Personally I have never written much, english was not one of my best subjects in school, and I didn't really see myself as a writer.



About 2 years ago i started my own journal, where I started to record my thoughts, my progress, my ideas and everything I wanted to make an observation about.It wasn't until about 3 months ago, when I discovered squidoo, that I realised how much fun it is to create and share your experiences and wisdom with the world.

You don't have to have a degree in anything or be an expert about something, you write about what you enjoy doing. Maybe it's watching movies, maybe you've been doing a martial art or playing an instrument since you were 5, maybe you have gone through a trauma and want to share how to deal with it.
It will take time to build up a reader base, but if you are passionate about what you write about, and it's interesting and expressive, then you can get hundreds of people following your posts, becoming your fans and friends and a whole new world can open up to you:)

You can even make something out of it, a lot actually, if you throw something in your post that you are writing about.
What I am talking about is affiliate marketing, adding a link to promote selling a product which you will get a comission for, or even selling your own product.

For more about affiliate marketing click here!

There are lots of free sites out there where you can open your own blog.

www.blogger.com is probably the most popular one.

However, when you do something, you may as well do it right.

Its like having a premises, its way better to buy than to rent if you can afford it right?

So although a blog account with another site is free, it is not totally yours, and you can't do what you want with it in terms of layout and advertising. For me freedom is important!

So what you want to do is buy your own domain.

I know this may be a big step for you, especially since you may know nothing about the internet, and I was faced with the same thing, but Ive gone out and done it, and am posting on my site a few times a week!

Think about your blog, what are your main topics going to be, what do you like writing about, what do you want to share with the world.

The domain title should be something that is relevant to you, to your style and posts.

Mine for example is all about personal development and life in general, and I chose the name www.upgradereality.com because I believe people can achieve much more than what they limit themselves to!

Bluehost is one of the cheapest web site hosting services on the net.

It allows you to check if the url(www. whatever .com) is available and then you can register it to your name.

6.95$ a month and this includes a free domain and set-up!



You can go down the route of HTML coding your own website in notepad, but for it to turn out nicely you really have to know what youre doing.

If you have experience with Dreamweaver of MS Frontpage and you can come up with a good design, by all means do that.

Otherwise I stongly suggest getting a program called Wordpress, it is a blogging platform that you upload to your server, you can choose out of many themes and then your blog is ready to go and looks really professional.

This is what wordpress would look like installed on your server

Now that you have a blog, you must decide on your main theme and adjust my tips according to your purpose of the blog.

Do you want to write for yourself as a journal, do you want to entertain an audience,do you want to give advice and help people or do you want to market and sell things?

1 - Google adsense, depending where you want to place it, can bring extra revenue. It is targeted ads that google chooses related to the content on your page, and when viewers click on an ad, you get paid between 1-20c. Easy isnt it...!
What you want to keep in mind, if people are really interested in the ad and they click on it, they will leave your page and go to someone elses!

2 - I advise a "Recommended section" where you display products that you hold up high and want other people to benefit from too, like really inpirational books, movies or a cool gadget. Put it in your sidebar.

3 - Wordpress comes build in with a standard RSS feed subscription. In case you do not know what this means, RSS is a way of letting readers subscribe to your blog so that when you create a new post, the subscriber is automatically notified.
Once someone is dedicated and signs up to your site, you are starting to build a fanbase.
What you want to add to your blog is another feed service like Feed Burner that allows you to see how many subscibers you have.
(just for statistics purposes)

1 - Decide on a domain name
eg : www.upgradereality.com

2 - Go to Bluehost and register your domain name and sign up for the hosting service @ 6.95$ a month

3 - Go to the Wordpress site and download Wordpress to your server

4 - Start Blogging

5 - Set up a "Reccomended section"

6 - Add Google Adsense

7 - Display a few favourite products in your sidebar