On Your Mark, Get Set, Go!
First thing you should do before setting up a blog is doing your homework. Learn from others mistakes by researching in internet. Make their mistakes your benefit to a safer voyage. Then search online for a reliable web host. Do not rely on the offered bandwidth but make main requisite the host's reliability. Use an online website speed test(webtool.com) as you do not want your site to end up taking ages to load.
Next step is choosing a good domain name. Your domain name should be easy to remember, easy to type, short as possible and most importantly should be able to attract key word hits.
Do not fall for free domain name registration of web hosting plans. Instead register your name with a reliable registrar (eNom or GoDaddy ) to evade worthless problems in case if you wish to change your web host.
You should update your ping list quite often. Ping services allow you to notify the search engines and blog directories when your blog is updated. More ping services you have, more traffic you will attract. Choose a professional theme when selecting your blog template and remove unnecessary information from your blog. As readers have a short attention span they tend to stick to relevant information only.
Using blog automation software has been proven as quite useful (www.blogwarriorelite.com ). These will give you more time to do other activities as this software will automate the updating frequency in your blog.
Next step should be optimizing your €About€ page. When doing so insert some functional links on that page such as your €advertise' page or your €contact€ page. Or including a link to the archives or your popular article can be useful too. Installing plug-ins can be very useful when blogging. The following list includes plug-ins that are the most popular among bloggers (Akismet, WordPress Database Backup, Subscribe to Comments but leave it unchecked, Chunk URLs, Related Entries, Custom Query String, Jerome's Keywords, sig2feed)
At the end you can include search engine optimization and analytics to make sure your blog attract traffic.