Some people just write about whatever happens to be on their minds. That’s totally okay if you simply want to express yourself, but many of you have other goals, like making money, growing a readership, or selling services.

If so, I definitely recommend clearly defining your blog niche and creating an appropriate content strategy to fill it. The easiest way to choose your niche is to start backwards - that is, with the end in mind. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Define your goal. In one sentence, why are you blogging? What do you hope to get out of it? For example:

• Make money semi-passively through advertising and affiliate marketing
• Establish yourself as an expert in the field to obtain consulting engagements
• Develop a subscription base to sell products
• Connect with a community to make friends and partners

Your goal can be a combination of any of these things, but it should be encapsulated in one sentence. One more thing: your goal can change, and probably will. That’s fine, and you’ll adjust your content strategy accordingly.

2. Brainstorm subject areas. There are two ways to do so:

• Current expertise. If you don’t think you’re an expert in anything, think again. Have you ever bought a car? You know a lot more about car buying and financing than most. If you’re young, you’re automatically an expert on what young people want. Think about what you do on a regular basis. Think about problems you’ve overcome in the past. How can your experiences help others?
• Interests. If you think dogs are awesome, but don’t know anything about them, read a book about dogs. You’ll probably become more knowledgeable than 90% of people who also think dogs are awesome.

What I’m getting at is that you either know more than you think, or you can learn enough on your own to write about a particular topic. Expertise is only relative to your audience, which is why you must…

3. Define your audience. If you don’t know who you’re writing for, it becomes difficult to stay consistent with your message and brand, which makes it harder to grow. Let’s look at a few good examples of blogs with defined audiences:

• Personal finance [for “the rest of us”].
• Copywriting [for bloggers who are also internet marketers].
• Technology news [for gadget lovers]
• Lolcats [for… people who might think that lolcats are funny. For the record, I so do.]

4. Define your niche. Choose your topic, decide who you’re writing for, and ask yourself if that niche would help you accomplish your goal. If so, you’re already done!

… with the easy part.

5. Research, research, research! Until now, all this has been speculation. How do you know there are [your target audience] looking for [your subject]?

There’s no one correct way to perform market research, and indeed it’s a subject worthy of another post, but to sum up: Talk to people. Snoop around forums and try to identify needs. Do some intensive keyword research. Believe me, it sucks to spend time on something only to find out too late that nobody cares about it.

If the demand isn’t significant enough to meet your needs, start from scratch and try again. By going through this process, you’ll likely find at least a few topics you can start blogging about.

Identifying the right niche is critical to blogging success. With the right niche, you’ll have a much easier time identifying what fits your blog and what doesn’t, and writing becomes that much easier. The next step is to develop an actual blog content strategy for your niche - that’s coming soon.

There are a lot of ways to put ads on your blog, but the simplest way is to start with an AdSense-ready Wordpress theme. I’m using the ProSense Gray theme that I downloaded for free from DoshDosh. This is great, because it’s already set up to be optimized for ads and to incorporate into my blog.

1. Head over to someplace like DoshDosh and pick out the Adsense- optimized theme you like.

2. Now go to the AdSense page and sign up for an account. All you’ll need is your blog address and some personal information, and you’ll be good to go. It takes them about a day or so to approve your account, after which you can start getting paid whenever someone clicks on your ads!

3. Extract the theme you downloaded into another folder on your computer. Now upload these files to your site using your FTP client. The directory you want to upload them into is wp-content\themes.

4. If you uploaded them to the right place, head back to your Wordpress dashboard and click on the “Presentation” tab. You should see the theme you just uploaded. Click on the theme and voila! Check out your beautiful new theme by clicking “View site.”

5. You might notice some contextual ads on your site but you’re not finished yet. You’ll need your AdSense Publisher ID, which you’ll find on your AdSense account once it’s approved. Login to AdSense, click on “My Account” and scroll to the bottom where it says “Property Information.” You’ll see something that looks like “ca-pub-###” which is your Publisher ID. Highlight and copy it except for the “ca-” portion, so you just copy the “pub-###” part.

6. In Wordpress, click on the Presentation tab and then the “Theme Editor” tab underneath it. This part might get a little tricky. You’ll see all the files for the theme you’re using on the right hand side. Some of those files are the AdSense files that came with the theme. If you can’t tell which ones are the AdSense files, check the folder where you originally downloaded the theme into and see if there’s a Readme file - it should tell you what you need t know. If you’re using ProSense like me, the files will look like “adsense_sidebar,” etc.

7. Now just search through the code and paste your Publisher ID over anything that says “pub-###.” In other words, replace any Publisher ID in the code with your own. Repeat for all the other ad files, and don’t forget to click “update files.”

You’re done! Any visitor who clicks on your ad now puts a little bit of money in your pocket. Be careful not to click on your own ads!

We’ve got a nice-looking blogs and our ads are in place. Now comes the hard part - coming up with content and bringing visitors to your site. That’s coming up soon.

I’ve wanted to start a blog (even just for test purposes) for months now. Despite every resource out there saying that you can “Start a great, customized blog in just minutes,” I couldn’t quite figure out how to do it. I felt stupid every time I tried, and even gave up at one point and just pushed it to the back of my mind until “later.”

Am I just an idiot, or is this actually trickier than everyone was saying?

Well I finally got it right just a few days ago after trying for the umpteenth time. And they’re right, it’s easy - once you figure it out. Luckily, you don’t have to make the same mistakes I did. Here’s an excellent screencast I just found that walks you through pretty much every part of setup from start to finish. This could have saved me tons of time if I found it earlier.

A few notes:

-It’s from 2006, so the Wordpress layout may look slightly different. It’s still the best screencast I’ve found by far.

-You won’t have to take every step she describes. For example, it appears the .htaccess file is created automatically by newer versions of Wordpress.

-For detailed instructions, here’s the full guide from Wordpress.

-Download the Filezilla client here.

When you’re done installing Wordpress, you’ll be taken to a Dashboard page where you can write and manage all your posts. I recommend bookmarking this location. By default, there’s an “admin” login link on your blog’s homepage which will also take you to this page, but if you decide to get rid of the link later, you’ll want to be able to find your Dashboard!

Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll try to help you out.

One of the most popular places to register a domain is GoDaddy. At the GoDaddy site, you can do a domain name search to check if the domain you want has already been taken. If you’re lucky, and it’s still available, register that bad boy! Note: GoDaddy usually has a bunch of silly offers that they throw at you when you buy from them, so just be ready to ignore those.

You’ll also need hosting. The simplest way to describe hosting is it’s like renting space on the internet. You pay a small “rent” for a place to put all your stuff online. There are tons of web hosts out there. For simplicity I’m recommending Bluehost. It’s reliable, reputable and fairly priced. There’s cheaper or even free hosting available elsewhere, but hosting is one of those things where you get what you pay for. You wouldn’t want your beautiful site crashing, would you?

If you can’t wait to set up your site, you can buy a plan at Bluehost. Longer plans are cheaper per month, but I would caution you against buying a really long plan if this is your first website. I bought a 2-year plan almost a year ago and didn’t use it for almost the entire year! That effectively doubled my hosting cost, so be careful unless you’re sure you’re going to use it right away.

PS: You can also buy domains at Bluehost, but usually only if you already have hosting there. I buy all my domains at Bluehost.

Even if you’re not ready to buy hosting and set up a website, it’s a good idea to register your domain name before someone snatches it up! It’s cheap and you can always buy hosting later.

So let’s say you want to start a blog like this one. You’ve registered “www.yourblogsname.com” and bought hosting at Bluehost. Great! The next post covers setting up and starting a blog for free.

Unfortunately, despite all the great free information out there, blogging on Wordpress (easily the best blogging platform out there) can get  pretty difficult if you don’t have a bit of technical background.

So I created this blog to help other beginners just like me. If you’re just starting from scratch, this is the place for you. We’ll start with the basics, like setting up a blog with ads, and progress to more complex topics over time.

If you want to stay updated, I recommend clicking the giant orange button:

That’s an RSS feed button, which lets you subscribe to this page and be alerted by a feed reader any time there’s an update on this site. When you click on it, you may get a few different readers to choose from. If you’re not sure which one to choose, I recommend Google Reader.

Hope to see you again soon!

-SK