How Do I Start A Blog For Fun and Profit?
My very first website was Ask Uncle Terry a sexual advice site that was in some ways started as a diversion from the sorrow that I was experiencing from the loss of my wife, the woman that I had spent 42 wonderful years with. It was a real change from my life in the floor covering industry. In many ways it was a project that was totally new to me for my wife was the only woman that I had ever been with.
How do I start a blog became a nagging question. When I later was to start my first blog I knew that I wanted an online business. I needed to supplement my income now that I was semi-retired. I am not a technical person and knew nothing about an on line business and certainly nothing about blogging. Thanks to good advice I started out using a Wordpress platform though with my blogs I was just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what would stick. Unfortunately lots of the spaghetti was sticking but I was not making any money.
Later I started visiting other blogs and reading articles by those that had become successful in blogging. Clues here and there I started absorbing the information, putting it to work and started to change my blogs to make some money. I am still in the transition stage but am seeing results. While I am far from an expert I am happy to share with you the information I have found and often with frustration as I dug deeper into that question how do I start a blog?
What Interest You?
First decide what topics interest you. I have found that it helps to choose a topic of interest as this makes it much easier to write about. With blogging you either write a lot of original material, post the writings of others or both. I do both though I prefer to write my own so that something identical is not at another site.
What Type of Blog Would You Prefer
As I learned from one of my favorite experts Jason at John Cow, there are 5 basic Internet business structures that most small business websites and blogs fall within. (By the way, if you haven’t already done so you should get his free book How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog). Anyway, these 5 types of site are community. e-commerce, content, portfolio and hybrid.
- A community site usually encompasses a specific group or a special interest. Community sites are usually very good for building traffic.
- E-commerce sites are similar to a retail business though your sales floor is the Internet and the consumers computer monitor. At an e-commerce site you market, sell and ship your product to the consumer.
- A content site is one in which you provide content such as articles, images or other content that will attract readers. Like a magazine, newspaper, radio or television program your job is to add the media that attracts traffic and promote your site to attract traffic to it. Just as a television or radio program has their commercials or printed media has its print ads, you will offer your readers the opportunity to click on your ads. The companies that have the ads on your pages will pay you for the ad space, clicks to their products or the purchases that those coming from your site make.
- A portfolio site may not sell anything directly. It may be an adjunct whose primary job is to attract customers or clients to a service, consulting or other offline business.
- The hybrid site is a combination of these types of sites. For instance one of my own sites floorcentral.com provides information much like a community site, attracts and encourages readers to click on the ads of others like a content site and attracts clients to my floor covering consulting business like a portfolio site.
Are There Products To Advertise Or Sell?
I then ask myself if there are products to advertise or sell for this topic. Naturally this is only important if you are building a blogging business as I am. If you are doing it just for fun this step is not needed. Since I want to make money I will be doing research on my product, the competition and the potential income that I can expect. We will talk more about this in a later article.
Once I have decided what type of blog to be built I will purchase a domain name and select a host for the blog. In the next article How Do I Setup A Blog we will talk more about this.
These are my original steps and there are many more that follow. If you follow along I will be happy to each day share more and more with you as to what I am doing. I hope you will visit regularly as we continue our series
As we continue with How Do I Start A Blog I would appreciate having you add your own thoughts. This will help all of us non-technical people and perhaps some technical people alike that want to build a blog of their own.
Techless Terry
