtually impossible to get free search engine traffic to those free blogs, and support is completely nonexistent. If your blog disappears overnight (as we had happen once on Blogger.com), there’s nobody to call and ask for help. Your work is all lost. You’ll also have a hard time every moving away when your blog takes off. And you’ll lose all the search engine value that you’ve built up.

Take this seriously and go with a proper web host that actually has competent support people available to help you. Spending $7/month for a proper web host will also help you realize that you’re serious about your goal. Do it.

We highly recommend HostGator. The fact that their email support replies to most issues in literally minutes certainly doesn’t hurt. Find out why in our web hosting review of HostGator, and go set up your own account with them today.

HostGator is great because it JUST WORKS, they offer a lot of great features, and (unlike most other quality web hosts) you can just sign up for an inexpensive monthly plan, month by month.

Are there other good web hosts? Sure, but there are literally just two solid web hosts we use ourselves and actually recommend to our own friends and family. These are “the web hosts to choose from" that we recommend to our own friends and family when they ask…

• HostGator – Solid, reliable, and very inexpensive: as low as $5/month. And a unique feature that other low cost web hosts don’t have: you can sign up monthly, no commitments.
• ServInt – Great high end web host, starting at $49/month. Solid, reliable, and very knowledgeable support staff. This is the must-have web host if your website is getting over 100,000 page views/month.

We started with HostGator and stayed very happy customers with them until we passed 100,000 page views. After that it was time to move up from a $5/month hosting plan, so we upgraded to ServInt. If you’re looking to upgrade to a high end, mission critical web host, then ServInt is your best bet.

If you’re just starting out – or you’re looking to keep your costs as low as possible while working with a solid, reliable web host, do youself a favor and get started with HostGator.

In fact, HostGator is currently running a special promotion: less than $7/month – with no long term commitments, or $5/month for a longer term. You just can’t beat that for a solid, reliable web host when you’re stariting out.

Be sure to check out our web hosting review of HostGator, and give it a try yourself; we’re glad we did.

Install WordPress to run your blog

After you choose a reliable blog host , you’re ready to install your blog software. The most flexible choice available today is WordPress. It’s also free, and easy to setup and maintain.

Yes, this is a little more involved than setting up a free blog somewhere, but it’ll be well worth the effort when you get more web site traffic in a month then you would have gotten in a year on a Blogger.com blog.

Make a great first impression with a great theme for your blog

First impressions always matter. On the web, that’s even more important. A web visitor’s first impression about your site determines if he clicks away in the first 5 seconds, if he stays on to read what you have to say, and if he will ever come back again.

So it’s very important to put your best foot forward. Make your site interesting, distinctive, and engaging to your readers by using a great “theme”. WordPress themes are basically website designs that you can just download and enable for your WordPress blog.

Find the best theme for your blog, and when you have the resources, consider having a custom theme made for just your blog.

Configure WordPress and it’s plugins to get the most search engine traffic

What good is a blog if nobody is visiting? One of the great advantages of WordPress is the vast array of options to make your blog very yummy to the search engines. This is all about understanding what Google wants and giving it to them in the way they want it. Simple.

The most powerful SEO trick of all: “work with Google to give them what they want instead of trying to trick them”.

Make your blog welcoming and engaging to every reader

To make your visitors stick around and come back for more – day after day – use the power of WordPress and make your blog fun, engaging, and interactive.

Use polls to get readers involved and ask their opinion. Feature the latest posts and comments. Show off your most popular articles. Get readers truly involved by getting them to comment on your posts.

Write your first post

OK, at this point you’ve chosen THE best niche for you, you’ve become very familiar with that niche and it’s most popular sites, and you’re basically what could be considered an “authority” on your topic.

So now is the time for that all important first blog post

Off the top of your head, make a quick list of all the issues in your niche that people care about. What problems do they have, what questions do they have? What keeps them up at night?

Now pick ANY one of these and write a quick article on it. This “article” can be just a simple Top 10 list, with a supporting sentence of two for each bullet. That’s it!

Get feedback

Get this first article out there and see what people think. Email it to your family and friends, and ask them to help you make it better.

All the planning in the world is no substitute for Action. It’s time to go forth and do those good and powerful things.

Set up your RSS feed

Not long ago, RSS was the domain of the super-geeky. But today, millions of mainstream internet users are subscribing to RSS vibes every day.

Get your blog set up with full blown RSS support by setting up a free account with FeedBurner. They’ll pull a feed from your blog, make it pretty so everyone can actually read it, and they’ll even give you accurate stats on your readers. Yes, it is nice to know if anyone is actually subscribed to your feed.

WordPress also has a simple plugin that you can enable to support your shiny new FeedBurner RSS feed service.

Register your new blog with the top website and blog directories

Once you have a few posts on your blog, it’s time to start getting the word out. Search engines want to see links coming back to your site. Those links show that people other than just you consider your site to be important.

Well, at first you have no links. So you have to start somewhere. One of the best places to start is the endless list of web site directories and now blog directories which are just begging to give you a free link.

Here are a few to get you started: BlogCatalog, Blog Flux, and the Connected Internet Directory. DMOZ and the Yahoo Directory are also very important, but your submission to them is considered just a “suggestion”, and you may never hear back or get included.

Blog Catalog has turned into a social community of bloggers, which makes it significantly more valuable than a regular blog directory, largely because of the relationships you can forge there.

Promote! Social Media, Internet Press Releases, and more

If you don’t tell people about your new site, they’ll never know about it! Stop hoping someone will accidentally stumble upon your site. Take matters into your own hands and get the word out there!

It’s never been this easy to promote a brand new site, and to explosively grow your traffic and readership.

Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, and more

Did you just publish a great article on your site? Let people know! Social media provides a great way to share your stories with others who WANT to know about it.

Share your great article on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon. But tread with caution. Don’t “spam” these sites with everything you write.

To be truly successful, it’s VERY important to follow the rules and participate in these communities.

There are even some great tools like Web2Submitter to automate the process and submit your stories to tens of social media sites! This means you save countless hours AND actually get your story out to dozens of sites instead of just one.

Check out this video to see how to automate this process with Web2Submitter.

Article Marketing – Establish yourself as an expert by publishing your articles

Time to get more visibility for your hard work. Article directories take your articles and provide them to the countless webmasters and eZine publishers that need what you have: good, useful, and informative content.

You’ve already spent the time and written your excellent articles for your blog. Now publish those articles on the top 10 article directories and get lots more readers coming to your website.

Choosing the right niche for your blog is perhaps the most important choice you can make BEFORE starting a blog. Choose the wrong niche, and it’s very unlikely you’ll ever succeed.

Some questions to help you choose the right niche

• The most important question you have to ask yourself is this: What are you passionate about?
  It’ll be very hard for you to write regularly and authoritatively and be a go-to industry expert on a topic you don’t really care about. Passion tends to make the difference between amazing success and quiet failure.
• Do you intend to make money with this blog? Would you like it to be your primary income source?
  This makes a big difference. If so, you’ll have to choose a nice that is not overly crowded. Regardless of the crowding, you’ll need to research your niche thoroughly and develop your own value proposition.

Research your niche and learn the landscape

Find the popular blogs and websites in your niche, study them closely, and visit them regularly.

Get to know the authors and regular contributors. Comment on these blogs regularly so they can get to know you too.

Find the right keywords to target with your blog

Once you choose your niche, it’s crucial to find just the right keywords to target. This is a delicate balance between finding keywords that get enough search traffic and keywords that don’t have too much competition.

Don’t wait until your blog starts getting popular to figure out which keywords to target, or you’ll waste a lot of time and effort and end up starting from scratch.

While you can do a lot of research the manual, old fashioned, and time consuming way, we recommend you get a proven keyword research tool to find your keywords quickly and accurately.