Before I get anywhere further I want to tell you one thing. I like being honest. Blogging is about patience, especially if you want to make money on blogging. Patience is the most important virtue in this business. Not many people will tell you this, for the simple fact that it’s hard to sell it. Frankly, I hate waiting for things to happen. However, I bite my lip and wait.

I figured I will write this article to give you something easy to understand, something that will actually help you look at blogging in a different way. Hopefully, this will help you start a very successful blog; or if you already have one and looking to improve this will give you some good pointers.

In order to facilitate understanding and flow of information I’ve decided to keep this to a 3 step process. This will help you get your own blog off the ground, but it will not cover monetization – making money. This will be another article, devoted to turning your blog into money-making machine. For now, let’s keep it simple and get you started.

1. The Brainstorming

Before you jump to the actual blog you need to take a step back and look at the big picture. What in the world are you going to blog about? Even if you already think you know what you will talk about, keep reading you’re not done. The bottom line is that you have to find your niche in order to maximize your profits later. If you’re planning on keeping a personal journal type of blog, it’s all fine and dandy, but unless your life is full of exciting adventures people won’t be interested. But, you can always prove me wrong. You have to find your niche, a focused set of topics. It’s not as hard as you think it might be. This is where the brainstorming comes into play. Let’s do this together. Get a piece of paper. No, don’t just brush me off. Go and get one!

We will make a table with several columns. Here are some general headings for the columns: Hobbies, Jobs, Interests, and Like to learn. You can always add more columns if you have a criteria that applies to you. But for the sake of the article, we’ll stick with those 4.

Hobbies – this basically includes anything that takes up a good portion of your weekly life, after work. This is where you can list stuff like video games, collecting stamps, collecting dolls, grooming your pets (if you enjoy it). Basically anything that takes up your time and you enjoy it.

Interests – this is something I would consider below hobbies. You are interested in a specific thing, but you rarely get to do it. Something like traveling, vineyards, yoga class, etc. Don’t worry, there’s no right or wrong. You can stick one in hobbies or interests, it won’t hurt you.

Jobs – well, this one is pretty self-explanatory. Don’t just list your current job, list all past jobs since high school and any future jobs (if any), too.

Like to learn – this is a broad category, so try to limit it to about 10 items. This can be anything, no restrictions.

Consider this list a map, a map to effective blogging. What you need to do now is begin looking at the things you have listed. Keep in mind few questions while examining your list:

• What makes me happy the most?
• What am I most passionate about?
• What am I most knowledgeable about?

Begin circling items as you think about these questions. See if you can tie items from different columns together. For example, you’re support specialist with video games as one of your hobbies and you want to learn how to create games. Well, you can tie these in into a possible blog about resolving technical issues dealing with video games, tell people what to ask and tell support specialist when they call with problems, talk about new games coming out, begin reading about how games are created, and write about your experience learning about it. Your niche would be video games, but as I said it’s a set of focused topics – support, game creation, news, etc.

Here’s a good advice, once you think you’ve found your niche – sleep on it. Just give it another day, another thought, and see what you think about it in the morning.

Not many folks will tell you this, but I will. In the beginning you get excited about a topic, create a blog and start writing. After 3-5 articles, you begin to think what you should write about. After 6-8 articles, your life begins to nag and you want to write something but that new movies looks so good, so you’re out watching it. Next thing you know it’s been a week since you’ve posted; a month; two months. You need to think long term before you begin blogging. Can you commit to writing? A good blog should have 3-5 postings a week. You need fresh content, so readers will come back for more. This ties in directly into monetization, which we’ll talk about later. It will happen; you will have days when you don’t want to write. But to be successful you have to overcome it. When you get lazy and stop working at work you will get fired, same exact principle applies here. You will lose your income if you let your blog become outdated and static. It’s a serious business, so you have to be serious… and you’ll have plenty of fun.

Next article will be Step 2, about generating content for your blog. You need to have some content before you start your blog so search engines and readers can chew on something. Feel free to subscribe to my feed, that way you’ll be notified when my next article is out.

Keep in mind – patience is virtue in blogging.

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