Blogging - step one

Even though I have several blogs, most were thrown up in a higgledy piggledy way --- the purposes varied; as support to an existing website that I have, others are a commentary and still others are on personal development. I want to do this one differently. This one has to be an example on how to blog for money. With this as the prime reason for starting a new blog, I have to give more thought about the way I go about it.

Immediately questions need to be answered:-
- what is the topic going to be?
- who is my target audience?
- should I use blogger or wordpress?
- should this be a standalone blog or should it promote one of my online businesses?
- how do I best monetize it?

The first question that I am going to tackle is topic. There is no shortage of topics to write about. If I want to make money on this blog then I have to be able to rank high in the search engines, choose my keywords carefully, even the domain name makes a difference.

If the topic is too broad then I have a lot of competition out there. An example would be both my Buy Me a Mercedes Benz site and the corresponding Mercedes Benzblog. I threw both of these sites because I like the car and just wanted to write about it. Even though I am making some money on the site (the blog is not monetized for a reason)I don't expect that it will be up on page one of any of the search engines any time soon. This will be a labor of love and who knows, years hence it just might show up on page one!

The way to success is to "niche" your topic. The saying in the internet world is "inch wide and mile deep". An example of that, still staying on the topic of Mercedes, might have been on the McLaren.

Between now and the next time I post here, I will do some research on my topic and will post here on how I arrived at it. Till then .... happy blogging to you!