In my previous post I gave you 5 Reasons to Start a Blog, so if you now have a reason to start your blog well I am now going to give you some follow-up tips on things you should do before you start a blog.

Before you start anything you first have to do some preparation if you want your task set ahead of you to go well. It’s just the same with blogging. You don’t want to make any mistakes while blogging because it can be really frustrating at times.

So, here are 8 things that you should do before your start you blogging.

Things To Do Before Blogging

This is the first rule/ thing you should do before you start blogging and that is choosing your blog’s niche/ topic. It is very important that you choose a topic to blog about that you are passionate about which you can always have something to blog about.

If you choose a blog topic that you have no interest in and you know little or nothing about this topic then you have failed at starting a blog. Choosing the right topic to blog about often depends on how successful your blog will be.

Your domain name would be your own .com, .net, .org or whatever you choose. It is also wise to choose a domain name pertaining to your blog’s niche/ topic.

For example, if you want to blog about health tips then you would want to buy a domain name with the word health in it. If your name was John, your domain name could be johnshealthtips.com and this will give your visitors an idea of what your blog is about.

I use DynaDot.com to purchase my domain, it only cost me $10.00 per year. So I would recommend you get your domain there as well.

Hosting is another important factor for you to choose for your blog and the place you choose to host your blog should be important as well.

I use Hostgator.com because it is really affordable. $4.95 a month is really cheap to host your blog and you get great service with HostGator.

After you have install your blog on your hosting, it’s now time for you to choose a theme. There are lots of theme to use on your blog. The theme that this blog use is Thesis Theme which is really easy to customize to your liking. So I would strongly recommend Thesis as well because it has great SEO features and it is user-friendly for both you and whoever visits your blog.

If you want to get some traffic to your blog from search engines then you have to change your permalinks to SEO friendly links.

The default permalink is something like this webmaster-success.com/?p=387

SEO friendly links looks something like this webmaster-success.com/what-to-do-after-installing-wordpress

This is how you change it.

1. Go to Settings > Permalinks
2. Under ‘Common settings’ choose ‘Custom Structure’
3. Enter %postname%/ in the field
4. Or if you prefer to have the category in the url as well, enter %category%/%postname%/

In order to get your blog off to a very great start there are some plugins that you must install for you to be successful at blogging. I have a list of my favorite 18 plugins.

Be sure to install the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.

FeedBurner, powered by Google, is one of the best way to track your rss subscribers and use it to publish your blog’s feed.

Google is the #1 site world-wide, it is the best search engine and everybody uses it. So wouldn’t you want to be listed in this search engine? Yes you would.

After making your site map, you want to go to Google Webmaster Tools and submit your site map there so that your articles get indexed on Google. Also Add your URL to Google can help you to get in Google Search Engine much faster.

In Conclusion…

I hope these tips have helped you new bloggers who wanted to start their very own blog. Have fun blogging 🙂