Charles Lau dot Com

When I was working with this blog, I didn’t really start with a plan.  I thought I have to experience through the blog experience myself before I move on into the real game.  Many people would always say this “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” I must really thank some of the ebooks that surfaced along my blogging career.  They came really useful for me to understand what blogging is about, and to plan some of the things to get everything up and running.

1) Vision Planning
In just one sentence of less than 12 words, can you tell me what do you want to tell the world in your blog?  This is the vision of your blog that you will be working towards.  This is the niche about your blog that your readers are here to subscribe and to come back for more.  This is the reason your blog is growing.

2) Technical Planning
You have to choose your domain name branding, and your blogging platform.

The domain name you have chosen, whether it is a true dot com or a sub-domain of a blogging host, it may or may not matter depending on how you would want to brand your website into.  Having a sub-domain, you are actually branding yourself to be a personal home-based business.  Having a domain by yourself, you can always get to see how far you are capable of stretching it into.

The choice of your blogging platform is very important because it determines how much you can do with it.  Comparing the blogging platform of blogspot, wordpress, typepad, movable type, joomla, serendipity and many others.  Asking the bloggers which programs they have used.  Seeing some of the blogs which you want to mould yourself into, and understanding which program actually allows them to do such a blog appearance.

Even after you have chosen your blog, you might have to choose your hosting platform to get your blog started.  I would recommend you to go for hostmonster since it’s only $5.95 per month and it helps in your domain branding.  I personally using $6.95/mth bluehost currently.  But because both are under the same person managing this hosting business, I would recommend you to take the cheaper one for sure.  It’s easy to get the whole thing started! Probably just drop me a mail if you have any questions about it.

3) Content Planning
Blogging is more of a natural flowing contents, than to plan for the many contents ahead when you might have nothing to blog about at a much later dates… Hence, it’s good to keep blogging as a hobby and to maintain it frequently.  It’s good to plan for 1 to 2 posts a day.  You can also set your frequency postings on a weekly basis as well.

As you build your contents frequently, you will be forced to a stage of “no-contents-to-blog”… And that’s the next stage you are heading towards where you really don’t know what you don’t know!  Things that you don’t know, you should have covered it in your blog already… So are the things that you know… Now, the blog is challenging you for things that you don’t know which you don’t know at all…

4) Traffic Planning
As you build up your contents, you might want to do some planning to create more exposure to your own blog.  You can either ask for a video review from me, or ordering for a review-me from different bloggers, or to write more comments in other blogs, or aiming to be top commentators in other blogs, socializing around, socialbookmarking other blogs, buying advertisements, taking up search engines’ Pay-Per-Click campaigns, aiming yourself to be in the top blogs, linking to more bloggers, etc…

Traffic comes when you plug yourself with other bloggers.  Where the people are, that’s also where the money and the traffic are being built.  Socializing yourself is a must to get more traffic coming into your blog.  Your blog is like a real life entity by itself where it needs multiple sources of traffic to come in… Search engines, blogs, websites, advertisements, comments, etc…

5) Business Planning
Where the traffic is, that’s where the business comes into play.  You will have the authority in making decisions of taking in advertisements, taking in orders for reviews, selling products off your own blog as well.  There are two schools of thought when it comes to placing your advertisements.  Some placed their adsense ads right from the start of their blog while others only place it when their blog is ready.  Whichever way it is, this blog will still need some growth on its contents and strong loyal readers.

6) Blogging Beyond
As you blog further, you will always start to face problem such as nothing-to-blog, blog-alarm rang in your brain when you remember it’s time to blog, having to blog to keep the crowd happy.  A stable blogger tends to have a steady flow of traffic and probably some income as an incentive for motivation.  It needs some time for a blog to mature and to merge into the blogosphere…