The first step to starting a blog of your own is to determine the type of information you would like to convey to the world. I know, this sounds like daunting task but, if you take it one step at a time, it is not that hard. Take a look at your interest and activities in your daily life. What are you good at? What do your friends and family come to you for help with? The answer to these two questions is the perfect subject matter to share with the world.

Second, determine the type of audience you want to reach. There are normally three types of blogs. The first one covers any topic that happens to interest the writer at the time of the post. This type of blog general works well for friends and family but makes it hard for others to find because your blog won’t have a high rank on any of the search engines. This is because your blog is not authoritative on any single subject. The second type of blog only focuses on one very narrow subject. This type of blog suits writing about a single theme or topic. The advantage of this type of blog is, over time, it’s page rank in the search engines will rise, making it easier for others to find. The down side is its hard to stay motivated to write about one, very narrowly defined, subject for long and the quality of your post might begin to fall off leading to fewer and fewer return visits. The third type is a variation of the second. Instead of focusing on a single narrow topic, mix it up with a few articles that are outside of your main topic but are not necessarily unrelated. You could also take a higher view of the subject matter. For instance, if you are writing about apple computers, move up the chain and include all news that is apple related.

Third, you need to actually setup your blog on the web. At first I would suggest wordpress. WordPress has it’s own free hosting service, a large number of custom options to play with, and can be moved to a dedicated host and domain if you really get into blogging.

At this point I think it is more important to start blogging and see if you can make it a habit then it is to make all the correct choices to the steps above. At first no one except the people you tell will actually see your blog so there is plenty of time to make changes. Don’t be afraid to try a number of different ideas for your blog. If you make it through the first month then you can go back and re-evaluate your choices and make any necessary changes.

If you made it this far then return to learn how to setup a dedicated host for your blog and how to monetize it.