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.

Those were the words I heard often enough at as kid when I was being cautious. I heard them from friends who tried to goad me into trouble making either with or for them. I heard them from many a male relative who simple mistook caution for timidity and didn’t really know what else manly they could say.

Now that I am older and wiser those words keep coming back to me. No, they don’t pertain to my blogging for the most part. When they do I shudder with revulsion and take action. This time though they apply to a lot of my fellow bloggers. So I say unto many of you, “Quit Being Such A Pussy!”

Most bloggers want their blog to be a source of income, a business if you will, but they won’t treat it like one. Almost every time Firefox highlights a comments section with nofollow tags, I shake my head in wonderment. These people just don’t get it. They are letting timidity or laziness get in the way of their business’s goals. The most often heard response of why they won’t turn it off is they don’t want the hassle of dealing with comment spam.

If you are getting a few hundred comments you don’t need to remove it, because some other part of your business model is working really well. That is a different story altogether, they are offering such high quality or value that they can get away with offering nothing else to their customers. Everyone else, that claims they want to make money, need to quit being pussies and take off their nofollow tags for comments.

Here is why you need to do it from a small/new business perspective. If you keep the nofollow tags and aloofly say “I don’t want to deal with comment spam,” this screams you are just lazy and don’t care about your customer. It also puts you in the arrogant beyond belief category thinking you are so important you will spend more than a few minutes cleaning up spam a day. Your blog readers are your customers. They might only come to browse, but if they comment they are leaving the store with the crap you are selling.

If they leave a botted comment that akismet picks up, they shoplifted and your auto-theft system picked them up and hauls them away no trouble for you. If they left a “Hi, this was interesting,” comment they bought the cheapest thing they could. Maybe they meant it or maybe they didn’t. Nofollow tags on those mean you took their money, scowled, and didn’t bother to even say thanks with a smile. In fact if you are moderating your comments you probably said “Fuck You!” and hit the spam button. Whether they meant it or not you have alienated them, by playing king of the sandbox and acted like a six year old bully.

Then there are the customers who really mean something to your business. These are the ones who give good relevant comments. You don’t have to remove the nofollow links the first time. You can use Nofollow Free or some other plugin and make it several comments if you like. You should of course have a page marked Nofollow-DoFollow Policy and let them know your posting policy. It is no different from a brick and mortar store posting the return policy or “we will prosecute shoplifters” sign. By removing the nofollow tags you are saying: “I thank you for making my blog better. I appreciate your comments and am willing to do a little work in the area of spam control to keep them coming. Here is your reward.”

If you want your blog to be a business, then you need to start acting like it is a business and treating readers like paying customers. Put out quality merchandise. Post your store policies. Say thank you to all of your customers. Honor the really good customers. Last, but not least, don’t be a pussy when it comes to doing a little work.

Link Note: The links on this post all go to good people who have the nofollow tags removed. They understand the value of doing this, so don’t screw with them by leaving spam.

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!

I am in no way an expert in Blogger or BlogSpot, but I am passing along to your a nice free article on how to write a theme there since I know some of you blog there.

How To Create A Blogger/Blogspot Theme by Brad

This tutorial will cover the steps needed to create your own blogger template. Many people have used blogger to run blogs and have wondered how they can make their own theme to use with it. There are a very few hard to find guides on how to do this, so I’ve decided to take up the task to help as many people as I can, create one. Incase you are skimming over the content, this article is teaching you “How to create a blogger / blogspot theme“

To create a blogger template, you will need a graphic editor (Such as Photoshop, GIMP, or even Paint will do) to create images for backgrounds, post headers, sidebars, etc.. We will get to that later. You will also need an idea or vision about what you want to create. Without that, you are just wasting your time and electricity. Lastly, you will need to know about C.S.S (Cascading.Style.Sheets) and how to operate them. If you do not know how to do that, you cannot apply interesting effects to your newly designed template (Such as: Positioning pictures or text, creating repeated backgrounds, moving around pictures and text and more). A great guide on how to get started with this is available here.

Once you have got everything you need, you should start the C.S.S Framework by putting properties such as

body[ background-color: #000000; margin: 0 auto; font-family: “Trebuchet MS”, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;}

#title [ font-size: 32px; color: #000011; }

so-on and so forth. A basic list of these tags that were taken from Blogger’s simple white theme are available here: (PDF File) XML Tags Blogger List Of CSS. An easier way to do this would be to find a theme that you like and copy and paste the C.S.S, editing it along the way so that time is saved. The only problem with doing that is that every theme is engineered differently so the tags will change.

After configuring your CSS Stylesheet, you must piece it together in HTML. This can be achieved using similar structures.

<div id=’main-wrapper’> <b:section class=’main’ id=’main’ showaddelement=’no’> <b:widget id=‘Blog1′ locked=‘true’ title=’Blog Posts’ type=Blog’/> </b:section> </div>

Do not forget to reference blogger templates that have already been created for the required widgets that you are supposed to put in certain spots. Without doing this, you could not complete making your own template.

Now comes the grueling part that you can either do yourself which could take hours to finish, or copy from another site and edit accordingly. Blogger is configured using widgets. All your posts are just one big widget hence the code up there. An Example of the code that you could type yourself or copy is:

<div class=’post-footer’>
<p class=’post-footer-line post-footer-line-1′><span class=’post-author’>
<b:if cond=’data:top.showAuthor’>
<data:top.authorLabel/> <data:post.author/>
</b:if>
</span> <span class=’post-timestamp’>
<b:if cond=’data:top.showTimestamp’>
<data:top.timestampLabel/>
<b:if cond=’data:post.url’>
<a class=’timestamp-link’ expr:href=’data:post.url’ title=’permanent link’><data:post.timestamp/></a>
</b:if>
</b:if>
</span> <span class=’post-comment-link’>
<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType != “item”‘>

<b:if cond=’data:post.allowComments’>
<a class=’comment-link’ expr:href=’data:post.addCommentUrl’ expr:onclick=’data:post.addCommentOnclick’><b:if cond=’data:post.numComments == 1′>1 <data:top.commentLabel/><b:else/><data:post.numComments/> <data:top.commentLabelPlural/></b:if></a>
</b:if>
</b:if>
</span> <span class=’post-icons’>
<!– email post links –>
<b:if cond=’data:post.emailPostUrl’>
<span class=’item-action’>
<a expr:href=’data:post.emailPostUrl’ expr:title=’data:top.emailPostMsg’>
<span class=’email-post-icon’> </span>
</a>
</span>
</b:if>

<!– quickedit pencil –>
<b:include data=’post’ name=’postQuickEdit’/>
</span> </p>

<p class=’post-footer-line post-footer-line-2′><span class=’post-labels’>
<b:if cond=’data:post.labels’>
<data:postLabelsLabel/>
<b:loop values=’data:post.labels’ var=’label’>
<a expr:href=’data:label.url’ rel=’tag’><data:label.name/></a><b:if cond=’data:label.isLast != “true”‘>,</b:if>
</b:loop>
</b:if>
</span> </p>

That code translated into human terms controls what goes at the bottom of every post…In this case its the author, time, comment link and labels. To extract the code from other templates, just click the “Expand Widget Templates” button and it is below the stylesheet on a certain template.

Most of creating a template is just trial and error. If you look at the code and try to piece it together bit by bit.. you will eventually succeed and reap the rewards of creating one. I hope this tutorial has covered everything that you will need and comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated as it would be great if this tutorial would become a one-stop source for all of the Blogger CMS(Content Management System) users.

About the Author

This post was created by Brad. This article is from Brad Blogging.com, which is also where he blogs about tips to make your blog better, through personal experience. If you run a blog, or will be considering about creating one in the future, this blog may be the ultimate resource for you to achieve maximum success!!

BlogBoy Notes:To me everything looked quite sound, but I am not expert on blogger or BlogSpot so make sure you back up your current themes and templates.

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