Creating Your Brainchild

You’ve got your brilliant idea now what do you do? Glad you asked. A great man once said if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Success doesn’t happen by accident. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of generating a plan and executing it. You think the military is successful because they wing it? Of course not. They follow strict guidelines and procedures they set out for themselves, take their time and execute their plan flawlessly. It’s not willpower, it’s structure, they just don’t know how to do it any other way. It’s that kind of dedication to your plan that will make you successful.

Formulating the plan of attack

As I’ve found out though not every plan is a good one. In fact I’ve worked on plans that were so flawed in the beginning that I don’t know how they even worked. The thing that I find helps me is to know which direction I’m heading in and where I want to end up. Try to be specific as possible. When you know where you’re going, it’s easier to figure out how to get there. Take my plan for example, while it’s relatively simple (Start: Create Blog - End: Make Money) I didn’t realize how many points in between there would be. I had to first figure out how to get my blog designed, online, and active. Enter Wordpress.

Wordpress and your baby

Soapbox time! I love Wordpress. I used to do some web design back in the late 90’s which of course hasn’t changed a bit since then. SQL, php…OMG WTH! Wordpress single handedly saved me hours of frustration and research into building my very own blog. It’s all done for you, fully automated and simple to work with. It has custom themes, indispensable plugins, and functional widgets it’s the best thing that happened to blogging since Al Gore invented the interweb. Regarding themes your advertising space is your blogs real estate. You can make a tremendous income off of it. Try to stick with a theme that can do that for you. Once you have your baby all set up it’s time to take it live.

Waking up Frankenblog

At this point your blog should be mostly ready. Now is the time to make sure everything is working for your rabid readers. Test out your plugins, widgets, links, correct spelling mistakes, and most importantly set up an RSS feed and email list. This will allow you to prove your worth to your advertisers which in turn allows you to eventually charge more for your advertising real estate. Once all is complete you are finally ready to blog on your blog about blogging.

The Running Total Recap

While there isn’t much here that will give you an epiphany it should help you get started down the road to success. As my blog continues to grow I’ll be posting more articles on how I did it, and give you all the planning tips I can. So to recap:

•  Plan
•  Get Wordpress
•  Set Up Your Blog
•  Test Your Features
•  Start Blogging

And you thought it would be hard.

Next step “Affiliate Advertising”.