It’s inevitable: I think every traffic-hungry blogger in the entire world has made one of these posts already. Publishing lists like these are unbelievably popular on the internet and I guess I really can’t be called a serious blogger if I haven’t made one.

So here’s my take on a brief tutorial to starting your very own, succesful blog:

Step 1: Get your own domain and good hosting

This is the first and most important step of all. In my opinion, for a blog to be taken serious at all, it’s of unmeasurable importance that at it’s base there’s a solid domain name. This way, visitors look at it all impressed-like! Think of something catchy and easy to remember. When you’ve reached some stage of popularity, it has to be easy for your visitors to tell their friends about your site ‘in real life’, without having to write down your 50 character URL.
Domain name cost: $9,95/year

Second part of this step is making sure you’re running your site on a good package of a proper and reliable hosting service. I can most definitly recommend the greatest host of all time: Dreamhost. They offer incredible hosting packages with very sharp pricing and payment options. I’ve been using it for over 4 years now and I must say I have never had any down-time and when there’s trouble and you ask for support, usually it takes a mere 20-30 minutes to receive a proper reply. Best feature of all is part of what you’re looking at now: One Click-Installs. One of those one click installs is WordPress, the base of all that is Actofrage.com. It takes just a couple of minutes to set up a fully working installation of the greatest Publishing Platform out there!
Solid hosting cost: up to $10,95/month (including free first year of .com/net/org/info domain)

Seeing there has been quite a lot of interest in this host through Actofrage.com, we’ve created a promotional code that helps you cut expenses:

choose the YEARLY PRE-PAY plan and type in ACTOFRAGE as promotional code at the end of the registration form to receive a $25 DISCOUNT and 1 extra FREE LIFETIME domain registration (beside a 1-year domain registration already included!

So if you’re really interested in making (some) money and having some fun bloggin, make sure you do not miss this first step!

2. Choose a good, self-hosted, free Publishing package

What you’re looking at now is an installation of the incredibly powerful and very free WordPress software. I must be honest: it’s the only one I’ve ever tried for more than a couple of hours, but here’s a small list of the best options:

• WordPress: As stated, the most functional, comprehensible, customizable and for me simply the best blog tool out there.
  

  WordPress logo!

• Drupal: I just tried this one for a moment or two. It’s another free blogging tool, with a vast community of theme/plugin builders, but I guess nothing compares to WordPress. Can’t argue about taste though!
• MovableType: must say I never tried this one, so I’ll just hand you the option through a link
• Suggestions? Describe it in the comments below and add your experiences, I’ll post it here together with a link to your site

3. Create/choose a good theme

Ofcourse the best way to stand out is to use a theme for your blog that’s completely original and one of a kind. But seeing there are so many many good and free downloadable themes from terrific artists out there, choosing a free theme and customizing it makes for a good start. I’ll make sure to post a good list of themes and theme artists for WordPress a.s.a.p. and put a link up in this post. Here’s a list of 10 high-quality themes useful for several types of blogs.

Offering a good layout and proper use of colours for your readers to look at might make a good reason for them to come back and read more of your work.

4. Set-up proper advertising

Best advertising program out there!

It’s no use wanting to make money with your blog if you don’t put some proper ads here and there. Now don’t get all fucking crazy and litter your entire blog with flashy banners and textual links. No, don’t.

It’s important to know how advertising works. I’m not an expert, but I can definitly recommend Google AdSense for it’s ease of use and all the helpful tools it offers to enhance your advertising reach. It’s not just about randomly placing eye-catching banners, it’s an art to make your readers actually see the ads without being bothered by them.

I’m not going to post a list of best advertising programs, just stick with Google AdSense and you’ll do just fine.

Also don’t forget to have Google Analytics track your pages for keeping in-depth track of all your readers’ behaviours and locations and ofcourse the number of daily hits and visits. Just try it out, it’s free! I know Wordpess offers quite easy ways of adding the Analytics code to your entire website, so it shouldn’t be hard.

5. Write often, but write well

If you want to get any credibility at all, make sure that whatever you write has a certain level of quality to it. Ofcourse you can decide on this level yourself, but writing a lot of articles that don’t contain any original and/or interesting subjects and opinions, you’re just not working on a solid stream of readers.

Besides writing about whatever the heck you want to make your blog about, these are two types of articles that work well and will most likely give you some good traffic to start with:

• Lists: writing lists of interesting things draws attention. Like 10 ways to lose weight fast! or 5 pick-up lines for instant sex on the spot!. Well, you get my drift. These’s article titles sound interesting and people are usually curious for these types of posts.
• Controversy: write some controversial stuff about recent events, like politics, your view on currently raging wars or perhaps your conspiracy theory on Michael Schumacher’s winning sprees in Formula 1 races: IT’S ALL A BIG HOAX!! Keep it within limits though, you don’t want to hurt people’s feelings or anything, you’re just trying to bring your opinion to light and you should be very interested in people’s feedback, remarks or alternative views on the subject. No flaming allowed.

After each post, make sure to go through Step 6 of this tutorial

6. Be heard! Submit your articles to awesome linking sites

This step doesn’t need a lot of explanation. To get your blog or particular articles noticed, not only does the article need to be interesting to read, you also need to make people aware of it. Post your articles to any or all of these sites:

• Digg: probably the best way to get your article noticed. It’s a very good and entertaining site and with over 17 million visits every month, I don’t really need to say more.
• Reddit: kind of like Digg, but with a completely different interface. Simple, yet very effective.
• StumbleUpon: More of the same really.
• Mixx: yes, another one
• Tweetmeme: not really a site to post your article on really. It uses Twitter to count the number of ‘Retweets’ you get. The more people ‘retweet’ your article to their friends, the higher it appears on the Tweetmeme lists. Higher = more traffic, obviously.
• Technorati: just check it out, it’s worth it

All these steps combined should make for a good blog in the end. Just don’t think you’ll be making hundreds of dollars every month right from the start. It takes patience and perseverance to get higher up the ladder, but if you enjoy writing good articles and sharing your views and opinions with the world, it should be an easy task.

If you’d like to know: I’ve been blogging for just over two weeks now and with only two popular articles so far I’ve made about 4 euros through Google AdSense. That’s thanks to about 30.000 pageviews and 12.000 unique visitors. It’s not quite high revenue, but the pageviews I’m quite proud about, especially since that wasn’t even the meaning of starting this whole blog. I was merely trying out WordPress and it turned out to be incredibly fun! Have a look at the two articles I’m talking about, I never knew they were going to be that popular when I was writing it, but it could be a good inspiration for your next submission:

• 5 Freeware Photoshop Alternatives and Web-based Photo editing (9.000 unique readers in 1 day, resulting in over 14.000 pageviews in a 24 hour timespan)
• The greatest mystery of our time: aXXo The Great (1.500 unique readers in 1 day)

It’s a good thing to set goals for yourself in the beginning months. Like setting a number posts per week or month or trying to reach a number of pageviews by the end of the month or getting a good number of comments on each post. The latter is quite important to get noticed by Google by the way. So just make sure your articles are engaging enough for people to comment on. Try and activate them to participate by offering a chance to have their blog or other sort of site mentioned in your post when you update it with their comments: linking to others is a good way to make friends and eventually will get you links back to yours.

Just my two cents. Have a go at it, it’s fun. If you’ve tried it, please share your experiences right here to get some discussion going. Also, if you think I forgot to add anything, don’t hesitate to fill me in!

By the way: here’s a link to a mate’s blog Blog About Nothing, offering all kinds of help, hints, tips and experiences with blogging, traffic, advertising and all that!

Source: Act Of Rage! .com