Overview: There are three essential questions you should ask before starting a blog. Four if you want to earn a living from your blog. What am I going to blog about? Who do I want to read my blog? Why will they read my blog?   The fourth question is for those wanting to make money from the blog  How to I make money from my visitors or my visitors actions.   What am I going to write about? In brief you are going to blog: to promote a product or yourself whatever comes into your head, a personal blog  build your blog in a particular subject area, niche There will be articles about each approach in linked posts that will be written this week.   Who do I want to read my blog? This is an important consideration as you will have to make the decision between building up a large number of visitors or targeting a clearly defined group of people. A business using a blog to help sell a specific, expensive, technical product would want their blog to be seen by people in their industry. The blog would be a mixture of brochure, public publicity, basic support centre and news about the product, other products the business makes and news of interest to the industry. Attracting thousands of general interest visitors would not be one of their goals. On the other hand a blog making money through adverts and affiliate schemes would want to attract as many people interested in their particular niche as possible. Every visitor would be Continue Reading

Overview There are so many different aspects to blogging that it can be a little overwhelming at first. What starts as a seemingly simple venture can turn ugly quickly if you aren’t careful. However, being able to define your niche and target audience can significantly streamline everything for you and make the overall blogging process a little easier. Defining Your Audience By defining your target audience you effectively set the tone for your blog. It will help you to pinpoint what topics you are interested in posting about, which will in turn help to organize your thoughts. By picking topics you are already somewhat knowledgeable about you have the opportunity to research, write, and eventually become an “expert” in your blogging field. In addition, it will enable you to reach out to the right people, the people that will have an interest in your blog and an interest to continue reading your blog. While having people stop by is great as far as short term results are concerned, you ultimately want to be able to grow your readership and retain a solid readership base, which will translate into long term results. If the blog isn’t marketed towards the people that are intrigued with your blog’s niche, it will eventually fail. Forming Quality Relationships You also need to form relationships with other people in your niche. This can be done by commenting frequently (with quality comments) on people’s blogs in your same niche that you respect and engaging in Continue Reading