So you have the perfect idea for your new blog. A Shopping Guide Blog, a Fitness Blog for busy mothers, or a blog on planning a trip to Disney World. Whatever your Blog idea is, if no is visiting or finding your brand new fancy blog, then all the hard work you put into it won’t make a difference.  You need to know how to setup your blog properly to maximize all your efforts.

So for our example were going to make a blog on planning a trip to Disney World. So let’s say you’ve been to Disney World every year since you were 7 years old and you know everything their is to know about planning a trip to Disney World. Planning a trip to Disney World is not easy for any first timer. So you want to use your acquired knowledge and experience to help others plan and get the most out of their first trip to this magical place.

The goal here is to create your blog with extremely helpful content, tips and information about planning a trip to Disney World. Just like you, whenever you are searching for something online, trying to research and get more information about a specific topic, you want a site that answers all your questions and more. That’s what we want. To become the authoritative site for your topic or niche. The only way to accomplish this is by creating killer content and people will start visiting your blog and referring your blog to family and friends and then soon enough everyone will be visiting your blog whenever someone wants tips for Disney World. After some time and doing proper SEO you’ll hopefully find your blog on page 1 of Google when people search for “Disney World Tips”. Eventually you start getting a lot of traffic to your blog, by traffic I mean visitors coming to your blog. At this point you can then monetize all this new traffic several ways. Example: Paid Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Referrals / Lead Generation, Adsense to sponsorship. For now lets focus on getting your blog up and running the correct way right off the bat.

First thing you need to do is get the proper domain name for your new blog. You need to choose the right domain name so people who are searching for something in the search engines find your blog and know what your blog is all about. Secondly by choosing the right domain name, it will also help you rank better in the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to help you get on the first page of Google so everyone will find your blog.

So how do you choose the right domain that best matches your topic or niche. This is where we do a little keyword research using a free tool by Google called: Google Keyword Tool

There are other Keyword Tools that cost money that have more features but the free Google Keyword Tool is more them enough to get you started. If you are interested in investing in a more advanced keyword research tool, I personally use a tool called Market Samurai.
Like I said before, the Google Keyword Tool is suffice for what we are trying to do.

So go to the Google Keyword Tool and type in your main keyword, in the Word or Phrase box. Expand Advanced Options and Filters and choose All countries because we want to filter what all countries all searching for not just the United States. Type in the captcha in the field below (a capthca is used to verify the response is generated by a person) Now click the Search button.

Now you will see a list of Keywords people are searching for, the competition of the keyword, the Global Monthly Search Volume and Local Monthly Search Volume. What we want to do is narrow down the find the best keyword that relates to your topic or niche which has a high Global Monthly Searches volume. These are how many people are searching for this keyword in Google every single month.

After we’ve did a search for Disney World we see that the global monthly search volume is pretty high at 6,120,000 but this is to generic and we want to be more specific on what people are searching for. In our example we want to provide Disney World Tips, so in the Word or Phrase box below our original keyword type in Disney World Tips and click the search button again. So now we see the monthly search amount drop to 22,000, which is still considerably a high search volume and the perfect keyword for our new domain name.

 Now that we know what your main keyword is we are trying to target and how to convert those 22,000 people searching every month for the keyword “Disney World Tips” we need to see what domains are available that are an exact domain name as our keyword or as close to possible to it ex. www.disneyworldtips.com .  Head on over to www.domainsbot.com In the Search field type in Disneyworldtips and click search. You will see that disneyworldtips.com is already taken but the .net and .org are still available. Just a little FYI about domain names is that the exact match domain name as your keyword will help Google and the other search engines determine the keyword relevancy and help you rank higher in the search engines. One more thing Google tends to do is favor .com first, .net and .org in that order if all 3 had the exact domain name, also taking into consideration the content on the site, page and number of backlinks. This is whole different beast, which I will write a post about in the future. Basically if you can get the .com for your keyword that’s the one you want. If it’s not available then try to get the .net and then the org.

Next you need to do is choose a good web hosting provider like Host Monster. I personally use them for a lot of my websites, I have never had problems with them, support is great and you can get hosting for as low as $4.95 if you sign up for 24 months. Check them out here: Host Monster Web Hosting.

When you’re on the Host Monster main page click on the “Get Started” button in the middle. On the next page put the domain name you found from domainsbot. In our example were going to put disneyworldtips.net and the click next. Now fill out your Account Information, choose which Account plan best suits your needs 12, 24, 36 months. The only other option I would choose is the Domain Whois Privacy. Which protects your contact information displaying when someone does a whois looking for who owns the domain. Fill out your Billing information and the click Next and go through the remaining steps to complete your registration.

That’s it, you’ve just setup web hosting for your brand new domain name. You’ll shortly receive an email from Host Monster with all your account information on how to logon to your new website.

In my next post I’m going to show you how to configure your brand new blog using WordPress.