A few weeks ago one of my clients came to me with the idea of wanting to build a network of blogs. She wants to launch blogs in different genres and turn them into affiliate sites along with adding valuable content and then selling the blogs at a later date.

One of her questions was what do I need to do before starting?

Although there are many other steps to setting up a blog I was able to narrow it down to what I feel are important first things to consider before anything else. I will be the one designing and installing the WordPress platform for her but in the meantime, my suggestions were as follows:

1. pick a niche and narrow it down
2. define your intended audience
3. what are the main issues or solutions you can help this audience with
4. get yourself familiar with some basic SEO

Narrowing Down Your Niche

My client is passionate about many things. I suggested to her that scaling down to a more narrow niche would make it so much easier to develop the right content to keep her readers interested. You want to enjoy the process of writing and sharing so keep it simple by staying on the path with a very narrow niche.

Audience

Thinking about your targeted audience will also help define the type of content with a more narrow focus will be. Who are you writing to? What ages will be interested in the type of content you will write? Write to help them learn a specific thing.

Issues and solutions

The goal is trying to write the best content you can with solutions for your reader about the subject of your blog. What have been your experiences with a particular problem and how did you resolve it. This is providing solutions to your reader’s things and ideas that worked for you. You need to appear knowledgeable to the audience.

Basic Seo

Becoming familiar with SEO basics when first starting can certainly put you ahead of the game. Learn as much as you can. Learn about simple things like adding hyperlinks to words and phrases and why it is important. Using backlinks, doing keyword research for the best way to utilize keyword phrases. Use the alt text on images that you use inside each blog. Good SEO practice helps improve the performance of your website and gain recognition from the search engines. Thus bringing in more traffic and potentially more revenue from your blog.

As mentioned in a previous article, blogging is hard work but can be a life changer if you are dedicated to make it a serious business.