As I’m often saying, more and more bloggers are coming online everyday. People are seeing what a dynamic way of earning it is, and how accessible it is for everyone. However, some people don’t get it quite right, and that’s because they’ve messed up right at the start!
To try and help these people, I’ve compiled a list of questions to ask yourself before you start your blog. Infact, these questions are also relevant if you’re about to start a new blog, so it should be useful for everyone!
The Questions
- Do you have it in you?
This is the most important question of them all. Blogging requires commitment and passion, and unless you can display this, you’ll never make it as a blogger.
- Are you able to do it?
Honestly, are you knowledgeable enough about blogging to run a blog? If not, I suggest you do some reading. For a start, read the articles here on Teenius about ‘blogging’!
- What’s your niche?
The niche (or topic) is crucial for your blog. The trick with this is to pick something you know about. That way, you can provide quality content for your readers.
- Who is your market?
If it’s cold, hard money you’re after, then you’ll need to treat your blog(s) like a business, and in doing so you need to decide who your market is. Remember to be specific!
- How will you market your site?
Once you know who your market is, you need to know how to access them. Blogussion wrote an awesome post ‘169 New Ways To Build Traffic Like A Ninja’, which you should find useful!
- What’s your budget?
It’s hard to write an explanation on this one as it purely depends on how high your budget is, but remember that you have to put stuff in to get stuff out!
- What will your domain be?
The domain is a very important part of your brand, so it’s important you pick the right domain. The post I just linked to has some awesome tips.
- What are your hosting requirements?
If you’re going to be starting a blog, you’ll need hosting. Before you buy a package, you need to decide what your needs are, but when you’ve decided, I recommend HostGator.
- Will you be able to provide quality content?
Another crucially important question to ask yourself. Quality content is what makes blogs successful, as I’ve written in my recent post, can you provide it for your readers?
- What are your goals?
Finally, what are your goals? Setting goals is really important as it helps you to stay focused to your cause.
Any more?
This is just a really brief guide which, in my opinion, contains the most important questions to ask yourself, but if you feel I’ve missed anything off, or would like to make yourself heard, please feel free to leave a comment!
Thanks for this great post and for commenting on my blog also. These questions are great when you first are introduced to blogging.
Glad you enjoyed the article and, as for the comment, it’s no problem at all!
Do you have the time?
Many bloggers start a blog and then don’t have enough time to really make it successful!
I am running my blog as well as studying my final year of my degree and a part time job!
It is hard but I really enjoy it!
True, but I suppose that comes under the ‘do you have it in you’ point. But, yeah, it’s still a good point, and well done for balancing so many tasks!
Great list – I wish I had this to work from when I started out 18 months ago. The one thing I wish I could go back and change is how I set my permalinks to include the dates. I would love to change it.
Personally I don’t like dates in permalinks; I think either ‘/category/post-name/’ or ‘/post-name/’ are best. That way, if people see the URL on a search engine, they don’t think ‘oh, that post is really out-dated’.
Thanks for the comment, and I’m glad you enjoyed the article!
One more point i would like to include is your ‘patience’. When u dont see enough money and traffic for a long then u’ll loose ur patience and quit blogging. This is the reason why many bloggers quit blogging within 6 months of blogging.
You are wright Ricky
. Patience is very much required for every bloggers whoever it may be 
Setting Goals also has some steps :
Firstly we have to set short term goals later through which we can achieve our main goal
Currently my short time goal is to get 10 comments each week and 500 visits per day.
Thanks for these question Simon
Stay in touch
Very true. After all, as all the big bloggers say, it takes time to create a successful blog… you can’t expect it to just happen overnight!
The last one is really important to me as you can not set up a blog when you have ideas for it then when ideas are gone, the blog die. So, the long term goal is really important to any blogs
I agree, you must have a goal in mind, or at least, something to aim for. The rest, I think there are still okay.
If you know what you are doing, going for what you are doing and work on it, I believe you can be successful as well, as you have created what you had in mind
Touching sentiment there, Zack!
I do agree that a big part of being successful is in the mind!
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by PFIncome: Reading: “10 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Starting A Blog” (http://twitthis.com/2gd3db)…
These questions surely make new blogger already know what and how their blog.
Just be yourself and don’t try to pretend to be someone else…
Also a very good point! Being yourself in blogging is really important, as when you write your own posts you should try and inject personality in them, and it’s incredibly hard to try and make up a different personality!
Great list. If everyone asked themselves these questions, I’d bet we’d have half the blogs out there.
Probably, but then at the same time the blogs that were left would hopefully be of a much higher quality on average than the current average!
Well, to be fair to those who didn’t ask these questions to themselves, you can always make up for it by just using one principle – dedication.
Great article here Simon
Good point; dedication is crucially important, and probably is the most important thing, although knowledge is also very close!
These are fantastic questions to ask yourself. If I’m honest, there’s no way I asked myself all these questions before I started blogging. Thankfully you come to be a little more strict with yourself after a while.But obviously there are so many people who just give up on blogging after a couple of months.
I must admit, I didn’t ask myself these questions when I started Teenius. I got an idea of what I wanted and tried to create it, didn’t really think about anything else if I’m honest. However, on my new sites I’m trying to ask the above questions. Even for an experienced blogger, they’re still invaluable
What blogging platform you should choose? Who are your competitor? can be added. The overall article is excellent and very useful for new comer.
Two more great questions, thanks for the comment!
Thanks for the compliment, too!
[...] in a new post that relates to an old post, link to it. For example, in my recent article called ’10 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Starting A Blog’, I linked out to two different posts, and also to a category page. It’s incredibly easy to do [...]
I think the most important question should be how determined one actually is, getting traffic is not easy, new blogs don’t even make pennies, so before starting a blog one must be prepared to put in hard work with out seeing great results upfront,
Thanks for the very interesting post. I’ve already started my blog, but I can still ask myself some of these questions.
actually there were many more questions added on those mentioned by you, lol
and yea once blog started, slowly the time schedule got tighten and became busy with many other stuffs as well. But still i enjoy blogging and it feels refreshment when we get visitors comments as appreciation… right ?