Building a blog is not a one-time process; you have to be at it continuously as long as you continue blogging. However, before you monetize your blog, here are the first five steps that you through creating your very first blog. So, here we go:

Step#1: Choose The Platform: Technically, blogging platform refers to the application software where you create your blog. There are several blogging platforms out there, but choosing the right platform is critical to your blogging experience as well as online exposure.

Some of the blogging software applications are available for free while the rest are paid. Obviously, you’re not supposed to go for the paid ones as you need to spend some time on learning the ins and outs of blogging until you know how different platforms affect your blogging experience.

Speaking of free blogging platforms, both Blogger.com (by Google) and WordPress.com (Open source software) are immensely popular across the bloggers. However, with the invention of social web (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), the popularity of WordPress blogging platform has gone off the roof. Again, as a novice, WordPress.com is more likely to offer you a better blogging experience than Blogger.com. Therefore, choosing WordPress software for your first blog is always a smarter option.

Step#2: Create A WordPress Account: When you log on to www.WordPress.com, you can the home page filled with some chosen WordPress blogs from various bloggers. If you work hard and smart, someday your blog could show up on the home page, who knows!

Anyways, on the right side of the home page, you will find WordPress’s message for you that says, “Express Yourself and Start a Blog”. All you need to do is click on the Sign up Now button and fill in the necessary steps to compete the signup requirements to create your first blog. The good news is WordPress understands your concerns on how to go about starting your very first blog, so it offers you a step by step guide here.

Step#3: Choose A WordPress Theme: Once you’re done with the WordPress account creation process (I hope you didn’t have to face much problem), it’s time to dress your blog with a theme that appeals to your blogging needs. The choice of the right WordPress theme is important for several reasons. First, a proper theme inspires you and your audience aesthetically. It’s worth mentioning that the first impression of your potential visitors typically stems from the theme, images and post headlines you have on your blog. Therefore, you have to be thoughtful and innovating about how you present your blog by choosing the theme that most appropriately associates your blogging ideas with it.

The only bad news is that, WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to choose a theme of your choice. But then you can’t get everything you want for free. So, let’s make the most of what we have at our disposal, right? The good news, however, is that you can modify your existing theme to suit your blogging requirements. But that’s an advanced step and let’s not get into that as of now. Just choose the right them that represents your blogging philosophy. If you’re still confused on how to go about it, here is the link to help you.

Step#4: Plan Your Monthly Blogging Schedule: One of the most common responses from first time bloggers is they tend to go overboard with the blogging planning. You may feel like you’re ready to write several posts a week, but eventually, this fad might not last as long as you thought it would. So, get real and plan your writing schedule realistically. Maybe, just 3 posts per week? How about that for a great start!

Since you can’t plan your annual blogging schedule in one day, you can probably prepare a weekly or monthly schedule of 12 posts. Just write down the probable topic titles which you’re going to write on across the month. It helps a lot to stay focused and saves a lot of time that you would spend in pondering over what your next post should be about.

Step#5: Write Your Very First Post: Since you have a blog, you can write anything you please? Never start blogging until you have a plan in place. Your very first blog post requires as much deliberation as your annual blogging schedule. So, before you jump into writing your first post, hold back and make a plan on what you’re going to write and how frequently you can write your posts.

Assuming that you’ll listen to my advice and write 3 posts a week, your first post should talk about what you’re going to offer to your audience in general and a generic introduction of what your blogging plans are.

So, there you have it, your very first WordPress blog. With a little bit of discipline, planning and resolution, you can sure make it a hit across the Web. In future, we’ll talk about how to make your blog more interactive by creating audience-centric content.

Feel free to tweet this out if you feel others could benefit from it. Alternatively, leave a comment below. Insightful comments will get a link back to their blog.

However, you can’t really write off the benefits of Article Marketing completely as many online marketers still rely on article marketing to drive classified traffic to their websites. Since Google changes its algorithm of weighing the links you generate from various campaigns, it’s extremely vital that you evaluate your online marketing strategies and streamline it from time to time. One of our previous posts offers 5 tips on how you can get more from your Article Marketing drive. Take a look and it may be useful for you.

Guest blogging still remains a potential method of generating valuable back links for your website or blog. Two years ago, I did my very first guest post for Malcom, a very talented copywriter and owner of Gill Media based in Canada. Guest blogging was probably wasn’t as widespread then as it is today.

How to Determine Which Blogs to Guest Blog for?
Although guest blogging is a potential tool to achieve Google-friendly inbound links to your website and establish your authority as a niche blogger, it is not as easy as it sounds. I mean if you want to reap the benefits of guest blogging, you should be targeting popular blogs instead of just any blog out there.

You can do a search on your niche and find out at least 50 best blog sites that have people (read potential traffic) frequenting them every once in a while. Make sure you want to guest blog for those blogs that have a decent traffic coming to it and have a reasonable page rank. You can make a list of blogs you want to request for guest blogging. This is because you want to improve your odds of getting a “yes” from most of them. Given that popular blogs receive more requests than they can handle, you should go that extra mile to improve your chances of being accepted for guest blogging.

Here are a couple of tips that might help your cause:

Proofread to Perfection:
Popular bloggers know the importance of being perfect and hence, they make sure there are no issues with the post prior to publishing. If you want to make the first impression and improve your chances of being well received, make sure you proof read your posts for typos, grammar, syntax, facts and flow of writing. You may have to do little extra effort, but it’s well worth it.

SEO Optimized Posts:
Popular bloggers don’t have the time to optimize your posts – so it leaves you with an opportunity to impress them by doing it at your end and saving them the pains. Use the keywords at proper places and make your posts SEO-friendly. Well-optimized posts bring as many benefits to their blogs as to your website.

SEO Optimized Images:
It’s a no-brainer that posts with relevant and innovative images attract more eyeballs. It is important to consider adding some images to your posts before you send them to the bloggers. Moreover, try optimizing the images with keywords to improve their SEO value and you are more likely to elicit an entrancing response from the bloggers. But, make sure your images are not copyrighted as it might create unwanted issues for your blogger. Worse, you might lose your credibility in stead of gaining it.

Right Format:
Popular bloggers are rather busy writing stuff and hard-pressed for time. Do them a favor by sending your guest posts in a format that help them to post quickly. You may ask them about the proper formatting of your text that might help them to post your blog entries without much hassle. For instance, you can format the headings and sub-headings using proper HTML tags. The bloggers will know that you care about their time and it will improve your chances of being well-received.

What more can you do to boost your chances of being published in your attempt to guest blogging? Any ideas?

Press Releases- A potential tool of online marketing, press release when written professionally and distributed across the press release sites, will get your site publicized around the world wide web in no time. Besides, it helps you get critical back links in the process. However, the best part is it helps you build your brand identity which is very important for your business in the long run.

Blogging- Blogging needs no explanation. An informative, innovating and thought-provoking post a day should be enough to keep the visitors and search engine spiders coming back to you every now and again. Don’t be in two minds, choose any WordPress theme, install plugins and enhance the experience of your visitors, enable them to share your thought with others, increase its clickability and let your blog be popular across the blogging and SEO communities.

Forum Posting- Be active on various forum sites, participate in various discussions, offer valuable answers to your fellow participants. Don’t just write a thread or two, create scores of them per day. Share your views with others like crazy. Spend about 2 hours doing forum posting across various popular forum sites and you should be reaping the dividend for such efforts pretty darn soon.

Writing and posting one blog entry every two days should be good. Experts advise limiting blog entries to only 250 words. Apparently, blogging may sound easy but in reality, it’s too difficult unless you have something worthwhile to share with others. Clearly, you shouldn’t blog just for the heck of it- it doesn’t serve the purpose of blogging which is to inform, educate your readers. So, how do busy businesspeople manage and maintain their weblogs? Usually, they hire the services of professional blog content writers. Hiring professional bloggers take the responsibility off your shoulder as you get them to write and manage your posts at regular interval.

There is an alternative to hiring blogging professionals for maintaining your blog. You can spend about half an hour on various popular forum sites every day, participate in the discussions related to search engine optimization, and other relevant topics. Generating ideas for blog writing is necessary. However, given that you’re busy, allocating more than two hours a day to read other bloggers is a tough ask. Participating in forums not only helps you create useful back links, but also help you acquire critical knowledge on the basis of which you can write insightful, informative and relevant information for your audience. This, by far, has been helping me to come up with ideas. You can try and let me know if it works for you too.

Since the prime objective of blogging is to engage your audience in informative and useful discussions through your blog, it is natural for many bloggers to link their blogs to their social networking profiles in order to facilitate an enhanced interaction with their prospects. As a result, we can find bloggers incorporating social media profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Digg into their blogs. On the other hand, social media networking platforms such as Facebook facilitates interactive participation at a significant level by allowing bloggers to post links on their social media networking profiles.

Taking a deeper look into the popularity and practicality of blogging, it can be effectively used as a feasible technique of social media optimization. It gives you the opportunity to show your prowess in particular sphere, opens up the doors for networking and can be a great way of search engine optimization. Today, blogging is not only a tool to connect with your customers, but also a networking technique to connect other people in your field.

Recently, there are a lot of discussions going on about social media networking that has evolved as a weapon for online marketers to keep in touch with their prospects. If you want to create a powerhouse of your business, you should interact with other people in your industry and in corresponding services. Connection with people can also open the possibility of friendship, client referrals and others. As the weblogs are great social arena, they can capture the responses of the customers about your products or services.

Hence, blogging and social media networking are two sides of the same coin.

Patience is the virtue
It takes time to be successful in any sector and blogging is no different. There is no shortcut to make it big overnight, hence, patience plays an important role here.

Be proud of your blog
If many people don’t visit your blogs, that doesn’t mean yours is not good. You have just started, so give yourself some time and be confident of your blog content writing skill.

Polish your writing skills
Improvise your writing skill and for that, you need to read a lot. Read inspiring good articles or even follow other successful bloggers posts.

Don’t consider blogging as a mere job
If you are passionate about blogging, the result will definitely show in your writings. Hence, never treat it as any other job or never write only for money, else the end result will be a monotonous blog.

I hope these tips will help you tackle the blogging burnout menace to some extent. So wish you a happy blogging expedition!