PureBlogging

Photo credit: Paul Wicks

This is one big list of thirty steps you can follow when starting a new blog. I’ve started many blogs of my own and helped my blog coaching clients do the same, so that I’ve developed a general roadmap that I use. It starts all the way at the beginning by asking the right questions on why you want to start a new blog–it assumes you don’t have a blog topic or niche, yet. The steps are general, otherwise this would be one crazy-long post. If you’re considering starting a new blog, I hope you find it useful. It’s so easy to get lost in the details that we forget to take a step back and look at the overall process. I’ve designed this to help you see that process.

This is designed with business blogs in mind, but can be adapted for any type of blog. For example, a blog meant to be monetized with advertising may not start its own ad campaign, but would instead need to configure ad publisher accounts and WordPress plugins early on in the process. I’m really much more of a business blog kind of guy, so I’m running with my strengths, here.

1. Answer the question: Why do you want to blog?
2. Answer the question: What are your interests, hobbies, passions?
3. Answer the question: What are your areas of expertise, experience, and training?
4. Perform blog topic research: Existing blogs in your niche and keyword/domain research
5. Choose your blog niche
6. Establish long-term master goals
7. Determine blog categories
8. Determine page topics, if any
9. Choose a blogging platform
10. Install/create and perform basic configuration of the blog
11. Set up an email list
12. Set up a welcome/coming soon page with email sign up for future notification
13. Begin networking efforts and relationship building
14. Begin planning launch advertising campaign
15. Decide on single or team blog
16. Begin developing core content and write initial posts
17. Determine comment policy
18. Decide what features (via plugins or widgets) you want for the blog and implement them
19. Decide on the look and branding you want for the blog
20. Acquire a design (notice how late this comes in the process, because you want your design to reflect and enhance the content and features)
21. If necessary, modify the design to fit with features/plugins and to give it the look you want
22. Set up web analytics package
23. “Soft” launch by lifting the welcome page and allowing the blog to be seen
24. Work out any immediate visible issues with design/features
25. Claim the blog at Technorati
26. Begin adding blog to blog directories
27. Engage in prolific commenting on other relevant blogs
28. If possible, begin advertising campaign
29. Notify your network and email subscribers: try to get them to help you spread the word through email and social networks/bookmarking
30. Publish prewritten content as much as possible so you can focus on networking/submitting/relationship-building

We all have our own “startup style” so what works for me may not work well for you. Any additions or suggestions to the list are welcome in the comments below.