Starting a new site is no small task if you want to do it right. Even some of us who have been doing it for a long time still make mistakes, However most of us who are successful in this business don’t keep making the same ones. The site I am following is Meme Connection. I started the site five days ago with a stock theme from Revolution Two. I am quite pleased they have gone to open source licensing so I can give you the theme with all of my upgrades in the SEO department, because frankly it needed them.

Now five days on in the blog I have linked it to a couple of my other blogs, registered with Technorati, made a few posts, and promoted it off an on in my social network. For the first time today I am seeing an Alexa score which we will call my base score of 7,169,215. This isn’t bad since I know bloggers who have been around for years and don’t have scores that good. My target is to have that down to a 1,000,000 by the first of the year. I also have a goal of hitting PR 1 with the next Google PR update do out either at the end of December or first part of January. I won’t be to disheartened if I don’t make that goal since this is a very new blog. If it doesn’t happen my goal is no less than PR 2 in the March/April update with an Alexa score of 250k or lower.

What is next for the blog? In the coming days I expect to submit new memes from all of my existing blogs, and maybe from a few more new domains. Backlinks are the key to search engine success. Now that we are live I am going to work on putting the link directory and forums up on the site and start to build the community. You can follow Meme Connections on the Memes for Blogs site or subscribe to our primary feed. You can follow this continuing story and keep updated on how well the Alexa ranking is doing at least twice a week on How To Blog. You can also get twitter updates of both of these blogs and all of my others by following me, BradHart.

If you are reading this post then you have taken your first step in moving beyond the amateur blog level.  The first thing you need to accept is you don’t know everything and you should be reading a lot of blogs how to get set up right.  None of us know everything, and I am more than happy to point you to the people who know a lot more than me on any subject.  That said let me tell you what we can all agree on.

• Figure out why you want to blog.  This is the most important step and the reason most people never bother with.  Deciding you want to blog for money is perfectly acceptable.
• Once you figure out why you want to blog you need to decide on what your blog is to be about.  This is one specific thing that your blog will be known to the search engines for.  This is going to be your keyword phrase.  See my post on picking your keywords for more information.  The short of it is you want to find something that defines your blog with a lot of daily searches, but not very many search results.  This choice will define your blog for a very long time so choose wisely.
• Once you know your primary focus you can start to choose a domain name.  Choosing something simple like your name seems easy enough, but frankly that isn’t necessarily the best choice either.  your name is a particularly bad choice if you want to sell your blog later.  Some schools of thought are Google will look more favorably on you if your keyword and your domain name are similar.  Once you decide on a Domain name register it.  You can do this almost anywhere so I suggest looking for a cheap place that has been around a while.  You can host anywhere once you have the domain, but if you lose the domain because you were dicking around making other decisions, then you are SOL and have to repeat steps two and three.
• Choose a blog platform and a basic theme design.  The fact is Google loves wordpress best of all, but without a well designed theme it doesn’t matter what kind of advantage you get from the platform you are taking blind swings.  Not only will you need to choose a good theme, you need to be able to alter or fix it yourself, unless you have a paid tech guy.  it doesn’t matter how good your writing is, if you don’t look profession to your readers your won’t be seen as a professional.  This goes doubly for google and every other search engine that could care less what sort of pithy commentary you make.  Search engines want the nitty gritty of posts.  They want meta information to match the text.  They want images that have full SEO treatments since they can’t interpret the visual.  They want to know what your navigation priorities are.
• Last but not least is you want to choose your host.  You need to do your homework and not let some affectation pull at your heartstrings.  You can switch hosts as you like.  Many hosts these days are even on month to month agreements so switching is easy.  The biggest thing to look for is how fast sites using the network move.  If the cost is next to nothing for a whole lot of promises beware.  Any company that doesn’t charge a minimum of $10 a month and promises the moon probably means that have three or four times too many sites for their bandwidth and if you ever try and use as much as the promised they will likely cancel you account.

If you can manage these steps you are well on your way to moving beyond the amateur blog level.

Post 9 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.

All blogs have their problems and niche blogs are no exceptions, especially micro niche blogs. The biggest problem is the amount of content one person can write about. Darren Rowse of ProBlooger mentioned last week that one of the emerging trends were multiple author blogs for smaller blogs. This is one of the solutions to this problem, but it is only a stop gap in my opinion.

Micro niche blogs, especially in the blogosphere of blogging will eventually run out of crap to blog about no matter how many authors they have. Many long time blogging bloggers I have been reading for a few years now are really just starting to repeat themselves. They aren’t simply giving a new take on an old subject; they are basically rewriting posts they wrote a couple of years back. In my less than humble opinion, this is when you know a blogger has started jumping sharks and needs to move on. As a blogger if you find yourself doing this, you need to realize if you can’t pull it out you will be eaten by the sharks.

There are workable solutions though. First, you can add multiple authors which will help keep you going until you really have something new to write about. Two, you can slow down the pace of your posting. This is especially true for very small niches. Lastly, you can redefine or refocus your blog. There is no sin in slowly moving from one niche to another. An abrupt change might cost your readers, but so will spouting the same tired information. If you want to know what else you should be covering ask your readers, they will let you know.

In the end starting a niche blog has a lot of potential as a money maker, but you need to think about the long term when you’re starting it. Plan a year in advance if you can. Make the best uses of the resources at hand and know when it is time to move on. As always network, network, network!

5) Don’t Advertise On Your Noobie Blog. People who tell you not to advertise don’t usually have your best interest at heart.

The first kind of people to give that advice are readers who want something for nothing. Second kind are bloggers who think if you don’t have ads their advertising will get a better click through ratio.

4) Gadets and Widgets are the bomb and you should use all the latest and greatest. The fact is unless it is unobtrusive and either useful to you or your readers it is pointless and slows down your load times.

3) Starting out with a free blog is the way to go. This might be true if you are just keeping a private journal, but if you ever want to make money on your blog, this is not necessarily the best advice you can get. Less than $20 can get you started right here on Zyon. After a month you will know if you going to give this up or keep at it. The longer you are established on your own server the better it is for your rankings. The longer you are on freebie blogs the harder it is to make the switch and the greater the detrimental effects to your blog there are.

2) Posting Frequency Doesn’t Matter. Unless you are writing a personal vanity blog detailing your life posting frequency does matter. Do you have to post every day? No. Do you need to post a couple of times a week minimum? Yes. In order to achieve any real following you need to post with some sort of frequency. If what you said in one post is interesting, but don’t have any sort regularity I might be kind and add your feed to the more than a two hundred and fifty I subscribe to, but if you don’t pick up the pace you will get relegated to the lowest priority folder, the check once a month if I have time category.

1) Only Write the Highest Quality Posts and Never Write Filler. This is fine when you have 25,000 daily feed readers, but when you are starting out regular posting is essential to getting momentum going. This is not to say write a crappy post, you shouldn’t do that either. When it comes right down to it, you should be able to come up with at least one good idea five times a week and knock out a few hundred words worth reading.

Filler posts may not be the best idea you have ever had. That doesn’t matter so long as you put some thought into it, made it readable, and did a good job with the SEO. There are many ways to come up with good filler posts, many of which are some form of linkbaiting. Trips Around the Blogosphere, Daily Del.icio.us Updates, or Twitter Digest Posts are just a few examples of this.

Not every post is going to interest every reader that is just a fact of life. Snobs will say a post is crap simply because they didn’t get anything out of it, but if you the blogger got something out of writing it, then you can guarantee someone else will to.

Remember to take good advice when you see it, but don’t be afraid to question the motives of those who are giving it to your.

Don’t get stressed about not getting comments. Like many other bloggers I too was wondering if this was worth doing several times this week. I am putting money, time, and effort into maintain a blog that doesn’t get very many comments. I am sure some of you have felt that way too. Well I gave myself a year for each blog to start turning a profit and I am actually ahead for the gross on all four of them so I am not fretting.

I still am left with the time and effort questions. There are plenty of other blogs out there talking about blogging, but frankly I might be the only one who dares to say “fuck” in their blog. I thought about changing that strategy and decided against it, because blogging is frustrating and sometimes saying “fuck” in a post takes some of that away, and frankly if you want to read “fuck” free posts there are other blogs out there who cater to every corner of politically correct behavior.

There we have it. I know I have a fucking niche among bloggers blogging about blogging. Alright niche defined, what next in the “is this worth doing” Q&A. How many people read this blog? Right now 50 new visits a day with an average of 2.5 page views according to analytics, with another 20 return visitors, that doesn’t account for the 25 now getting the feed which increases by 3 or 4 a week. Okay not a lot of people are coming here yet, but it does grow every week so I am okay with that.

This still leaves me with the damned lack of comments. It is frustrating not knowing if anything you say is getting through or making any difference to people. Then I had to take a step back and evaluate my situation. As any good blogger with a problem I went to the people who know a lot more than me. I started looking around at some of big name blogs and realized they have great content every day with huge numbers in their Feedburner stats, but they don’t have a lot of comments either most days by comparison. Several sites I looked at have 20k or more Feedburner readers and only get on average a dozen comments per post.

After doing the math, I didn’t feel too bad. With a Minimum 20k people getting the feed you can figure only half of them read the post every day, with that many visiting the site in total. Call it a 12 comments divided by 20k and you get an average of .06% post to comment ratio. When I divide up my stats I have over a 5% post to comment ration. I quit feeling bad and decided to go back to content writing.

Enjoy and please feed my ego if this was in the least bit helpful!

Yeah right, not if you are talking about a blogging god. The one thing Bloggers need to do is realize that they have readers who want to see something new out of them every day. Frankly that is also the quickest way to burn out as a blogger, especially for those of us managing multiple blogs. There are a few tips though that will help reduce the stress.

• Write posts ahead of time either for scheduled publication or keep them around in draft form until they are either finished or you need to pull something out of your ass.
• Make a schedule of posts and keep to it, it is even better if you post it somewhere on your blog so when you get a few nasty emails wondering where your daily blog post is you can point to it. Yes it does happen, in fact that is why I am writing this damned list now. I was tired and needed a day off yesterday and I too it from this blog. One of these days I will manage to take one off from all three at the same time.
• Make a quick post about anything relevant. Don’t make it a crap post, or it isn’t worth your time to even do and you will suffer from it in the long run.
• Make sure you have some great links to provide and tell your readers why they should go read these other people’s blog too.
• Remember even Blogging Gods have bad days and don’t post everyday.

In honor of the suggestion here are my favorite blogging links of the day.

• From Jamie Harrop 20 Ways To Get More Blog Comments. It is a good little list and everyone should be bookmarking it.
• Courtney Tuttle gives us6 Steps To Overcoming A Blog Traffic Slump If you aren’t reading her blog regularly you are missing some really good insight.
• Dosh Dosh:Building a Popular Social Media Profile: Seven Essential Characteristics

We could all stand to do better with this one.

• Darren talks about the new breed of bloggers who are getting into blogging for the express purpose of making money. Making Money as a Side Effect of Blogging (and a New Breed of Blogger) He also gives us a good link over to Seth Godin on how to write like a blogger from a few days ago. Write like a blogger

I modified the original LiveJournal CrossPosting plugin and have had it sitting on Brad’s Tiny World since the day 2.5 came out. It is a rather handy tool to have as cross posting your blog entries to your LJ page certainly brings in more traffic without any extra work. With the move going on at Tiny World I am bringing the plugin over here.

LiveJournal XP WordPress25

Digg

Every blogger should have a Digg account, no matter where you blog. If you don’t write crap for blog content, it won’t long before someone starts Digging your posts. You are going to need an account to help with the self promotion and respond to people Digging your work. As you build your network you can shout out not just your cool new finds but the ones elsewhere to your friends. Digging others is almost as important as getting dug yourself, since people do profile the people Digging them, especially when you’re among the first to Digg a new page or the other user is just getting started. On that same note you should be profiling the people Digging you and reading their work, not just to be nice either. You reap what you sew in social networking. Popularity snowballs on Social Networking.

Stumbleupon

Just like with Digg every Blogger should get a Stumbleupon account. At first you should be asking your friends to your posts not to mention if you use FireFox you can get a Stumbleupon toolbar that will let you quickly add your own posts. Once you start building your network there expect the same kind of profiling from your friends there to occur as it did on Digg.

MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog

MBL and BC are very similar in terms of the way they look on the surface. As you can see from my sidebar I think you shouldn’t get one without the other. You can basically create networks of users the same way you do in the other programs but that is where we start to diverge from them. You can actually see in real time which other members, not just the ones from your network are visiting your blog. MBL gives some nice statistical tracking data when you register your blog(s) but lacks the same sort of rapid friend building you can do in BC. BC also lets make announcements to the people of your network which comes in handy the way it does for Digg.

In the end if you want to develop a following and are writing quality posts none of these tools are things you want to be without.

I know what you are thinking Blog College… WTF! I decided what was really lacking was a bulletin board forum for bloggers. Almost any subject you could want to talk about has its own bulletin boards, usually several. However I have never heard of one for bloggers, much less been directed towards one by pushy bloggers trying to sell their crap. In the absence of anything else I have put together my first ever bbs. You can find the Blog College at http://bradtheblogboy.com/forum/

You can have the coolest blog layout and even more impressive content, but without readers it is merely a vanity project.

We all want lots of Google traffic because as everyone knows it is king of the search engines. The fact is when you are a noob Google traffic is going to be hard to come by unless you did something really stupid and have your blog associated with it. Having a podcast of you and your sister doing it on the desk would probably get you noticed. Frankly if she is hot enough that you want to fuck her and she is horny enough not to care about incest good for you both, That will likely get you noticed, but it won’t get you the kind of traffic you want in all likelyhood. Face it you are a noob. you need to worry about the technical aspects of getting listed on Google, but you should not worry about if your traffic is coming from their. Get your traffic in play and Google will eventually pick up on you.

So where does that leave you to get it?

1) Use free link exchanges like the one I have listed here.

2)Post to You Comment I Follow blogs with relevant comments. I do mean relevant, nothing pisses off your fellow bloggers like posting inane babble on their hard work. Read the post and comment appropriately.

3) Keep writing good copy.