In the first part of this series, I talked about the importance of selecting a niche before to start your own blog, in addition to some tips to do it successfully.

After that important step, many people are not sure about what they should do next. Some of them, start looking for the hosting and others for a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) agent to help them with their blog’s configuration… I recommend you to plan some strategies after selecting a niche, this way, you will know what to do next.

2. Plan Strategies

What for? Well, I recommend you to investigate and create a list of things which you can use when you start your blog to attract traffic to it. As you may know, traffic is the most important thing in this business. You can have a great blog with many rich content, but if you don’t have readers to enjoy that content you are wasting your time.

To attract traffic to your blog, there are a lot of strategies that you can implement. The following one is a list of things which you can do to attract readers to your blog… All them are common but effective, and may be they could be obvious if you are familiarized with blogging:

• Sponsor a Contest: In your blog or in another one, if you sponsor a blog contest where you give away banners or reviews, you will attract many bloggers to see your stuff. Remember that people love to get things for free. I highly recommend you to try to find a contest held by good bloggers and try to take part in by sponsoring something in their contest. This way, you will get a good part of the traffic they get, which could be a lot.
• Offer an Ebook: Offering an ebook to your readers could be a great idea to attract more visitors to your blog. The problem here is that you will need to write and to review it first before the launching of your blog. However, it is a good way to get more visitors or subscribers.
• Buy Advertising: Buying advertising in other blogs related to your niche could be a way to get more visitors. Banners of 125×125 pixels, text links or reviews are the most common ways of advertising, and something you need to know is where to advertise on. It’s better to advertise in a few expensive blogs or in a lot of cheap blogs? The decision is up to you, but be sure not to waste your money. Remember, if you are going to advertise on a blog, you need to be offering something to the people driven through the banner or textlink.
• Plan Your Business: Some months ago, I wrote a review about an internet marketer who created a blog to sell keywords. His system is pretty cool, very ordered and well designed. Obviously, he planned his business before the launching, something you need to do if you want to be successful. Think well about what do you want to provide to the people who visit your blog and develop that idea.

Besides these, there are some other things which you need to plan and configure, such the keywords of your blog, the description and the logo, but they will be studied in the next chapter of this series.

To conclude, the second phase of building a business through blogs is about planning everything you will do in a future, to buzz your blog. May be the first weeks of your business could be discouraging but you don’t have to worry about it, many bloggers expect something bigger in their beginning.