Starting a new blog should be a very well documented decision because it’s not like `95 when you had your online store released and traffic was starting right that moment. Now you need take good care of content, commentators, search engines and a few others. I am trying to summarize a few of these mistakes below.

1. Write for your audience not for the search engines. Usually your visitors can tell if the article was well researched or if it’s just a bunch of keywords to trick the crawlers that come to index your site.

2. Listen to the comments and assume the mistakes is what you should do in case you have presented something badly. I am a gadgeter, writing for my own tech/gadget blog so I know that if you don’t research well your articles, mistakes can slip inside. If any of your commentators highlights this to you, apologize and update, don’t delete their comments even if they use a sarcastic tone.

3. Infrequent article posting will make your most devoted readers to go away if they won’t find anything new to read for a few weeks. Also check your grammar (if you are a guru you don’t have to:)).

4. No black hat SEO because you may get banned from the search engines.

5. Excessive ads is something no one appreciates when visiting a page. So when you add Adsense or any kind of other advertisements make sure they are blended in (in accordance with your blog’s design)

6. Unclear topics/titles is a way of confusing your readers. Pick a topic and stick to it otherwise many will think you don’t know what you are talking about and you will lose a possible reader. I know I said you should have a posting frequency (I will try to do it daily or a few times a day) but if you don’t have a clear, proofread story don’t rush one just to get content. Research well.

7. Steal other people’s content. This one may get you in trouble, because you didn’t even read mistake 1. If content’s owner feels like sueing you for stealing the content you won’t be a happy camper for sure. Again you lose your readership.

8. Blog theme stress testing. Ask anyone you know if you have any errors on your website. Go to every possible link on your website by using all the browsers you know, to be sure you’re error-free.

9. Try to be unique. If you will try to be just like everyone else and use other stories for your own, you’re not brining any new stuff. I know you cannot reinvent the wheel but this is not what people expect from you. Present your articles with personal pertinent thoughts. This is what your readers will appreciate: your opinions.

10. Don’t expect to make money from the start. A blog needs to grow in time. It will take lots of efforts and time to get it to the state of earning you money, but if you are committed  it will come.

For those of you that didn’t knew there is one blog released every second, according to Technorati. Not even 1% of these blogs will get lots of exposure and that is because not everyone is interested in marketing their blog or making money out of it or because the owner cannot market it the right way. Below you will find a few hints that you should try to follow.

Become an expert in your niche and write passionately

If you have nothing to do with medical activities you shouldn’t start blogging about brain surgery because you’re not good at it. Blogging should be something made with passion, something that you are good at so this is why you should choose your niche wisely and when you do, focus on it. If your articles are well structured other bloggers or sites will link to you, so that you may become authority.

Lots of people say that content is king and you should keep that in mind, in the quest for more traffic, because neglecting your writing could affect your blog. Here is a small tip : make your own researches and post answers to questions that people may be interested in. How to do that? Keep a close relation to what comments you get and inspire your next articles from what they need to know.

Make sure you are SEO friendly

SEO is very wide and changes day by day, but if you are going to follow a few simple rules the search engine bots should love your content. Change link structure to permalinks, use unique titles and highlight keywords that you emphasize on, host your own blog software, use SEO friendly blog themes and plugins. Make sure your ping and trackback really work and use them, and comment on other blogs both for exposure and for a linkback.

Blog themes should be relevant to your articles

Blog looks are very important when it’s about people coming back to read more of your content, because if everything is messy you are going to look un-professional, but if you have a clean theme (try unique) it counts very much for a first impression to become worthy reading. If you don’t have the money to spend for a custom theme, there’s no problem, go ahead and download one from the internet, but make sure you customize and tweak it wisely. Make sure you use related images for your theme or for your articles because that way you get attention.

Guest blogging will make you draw attention

Michael Kwan of Beyond the Rethoric is a very good example of guest blogging. He started commenting on JohnChow.com like hell and got the attention he wanted. Then he became a guest blogger on JohnChow.com and from this to getting a job as a blogger on one of John’s websites related to gadgets was just a matter of time. His experience on different technology blogs like mobilemag.com also helped.

Of course this may not work for you (commenting like hell), because it could get you in the spam filters or banned from a website, but keep in mind that guest blogging brings power, brings exposure and makes you a trusted person in that domain.

Make sure you subscribe to feeds and publish them full

Your articles is what make people subscribe to your blog’s feed and if you already been through the installation process adding a feed via FeedBurner is not going to be hard at all. Keep in mind that subscribers don’t usually unsubscribe so if you got one, you can count on another visitor (daily or not).

For those that will tell me using full feeds is not good because you get those black hatters to scrape and steal your content I have a reason telling you to do so. Usually when people see more text (not just the 4 lines) they get much more interest and want to read it from the source, directly on the site. If you add they everyone in the world is usually annoyed by a “read more” link, you have my case on why blogs should have full feeds.

Your content is great but you need linking

Remember I told you that the ping and trackback service should be working? Well you should understand that trackbacking other blogs is great, because they may write about you and give a link back, or they may accept a trackback in their comments which is also a potential source of traffic.

These are just a few things that you should consider when launching a new blog. Hope it helps and I am going to give a new answer regarding promoting on social bookmarking websites in a short time.

Hi. My name is Alex Ion and after being involved in making money online for the last 8 years (was 16 when I began) I think it’s time for me to start my own blog to give others ideas on how to start. I remember I was reading lots of places back then to get what I was interested in, and I would have appreciated so much a blog to summarize it up so that I don’t lose so much time.

I am not starting this blog as a guru, because I am not (no matter how much I make online) but to get my ideas written here and of course to learn more, because sometime it’s the users that teach you stuff.

All these being said, I declare it official that SocialPacks.com is my blog (Alex Ion) and it’s now live!