So many people do things the wrong way around, they start a blog without any clear idea of how they will monetize their work. 

To a lot of bloggers, monetization may feel like the most important part, but you need the other parts of the puzzle first. Start making money from the beginning, be careful of relying on advertising, and focus more on offering services or products. That’s where the money is.

Now if you are writing for your own pleasure that is fine, but if you are writing for other people then planning is essential. 

Sticking Adsense on your site is only going to earn you coppers; affiliate links will only earn you money once lots of people have come to know, like, and trust you. 

The only way you are going to earn money is to develop your own information product or service and to sell that to the subscribers who love you.

What is the end goal? Why am I blogging? As Earl Nightingale said, if a ship has no destination it will only leave the harbor by luck, and most certainly never find its destination. Do you want to become known as an expert in your field, is this a hobby, help as many people as possible, use it to drive sales, build trust, or maybe all of the above? You have to write down your goals in life, and blogging is no different.

Clearly identify a topic that you are greatly interested in. Why? Because you will be generating a LOT of material about that topic! 

Step 1: Focus on a niche

No one follows blogs that jump from one topic to the next. Users like to know what to expect when they come to your blog and more importantly what they will get from subscribing or following it. 

For example, if you first start a blog about eco-friendly cat toys, and then your most recent article is about your favorite pizza sauce recipe, your inconsistent content isn’t going to be relevant or resonate with your audience (and will also confuse Google about what your site is about). Instead, be a resource for a particular niche and only produce content, and here’s a hint, write about something you’re already interested in or passionate about.

Who am I blogging for? Too often blogs are all over the place and don’t have a central theme. You may think people care about your family vacation, but if you are a financial blogger, you should stick to the topics that are relevant; people are people, but you can insert your personality without wasting other peoples’ (your readership) time.

If you have several different ideas, try writing a series of 5 or more posts on each one and seeing which one feels most “ripe” to you.

While it is possible to launch your blog under Blogger or WordPress.com (etc.) auspices, it may be better to go ahead and get your own dedicated domain and establish a presence on your own. Look at your purpose and ambition to determine this.

Starting off, you might decide to save a few bucks and go for some no-name free hosting or website template site. In all honesty, if you’re really serious about blogging, spend the extra cash and sign up with a legit web-hosting provider and CMS like WordPress.

During this phase, it’s also important to strategize your domain name. While I always recommend people secure theirname.com for personal branding reasons, for other situations, proper research is needed to develop a unique and optimized domain name. It is a good idea to generate domain names to pick a better option!

The very first step is to learn how to secure your website. Without proper security on your website, all of your work will rapidly disappear due to a random hacker attack. Secondly, learn how to back up and restore your blog if any of these attacks should occur. Whenever you post something new you should back up your blog, or if you are blogging on a daily basis then this process should be done daily.

The second step is to write at least a week’s-worth of content before launching a blog. The reason why this is important is because as you are learning the ropes of how to use your technology to be a blogger you want to have something already prepared. Nothing is worse than going to a blog that has very little content, and if you want to constantly keep your blog updated, working ahead of time would solve a lot of headaches. Some may say you want to have a month’s worth of posts but that may be a bit too extreme but if you do create a lot of content beforehand then any problems you may have in your personal life or at your work won’t stop your blog from continuing on.

The third step would be to start to network with other bloggers. Try and be cool about it and be as helpful as you can. Of course, if you are the new kid on the block you may not be taken seriously, however, the people who see the value in what you have to offer will pay back dividends. By joining groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, G+, and so on you can learn what people are most concerned with, if you know how to solve these issues then write up some tips and pointers on these topics and then try and get the word out and advertise those posts.

Know what and how to scale

Bloggers often start new projects with great zealotry, but soon realize blogging something of value is extremely difficult, even when you know your topics/subjects very well.

Are you going to be the only blogger for your blog? Will you allow contributors? Do you have any friends that can contribute? Also, it’s important to consider not over-blogging for the sake of post count, as 1 quality blog post, promoted properly, is worth more than 1000 mediocre blog posts left in obscurity.

The fourth step would be to find forums, blogs, and other places where you can share your knowledge and expertise. Of course, you will want to be able to eventually include a link to your blog so you can get traffic and visitors so you can start to build up a fan base. You can leverage this fan base to earn commissions on recommended products and services. It is always best if you have used products or services in the past, recommending something you haven’t used before is wrong on many levels and ultimately it will bite you if that product or service is shady in any way.The final step would be to start to generate revenue from your blog. The above steps should have given you enough of a marketing edge to start earning some money from your blog each day. Signing up for Google Adsense, or other advertising platforms can greatly help with earning at least small amounts each day. Those small amounts eventually add up and you can use those funds to advertise your blog on Facebook, Google Adwords, Bing, and other platforms.