Your 10-Step Guide to Blogging

What software will you use and where will you host your blog? You have two options: 1) Host your blog with a third-party blog service provider like WordPress.com or Blogger.com; or 2) Get the software (WordPress.org is the most popular) and host your blog internally or with a hosting company.

Hosting internally provides more control over your content, updates, and is currently the only option if you plan to generate advertising revenue with your blog. Read "Build Your Blog" for more details on this software and hosting decision.

If you are working with a budget of less than $5,000, the wise decision is probably to identify which software you can afford FIRST, and then determine your content and design based on what that software provides. If your budget is $5,000 or greater, you'll have more flexibility and should determine desired features first, then choose the software and create a design based solely on your needs.

Features and Functionality - Do your homework and identify what features and functionality you want to have on your blog. In these articles, I outline 8 fundamental features and 13 must have features. Do you want to manage your own comments or use a service like Disqus? Do you want to automate a battery of "share" links into each post or choose select ones? Will you allow people to subscribe to automatically receive an email whenever you update your blog? What service will you use to do that?

Step 8: Marketing your blog.

There are countless ways to market your blog, but the key is that you actually do it. Basically you are trying to find ways to establish both creditability and visibility for your content. People have to know your blog exists and is useful. You have to remind them that it exists as often as possible and in a non-annoying way. Many of the features that are included in a blog are designed to help you drive traffic. I break the marketing job into two categories: 1) getting new readers, and 2) building loyalty amongst your existing readers. For a list of the best ways to market your blog see my post here on the top ways to market your blog.

Step 9: Monitor your traffic and analyze your success.

Establish a process (weekly, monthly or quarterly) to assess your blog's success and failures with a keen eye on what's driving each. Are you getting a lot of traffic from particular places? Boost your presence there. Are you spending a lot of energy on a particular topic that consistently gets very little traffic? Perhaps you should either stop writing about that topic or consider if you are marketing to the wrong audience. Are you not generating the advertising revenue you had hoped? Perhaps you don't have a large enough readership, or perhaps you're not making an offer that's relevant to advertisers (audience demographics, pricing, ad placement, etc.). Perhaps your going after the wrong advertisers. Make sure you assess your blog on a regular basis against the goals you defined in Step 1.

•    Tools for traffic assessment will include website traffic statistics software Google Analytics or the simpler traffic statistics software that should come for free with your hosting account. Ask your hosting company how to access it.

•    Once you know your site traffic, you can also benchmark it against other sites with Compete.com and Quantcast.

•    For advertising rates, search competitor sites for their "advertising rate sheets" for free data or you can use paid tools such as Nielsen Adrelevance, Nielsen @plan.

Step 10: Monetize your blog.

If you choose to take the route of generating revenue from your blog, I'd like to offer some sobering information supplied by Technorati. Based on the 2009 State of Blogoshopere and 2008 State of Blogoshopere, 72 percent of respondents have not monetized their blog. Only 4 percent of respondents derive their primary source of income from their blog. In fact, the median annual revenue for the bloggers who do have advertising was $200. That means 50 percent of the respondents earn less than $200 per year from their blogs with CPMs of $1.20 or less. The top 10 percent of bloggers earn an average of $19,000 annually. The top 1 percent earn $200,000 or more. The average annual income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month (some of whom had more than one million visitors each month). This should provide some grounding on what to expect from monetizing a blog both in terms of dollars and traffic thresholds.

If you're going to monetize your blog you should be aware of the options that are open to you. Most people think of monetizing only through selling ads but there are many other possibilities.

1) Supporting an existing online store. Zappos is probably the best example of this.

2) Selling your products and services. Blogs are often used to drive sales of information products (i.e. ebooks etc.) or services.

3) Selling products for other affiliates. Earn a commission from the sale of other people's products on your site.

4) Selling advertising. Do your own sales, hiring a sales team, or join an ad network. Here is a fantastic list of advertising networks from econsultant.com.

5) Pay per post. Companies will actually hire you to write a post for them or review their product on your blog.

WARNING: This technique is controversial and may damage the trust your readers have in you.

6) Arrange speaking engagements. The authority you establish in your blog can translate to your ability to speak on this topic to a live (or virtual) audience.

7) Paid writing and media appearances. Write for other publications or make media appearances.

8) Blog roundtables. Provide your opinion and feedback on products.

9) Event attendance. Sometimes all people want is your presence!

Let's face it, blogging is resource intensive but can be highly valuable. Make sure you're going to get your money's worth or else those resources might be better used elsewhere.

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Maisha Walker is an award-winning 13 year Internet industry veteran and the President of message medium, a New York firm that works exclusively with entrepreneurs and growing businesses to maximize their digital footprint and drive revenue and sales through Internet marketing. For guidance right now, download her popular (and free) Web Site Checklist and Internet Marketing Checklist. She is also the author of Web Site Fundamentals for Entrepreneurs. @maishawalker