The First Three Steps in Starting a Blog

You want to start a blog and so what do you do? This is assuming have already wrestled whether this is the right thing and the right timing. You are ready for the commitment and you are confident you are read (or as ready as you will ever be).

What are your first steps?

1. Choose your topic. The key is to be broad enough that you can sustain ongoing blog posts but narrow enough that you will be able to target a specific audience. So human existence might be too broad but best transmissions for Lada cars might be too narrow. It is possible that your topic may broaden, narrow or even shift as you go, but you have to start something. The best way to know if you are going in the right direction is to grab a piece a paper and try to come up with the titles of twenty blog posts on your topic.
2. Choose your domain name. You need to be very careful with this. This is the only one of the three initial steps that you can’t (at least easily) change. It has to be something that people can remember. It would not be a good idea to just smash the keyboard and add a dot com. Also, you might not (or you might) want to go with the narrowest aspect of your topic. You may want to leave some room for adjustment of your topic as you go. You can (as I have) go with your name, which allows you to change your topic in any way you want. But this is problematic if you want to sell your site at a later date.
3. Choose you blog name. This can be, but doesn’t have to be, the same as your domain name. There are benefits to having the same as it makes things easier for people looking for your topic. But you can also change the name as you go. Try to come up with something that tells potential readers what you are writing about, especially as you start out. So I recently started a blog called The Jesus Myth Theory . It is about the Jesus Myth Theory. While you may not know what that is, people who are looking for that information will.

There is more to blogging than just this, but these are definitely your first three steps.

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