26 Dec 11 Avoid These Killer Marketing Mistakes - How to Set Up Your Blog For Maximum Profit

Who else is in the process of setting up their first blog? If you are....congratulations! It's a big step, and if you had any real ambition of making money online going forward, or simply building up a business presence at all, a blog is an absolutely mandatory platform for making it happen. Why? Because not only do search engines LOVE blogs from a ranking standpoint, they're interactive, engaging, personal, transparent and PHENOMENAL bonding agents between you and your audience or customer base.

But LOTS of people make pretty big mistakes when they set UP their blogs, and this includes lots of folks who simply want a creative outlet to express their artistic emotions..:-) I'm going to focus mostly on business blogging below, but rest assured, for the most part...these very same tips are super important for ANY type of blog at all that you truly care about going forward.

Filed Under: Pick the Proper Hosting Set Up Straight Out of the Gate

Do NOT use a free service or sub domain like blogger, or the free version of Wordpress. (where they host it for you) Why? Because you give up complete control. It's not on YOUR host. You are severely limited in what you can do to scale UP your site, and you most likely won't have FTP or server access as well. Don't worry if this stuff sounds complicated...it's NOT, and all you really need to know is that while most blogging platforms are free, you SHOULD pay for hosting when you get set up. (it's super cheap, and very worthwhile, especially if you plan on maintaining an active and popular site)

Filed Under: The Subscriber Sin

To put this succinctly, your focus should be in building an OPT in list, and NOT an RSS subscriber list. You want a traditional, direct response style list of people who have signed up to be contacted when you have something valuable to say, add or offer. An RSS subscriber count is often sort of an ego thing....and does NOT translate into real dollars for most bloggers. (unless you are very popular and have tremendous followers and loyalty, which most of us, even those of us with pretty popular blogs, can't really say)

The bottom line is this.....

How you set up your site from jump is super important. The content you can add over time. Your writing will improve. The "fans" will come. But if you set things up wrong on the strategic side, you WILL regret it, I promise. (trust me...I've been there, MORE than once!)