1. Find Your Niche – Ask yourself. What do you really want to blog about? What are your interests? Then research on them to determine whether or not it stands a good chance of being successful.

2. Setting Goals & Planning
Why do you want to blog? What are your goals? Are you blogging because you want to earn profit from it? Don’t allow yourself to just go with the flow. With goals you will have something to work towards, something lying up ahead in the future to aim at.

3. Buy Domain and Hosting – If you really want to be considered as a serious blogger then you need to buy your own Domain Name and hosting. This will give you enough freedom to expand and modify your site later on.

4. Make your Layout Design Stand-out - If you have the resources to purchase your own Theme or Layout then consider it as a valuable investment. However, there are thousand of Free Templates you can use and modify to suit your needs. Just make sure you keep it simple and professional.

5. Content is King – Focus on your content first. Make sure your topics are useful, interesting and even entertaining. Your content is the main attraction of your site.

6. Reach out and Interact to your Readers – Think of your articles as conversation. You engage your readers to comment and send in their feedback.

7. Promote your Blog – It is essential to promote your blog. You can start at emailing your friends about it. Submitting to Blog Directories and so on and social networking sites.

8. Make your Blog Search Engine Friendly – This is important because you want your blog to be indexed to Search Engines easily. So never forget to modify your permalinks.

9. Add Useful Plugins to your Blog – Plugins help make your blogging life easier. I highly recommend, akismet, contact form with spam protection, all-in-one seo pack, commentluv and many others.

10. Tools for your Blog – There are lots of tools you can find that add functionality to your site, such as, entrecard.. feedburner.. twitter.

11. Post Regularly – This will get spiders much more interested at indexing your site and improving your serps. Not only that, it also keeps people coming back to your site and see what’s new.

12. Monetize Effectively – If part of your goals is to earn money for your site then its never too early to monetize. Common ways of doing this will be adding ppc ads, banner advertising, private ad sales and doing sponsorship posts.

13. Injecting Personality to your Blog – Try to find your own voice in the blogosphere. Create and stick to your own writing style to avoid being distant to your audience.

14. Proofread your Post – Before hitting the publish button make sure you have checked your article from spelling mistakes and grammar errors. This usually turns-off a reader.

15. Learn Basic HTML and SEO – It never really hurts to learn. Just try knowing the basics of html so you can easily tweak your lay-out here and there. Also, learn simple SEO techniques that can give your site a bit of an advantage than others.

16. Do not leave your “About Me” Page Empty – Usually the “About Me” section is taken for granted even if this is obviously necessary in a blog. Usually, the main reason is that, we kind of run out of words sharing something about ourselves. However, you must know that your readers woud want to know things about you and your blog.

17. Stay Informed – It is important to stay updated of current trends and developments in the world wide web. Simply subscribe to web portals who are offering this information first-hand.

18. Track your Stats – Check Awstats in your cpanel or sign-up and install Google Analytics. You need to keep track of your site’s growth so you will know if you are headed to the right direction. This will also help you determine the areas you need to improve on.

19. Be Patient with your Blog – Again, success isn’t achieved overnight. Give your blog a time to grow. As long as your numbers are increasing then that is a sign of a healthy blog. Do not expect your earnings, traffic and rss subscribers to zoom up right away. It all boils down to the time and effort you pour in to your blog. Be patient.

20. Submit to Important Web Directories – I am talking about Dmoz, Yahoo, and Google. Make sure you submit your site following strictly their guidelines. (It also takes time to be accepted and added).

21. Research and Do your Homework – Find really interesting or controversial topics that your readers can appreciate. Gather ideas that would improve your blogging by selecting and improving on your topic choices.

22. Showcase your Most Popular Posts/Articles – This is simply showing your best foot forward and is in fact the best way you can invite New Visitors landing to your site to subscribe. Show off why your blog rocks..

23. Network with Other Bloggers – Try to network with Blogs in your Niche. This is the best way to gain relationship with your fellow bloggers. Established blogs in the same niche as yours have exactly the type of readers you need. Therefore, they will likely follow you as well because the content you offer is relevant to their interest.

24. Link Love – Link generously.This is another way to best develop relationships with your fellow bloggers.

25. Scratch Each others Back – When you promote their blogs, most likely they will do the same thing. You gain backlink and even friendship!!

Read: Compilation of the Best Blogging Tips Part 2

Yeah yeah.. we know it already.. most Make Money Online Blogs are full of crap, they blog about their monthly earnings, fill their posts with affiliate links and persuades us to no end that if we only do everything they blog about then we can replicate their success. When in fact, they never really dish out exactly how in the world they managed to earn those 6 figures monthly.

However, bloggernoob.com tries to save newbies from all those B**Sh**t! Not only that, most of his posts are usually very entertaining. Here are a few of his recent articles that I highly recommend.. 1. If you read about it, it’s too late to make money online off of it 2. Spending too much can ruin your chances of making money online 3. Network with Newbies to Make Money Online.. well, why don’t you just head on over to noob’s blog and you’ll find more interesting reads.

Oh by the way, I never really join contests, maybe because I’m too caught up just organizing ‘em for WPTD. But noob’s contests are simple and fun so when he decided to give away an iPod Nano, I joined and won it! Thanks noob! Now, don’t be surprised if I’ll be joining more contests from here on.. It’s just so fun to miss!

Just a heads up guys, Matt Cutts announced that Google will be updating our Page Rank over the next few days. I am quite excited to see how WPTD will do, I mean I know my site is just 3 months old but I do think that I have managed to gain impressive inbound links. I checked on Yahoo’s Site Explorer: Inlinks (57,953) for WPTD. We all just have to wait and see then.

1. Does PR Rank actually matter to you? Why?
2. What PR are you expecting for your site?

If you haven’t heard of John Cow’s Ebook, “Building a Business not Just a Blog” then I suggest you go download and read it immediately. I am biased, I have always been a big fan of John Cow. How it started? Well, remember that time that Bob started doing a Video Conference of sort, a JohnCow Tv Channel? We’ve always exchanged conversations with substance through that. Other than the fact that we’ve touched elbows around the DP forum and when I told him my Username, he recognized it! The rest is history.. (anyhow) few months after that, it was indeed obvious that there was already a different voice behind John Cow. But the whole competition thing with Garry Conn made me glued to the site even more. Garry Conn inspired me to work on Niche Websites (I already have 14 Niche Websites and have signed up for Adsense) and John Cow made me think of Launching an Online Business.

I have great respect to the new voice behind John Cow.com now for helping me think and realize of better and bigger opportunities that I would have never thought of otherwise. Yes folks, I will be launching my online business next month. I will tell you more about it on my next post. It will be important because you will get to see WPTD’s direction from now on. Also, if you want to know the reason behind this move, you can check out my personal blog.

This post is simply a follow up on: How to Become a Successful Online Entrepreneur.

I have opened the discussion with the following questions:

1. What are the hardships you have encountered being an Online Entrepreneur?

2. If you could give an advice to Newbies who wishes to take the same route, what would it be?

So I took the time to ask some respected Bloggers that I admire myself. You see, they are all talking from experience and this could simply serve as a motivation to all of us most especially those who are just starting out.

Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

One of the hardest parts of being an online entrepreneur is being social outside of your business. When you are your own boss and you work at home, unless you create social activities and look for things to do outside of work, it can become a one-dimensional lifestyle. My advice for someone just getting started in Internet business is to find a balance between the work you do and the fun you have outside of work. Yes, working is fun too – but that can’t be all you do or you won’t have anyone to share your successes with.

John of JohnChow.com

The biggest hardship would b staying motivated in face of not seeing any return. When you’re working by yourself without the support system of a typical workplace it can be hard to stay focus on the task at hand. This is where taking time out to network with other like minded people can really come in handy. I belong to many local and Net based networking groups. It’s a great way to exchange idea, keep your focus and stay motivated.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net

There are many challenges to overcome including: Finding your voice, Finding a topic to write about, Developing a readership, Dealing with unexpected hits from outside factors (like being de-indexed by Google out of the blue), Personal attacks, Work life balance self doubt.. the list could go on but I’d depress you. Advice: Take a long term view – it doesn’t happen over night and takes a lot of work.

Chris Garrett of Chrisg.com

I think the main answer to this would be the lack of security. In a full time job you have, at the very least, the illusion of security. A steady pay cheque, nice package of benefits, all that. When you are any kind of solo entrepreneur you have to provide for yourself.

This is why my advice would be to not give up the day job until you have a safety net in place and have a good idea you will succeed in still being able to pay your bills.

The Noob of Bloggernoob.com

The hardest thing about trying to make money online is that you have no one telling you what to do. It would be a lot easier if someone would dictate things to you, especially when you get started. Being productive with your time in the early stages is the only way to success. If you are not productive, your site won’t get traffic or make any money. Most then likely you will quit. I think that’s the biggest problem with most bloggers. They quit.

My advice to newbies would be this. Give yourself enough time to test out the waters. Don’t expect to make thousands in your first week or month. Be realistic. Online business should be treated like a business. Most businesses don’t make a profit until months, even years. Why would it be different with an internet venture?

Paul of InspiredMoneyMaker.com

I can summarize the three main hardships I faced as:

(1) Truly connecting to what I loved to do. I am a “scanner” by nature so I love to learn a lot of different things instead of focusing on just one. Narrowing down my focus to stick to teaching one thing online took a lot of soul searching and help from my coaches. It took a while, but I finally realized that the passion I truly loved and wanted to pursue online was helping / teaching people how to make money doing what they love; and so I launched InspiredMoneyMaker.com.

(2) Funding. Building a business when you have a large reserve of cash is one thing, but trying to build an online business on a shoe-string budget can be challenging. I built InspiredMoneyMaker.com on a very small shoe-string budget. It’s been a challenge, but it’s helped me to get creative with my marketing and forced me to tap into other ways of promoting myself besides just buying advertising.

(3) Time Management. I run my InspiredMoneyMaker.com Blog totally part time in the evenings and on weekends, outside of my regular “job”. This required me to sacrifice certain things like playing video games, watching TV, going out with friends to focus my time on building an online business. So far it’s been well worth it, and I really enjoy the process. A lot of times I hear people say they have “no time” to build a business because they already work full time etc. yet when I ask them a few simple questions I find out that they somehow have plenty of time to watch endless hours of TV, sports, movies, go out and party, etc. In reality, they probably don’t “make time” because they haven’t figured out #1 yet – Who am I and how do I truly connect to what I love to do? If you don’t know what your passion is, you’ll distract yourself with “crap”.

Advice: If you can truly connect to what you love to do, find a way to creatively get around the “I have no money” issue, and the “I have no time” issue, you’re ahead of 99.99% of the people out there.Once you’re in that 0.01% to get to the point where you’re making money online, read my blog.

JohnCow.com

Two things come to mind as the biggest hardships
1. You can not please everyone
2. There is no magic tool

When you first start dealing with customers or even just subscribers, you are going to frustrate and plain and simply, piss off some people. Even though your intentions are 100% pure, someone will interpret it the wrong
way or just be in a bad mood and want to tear you apart. They will even threaten to blast your name all over the internet and the list goes on and on.

The bottom line is you can not make everyone happy and by focusing on the one or two people who are always miserable. You will not only run yourself down but you will also be ignoring the rest of your customers. I am not saying ignore the issues but do not take them personally and realize that some people will just never be happy.

The second thing is there is no magic tool that will take all your problems away. I used to struggle by always thinking there was some magic formula I must be missing or some tool others must be using that I still need. I would spend hours scouring the clickbank directory and opt in to every email list hoping to find it. What I did find was that I was wasting time searching for something that was not there and so I removed my name from all but a few lists (the ones that actually offered info) and then looked at what I had and how I could use that to make money. That was the biggest turning moment in my online career and was what helped me be able to quit my job and run my own business.

***

My sincerest gratitude to all of them for taking the time out to answer those questions. I know they have a zillion things to do and still they have imparted their advice and valuable knowledge. Thank You. - ChiQ Montes

***

Discussion: Which advice can you mostly identify with? What are your own struggles that you wish to overcome?

As you know themes.wordpress.net have stopped accepting themes. However, WordPress just opened their New Theme Directory!! I was personally notified by my sponsor JungleJar of this awesome news! Read the details of this news on their site.

WordPress 2.6 has been released with exciting new features! If you do not know how to Upgrade manually, then try using plugins to do the job for you. Everything is automated. Easy to follow.

• 2 Columns
• Wood Design
• Rounded Corners
• Dark, Banner Ad Ready
• Tested on WordPress 2.5
• Fixed Width
• PSD logo Attached
• ReadMe.txt (for support & other info)

The free version of this theme is “as is”, it includes an encrypted footer and the theme will not be supported.  Support for this theme and access to theme updates are only available to members.

WPTD is turning 3 months old and since I started I have focused my energy on branding, building traffic, and gaining loyal subscribers. Therefore, it’s about time I step-up in Monetizing this site. From now on, other than continually releasing WordPress Themes, I will also be blogging about Making Money Online and Internet Marketing. Both topic interests me a lot, and I thought this would be the most opportune time to inject personality into this site.

Therefore, I have signed-up for Google Adsense and got approved right away. I will be using it not only on WPTD but also on other Niche Websites I have been working on. I hope to be making this site content-rich from now on as this would absolutely help me earn from it.

I have also joined Market Leverage. It was an easy choice for me to do that since they have offered to sponsor a contest on WPTD, we are still in the process of finalizing the arrangement. Hopefully, I will be able to kick off the contest next week. Something to look forward to since our deal sounds really awesome. I would really love to get those items myself (but its for you my dear readers) so do not miss out the chance to win their cool prizes.

I have also noticed the way Market Leverage treats their publishers, it’s nice to be able to interact with them to try to come up with awesome ideas that could be beneficial to both parties. Definitely a win-win situation as 90% of my site’s traffic comes from USA, so I am hoping to be beneficial to the Market Leverage Family and to have a long term relationship with them.

Lastly, I will now start working on continually increasing my RSS Subsctribers, I’ve been a tad behind but it doesn’t matter, as I’ve said, I’m all in for Blogging Idol.