Welcome to Part One of my series of posts that will be covering the topic of how to set up your own blog. A lot of readers have come to me asking basically “how did you do this?“… and I believe it is time to get you up to pace.

Creating a website or blog is one of the more daunting tasks if you do not know what you are doing, but let’s put this into perspective. Although ultimately nobody can verify this, it is estimated that there are over 20 billion websites on the internet today. That’s a lot of webmasters, eh? Making your own website is one of the easier things to do, it just takes a little elbow grease to put the wheels in motion.

Before You Start
A lot of people don’t understand that websites cost money to build and maintain. Don’t waste your time with free hosting and free “sub-domains” (e.g. “mysite.yoursite.com”), because almost nobody gets noticed without a little investment. Knowing this, you can expect to pay $8/year for your “.com” domain name. That’s pretty affordable! Web hosting is going to be your biggest expense. You can find free web hosts if you want to live on the edge a bit before you start to see some serious traffic and revenue come in. Once you make the switch over to paid hosting for better service, you should expect to be paying anywhere from $4-to-$10 every month.

With these two costs in mind, that’s an average spending of $80 every year for your blog, not a very large investment considering the return you will soon be getting every month. Too expensive? Well if you use free web hosting, which we will explore in Part 2, you could get out of this for as little as $6 a year… not bad!

Pick Your Type of Blog
In the blogging world, of the “blogosphere” as many will call it, there are going to be two types of blogs: for-profit and non-profit. Some will tell you that a for-profit blog is “selling out” or what have you… this is complete bull. The Net Fool dot com is a for-profit blog, but guess what… I care about what I write about, so this should be entirely irrelevant! Even if you aren’t solely in it for the money, if money is a part of it… you are a for-profit blog. Nothing against either side, it’s just important to have that mindset in place before you start.

Put On Your Thinking Cap!
Whether or not you are planning to make money on your blog, it is going to be important that you find a “niche,” or some kind of small and unique market of focus, for your blog. Why? Well having a competitive niche will get you the traffic that you need, and having traffic should be just as important whether or not you are making money.

So what’s this about “niche” topics for your blog? As much as it shouldn’t drive what your blog is about, you won’t want to author a blog about something that everyone else is already writing about. In effect, you want a focus area that isn’t saturated, so that you can get the exposure and the traffic that you crave.

You don’t need to be so specific yet, just something to separate you from the pack! For example, when I started The Net Fool, I had a very saturated market in the “make money online” category… so I decided to spin things toward a business blog. Now I don’t just have that plain old make money online blog, I have something unique that people will consider different and special. I’ve got the “young blogger” market, I’ve got the “stock market” slant, and yet I’ve got my primary roots in making money. This is something that makes The Net Fool unique, and is also something that gets me traffic and RSS subscribers. So before you start, make sure you have something special to get noticed from the get-go.

Tying It All Together - Focusing Your Focus
Assuming that after hearing about the costs of owning a blog and the market saturation issue you still want to create your own blog, let’s tie things together. What we want now, is a focused blog. It’s one thing to have a blog about “golf,” but you’d be much better off with a blog about “golf clubs.” You could write a blog about “baseball,” but you’d get a much better audience if you chose to write about “NY Yankees baseball.” Get where I’m coming from? You shouldn’t be generalizing if you are making a new blog and looking to see results fast. A more exact focus, or “focused focus,” can really boost your exposure.

Bottom Line: Having the ambition to decide on creating a blog is great, but are you willing to put in the time and money investment to make it happen? You should expect to pay anywhere from $5 to $100 cash for a good blog, and you’ll want to get focused on what you want to blog about before you start. Don’t try to do too much at once. It is much better to start with a focused niche and gradually expand outward than trying to do everything at once.

-The Net Fool

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!