The 12 Step System To Launching Your Blog Successfully

Creating a blog to establish your online presence is a necessity nowadays. However, if someone was to start their own blog, what would be the steps towards creating it and in what order?

In this post I’m going to break down the easy steps towards building an online presence in the form of a blog, in step by step fashion to make it easy for anyone who’s just starting out. For those who are more intermediate at this, you could add some of the tips and tactics here to make your blog even more successful.

Summary of the Steps to Launching a Successful Blog:

1. Research a Niche that You’re Passionate About

2. Find out Profitable Keywords for Your Niche to Target

3. Register a Domain Name with your Top Keywords or Choose a Memorable Name

4. Install your website and Use WordPress

5. Install a theme that looks professional and suitable for your niche

6. Design your blog- Categories , About Page and Overall Purpose for your blog + Overarching Strategy

7. Change the settings on your blog- Permalinks etc

8. Add Plugins that are useful

9. Social Media Accounts setup for Branding and Awareness + Syndicate content (VIRAL)

10. Setup your Autoresponder, Optin Page and Email Sequence

11. Add 20 Blog Posts of 500 words or More, and Post Regularly (Content Development Strategy)

12. Activate Your Blog Marketing Strategy (Blog Commenting, Forum Posts, Answering to Each Comment)

#1 Decide on Research on a profitable niche that You’re Passionate About

The normal advice that’s given to marketers is that you should research on a profitable niche to blog about, regardless of your passion. Though I think that its not wrong to do it that way, but seeing that blogging is a longer term venture, I would suggest that you do this instead. Pick a PROFITABLE niche that you have passion for and knowledge about, so that your time invested and the learning curve will be significantly reduced. You will also find that the tasks of creating new content for your blog much more enjoyable, and you will procrastinate much lesser.

Great sources to search for profitable yet interesting niches are Clickbank, Amazon, Ebay Pulse, Dummies. A lot of research and leg work has been done at these sites already, plus you will be able to read reviews and feedback of customers from these sites, making your task much easier.

#2 Find out Profitable Keywords for Your Niche to Target

If you haven’t got any tools to do your keyword research, I suggest that you use the Google Keywords tool as it will give you the amount of searches for particular keywords. Then you could plugin the search into google, using phrase or exact match searches to determine competing pages for that particular keyword.

Basically, the less the competition and the more the searches, the more profitable the keywords can be for you, so research thoroughly for these gems.

You could use these keywords as anchor texts , subjects for posts and topics for discussion etc.

#3 Register a Domain Name with your Top Keywords or Choose a Memorable Name

When I register for a blog, usually a memorable name will be my top priority. A name that stands out from among the crowd , memorable, yet intrinsically related to your niche and profitable keywords.

Try your best to get .com, .org or .net domains as these will rank better on search engines and looks more professional too.

#4 Install your website and Use WordPress

Choose a reliable Hosting service such as Hostgator to put your blog on.

WordPress is a fantastic platform to run your blogs on. Its so easy to use, great content management system, and its easy to navigate. Why make your life difficult when you can use wordpress?

#5 Install a theme that looks professional and suitable for your niche

This is a pretty important consideration. Your theme will dictate the feel of your blog, the navigation, the ease of use and the mood of it. Take your time to choose the themes. Woo, StudioPress and the Thesis Themes are quite popular themes for bloggers that you could have a look at, although they are PAID versions.

FREE themes are usually more limiting so I suggest that if you’re serious about your blogging, go for a professional premium theme.

Meanwhile, when just starting out you can use the basic themes first until you have decided later on.

#6 Design your blog- Categories , About Page and Overall Purpose for your blog + Overarching Strategy

This is the Defining Part of Your Blog- IF you want it to be Memorable, to Stand out and to Stick in your Readers Mind, causing them to come back again and again. This is the DESIGN of your Blog.

I would suggest that you really take the time to think and rethink the overall purpose that your blog serves, for your readers and subscribers and what strategies you could use to make the delivery of your purpose much more POWERFUL.

Think and research what other bloggers are doing at the moment and devise a STRATEGY that you could use to be Better than Them.

Then create Your About Page, and reveal your personality in that page, to make your readers know you, to connect with your persona on a deeper and more memorable level.

Then Plan appropriate Categories that your blog would focus on.

#7 Change the settings on your blog- Permalinks etc

Make your blogs search engine friendly by changing your Permalinks. Setup your Blog Title and its Description as well. Takes about 2 minutes to get that done.

#8 Add Plugins that are useful

WordPress is so powerful because of its plugins. There are quite many useful plugins that I can suggest, but let’s go for the essential ones that you need in order to get your blog up and running.

a. Google Analytics or StatPress (Traffic Stats)

b. All in One SEO Pack (SEO Plugin)

c. Onlywire (Syndicates your posts on Social Bookmarking Sites)

d. W3 Total Cache (Speeds up your blog)

e. Exit Rescue (To increase optins)

f. Max Banner Ads ( Great for Banner Ads on blog)

#9 Social Media Accounts setup for Branding and Awareness + Syndicate content (VIRAL)

For every blog, create a BRANDED Facebook Page, Feedburner account and Twitter Account. To go further you could also create a Youtube account to syndicate your videos as well. Next, Twitterfeed.com is used to publish your posts automatically on Twitter and Facebook accounts via RSS Feed. This could make your posts go viral and also may add valuable backlinks to your blog.

#10 Setup your Autoresponder, Optin Page, LEAD MAGNET and Email Sequence

Next, setup on your blogs, ways that your readers can turn into subscribers. Add optin forms throughout your blog, on the sidebar, at the bottom of the post , as an exit popup and also and entry popup.

To do this you would need to ethically “Bribe” your readers, by giving them great content and value in the form of content based videos, reports etc in exchange for their name and email. This is what I describe as a LEAD MAGNET. It attracts new leads to sign up, and gives you the opportunity to market to them over and over, if you do it correctly. By offering a powerful and unique lead magnet, your subscribers will thank you and remember what you have done for them.

The autoresponder service provider that I use is Aweber, and its a fantastic tool with many features. Sign up for a FREE account there and to continually use that service, entry service is $20. On that aweber account, you would add an email sequence that it will automatically send them related emails packed with content and valuable information, along with your affiliate links to the products that you are recommending. Then you could add the occasional hard sell email promoting offers that you truly believe in, so that your customers can benefit from and that you could also profit from. Easy.

#11 Add 20 Blog Posts of 500 words or More, and Post Regularly (Content Development Strategy)

Now a blog is used as a tool for content propagation. Without great content, your blog will fail to receive regular streams of traffic and nobody will come back the second time, and it will not go viral.

So to ensure that your blog gets off to a great start, you would first have to Create Valuable content, and put them as a blog post. I would recommend writing longer posts as it stands out from the crowd like I’m doing here at NetMarketingStrategy.com.

And you would then add 20 or more Pillar Content into your Blog, so that at the first visit, your readers will have a lot of great content to read and learn and put into action, plus they would also be able to navigate the blog and familiarize themselves with it.

Then you would have to put together a Content Development Strategy, so that you could consistently churn out great blog posts that will benefit your readers on an ongoing basis, and keep them coming back for more.

In the future, I will post about Ways to Setup your Content Development Strategy to Create Killer Content.

#12 Activate Your Blog Marketing Strategy (Guest Blog, Blog Commenting, Forum Posts, Answering to Each Comment)

In this last piece of the puzzle, after your blog gets setup with all these great stuff, you would need to purposefully market it and bring your blog into the attention of your market.

The best ways that I have found to promote a blog quickly is to liaise with the other bigger and more established blogs in your niche or ones that are closely related with the same target market.

What you could do here then is to comment on their newest blog posts, give great insights with a twist on them and then link it to a related blog post of your own. This stimulates conversation and attention, and you will find that many will be drawn back to your blog.

Also, you could take the same techniques and use them on forums, whereby you set up new threads discussing the relevant and hot topics in your niche and link them back to your optin page or your blog. Get them to sign up as your subscriber and keep giving them valuable content.

Then when you have gained some traction, you could start contacting the more established blogs in your niche and offer to guest post for them, in exchange for a resource box linking back to your blog. This will really get you some serious bump in traffic and subscribers, so be warned!

Finally, when there are streams of traffic on your blog and when you receive lots of great comments on your blog posts, remember to interact with your commenter/readers, answer their questions so that they will be more motivated to come back to your site, plus they will trust you more.

CONCLUSION

So I hope that you have enjoyed reading this post of the 13 Step System to Launching Your Profitable Blog. This is by no means an exhaustive post, and there are still a lot of great content to be uncovered on this topic. So if you have any valuable feedback or comments please feel free to add them below for the benefit of the other readers, and maybe to generate a healthy debate:)

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