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.

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.

Here is your daily round up of everything you should have read today, but didn’t because you were jerking all morning, napped this afternoon, farted around with your new theme project this evening, watched idol, blogged about idol, wondered where all this traffic came from on The Other Blog, fooled around some more with your theme and then wondered what you were going to post today over in Blog Boy. i suppose I could have twitted all that today.

Mani at The Daily SEO Blog brought us Tags and Categories – SEO and Usability

Darren blogged on branding your blog with your name in The Choice of Associating Your Name with Your Blog

Last but not least Sara gives us a very appropriate post on tax day in Free Tax Sites: A Lesson for Bloggers about Advertising Balance

I am surprised these days how many people still don’t know what an RSS/XML/Atom feed is. Almost every website be it a blog or anything else has some variation of that nice little orange symbol that looks like this:

Okay now that you all know what those are, the question some of you still have is yeah, but what do they do. First lets explain RSS. In the guise of K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) RSS is Really Simple Syndication. As my MIL (mother in law- in case you are really knew to acronyms) would say RSS and Atom are the same meat, just different gravy. They are syndicated feeds of blog posts. XML is just the technology that both of those things are built on.

So what is syndication? I knew you were going to ask that. Simply put, it is anything you subscribe to, just like television stations get reruns of shows or newspapers buy advice columns, but web syndication is free. You click on the link and add to any number of web based readers like Google or into your favorite reader program. I personally like MS Outlook for this since it is what I read my email from several a dozen different sources, have my daily calendar and so on and so forth. So the question is why would you want to subscribe to a feed when I could just go to the website. The answer is pretty simple time. You are already opening a program or going to a single site for your email, so adding one more thing to check saves you time. If you are a voracious feed reader like me, I can quickly check to see if over a hundred blogs I read have new posts in just a few minutes. I can decide if I want to go and comment read the full article if it wasn’t posted in the feed, or just skip on by. I literally save several hours a day by using a feed reader.

So which is the best method to use a program or a website? That is really a personal things. For me it is a program, because that is how I check my email and it is open all the time. If you are on the go and want to check it from any number of computers or cell phones, then a website reader is probably better. Can you use both? Sure, though if you check as many as I do regularly you would probably only want a small list in for going mobile.

That is the long and short of it. Syndicated feeds are good for people who surf blogs, which means as bloggers you should learn to make the most use of them. Secondly you can get a feed of comments posted to your blog which is extremely helpful for bloggers who want to respond to comments on their blogs.

A new feature for me is a link to another great blog post about blogging. Today’s goes to, Sara at the Pajama Professional with How to Develop Mad Skills and Market Insight

Today’s blogging tip is don’t over extend yourself.  If you don’t have time to commit to your blog(s) then you have probably over extended yourself with either the blogs or your other activities.  Either way trying to do both will make your life suck and no one gives a damn if you blog about your sucky life!  When you start out blogging you need to make some serious time commitments to your blog and not just writing the posts either.   Unless you have the extra cash to throw around at web developers then you really need to spend time learning site design, SEO, your blogging software, and all the latest information about the plugins that will make your blog great.  How do you do it?  You do it by reading a lot of really great blogs or better yet their feeds since you can do that quite a bit faster.  Where Should you start reading?  Here is my short list

• Pro Blogging
• Perfect Blogging
• Pajama Professional

That should hold you for a while.