My first step towards becoming a professional blogger is to go through my BlogMastermind lessons again.  This time I’m going to make sure I spend more time studying them and applying them rather than what I did in my first round which was probably more knowledge acquisition rather than action-oriented.

The Blog Mastermind program focusses on five areas:

1. Blog set-up and internal optimisation
2. Content creation
3. Traffic generation
4. Monetisation
5. Advanced topics

It makes sense to work through it in this order because you can’t progress to the next wihtout having done the former.  For instance, you need a blog before you can create content, and you’d be wasting time and effort if you don’t optimise your blog before you start building it up with content.  Without content, there is no point generating traffic because it is content that will keep your readers coming back.  If your readers have nothing of value to read, they won’t come back and the traffic you have created will be wasted.  Without traffic, your monetisation options are limited so there’s really little point in looking at monetisation until you have some traffic to your blog.

The homework from lesson number one of Blog Mastermind is to set up a WordPress blog on your own domain.  Although you can use any other blogging platform, using WordPress offers some great advantages that you don’t have with other blogging platforms.  Likewise, you can also use hosted blogging platforms like blogger but you don’t control the blog and if something were to happen to the blogging platform, you would lose all the work you put into your blog that you built up from scratch.

So point to note – host your own blog and make it a WordPress blog.  I used Bluehost because they offered one click installation for WordPress and they offered one of the best packages I had seen.  The domain came free with my Bluehost subscription and the registration was all done for me.  It doesn’t get easier than this.

The second part of lesson one requires some background reading.  It is a prerequisite to have read the Blog Profits Blueprint before progressing further with the lessons.  The Blog Profits Blueprint is free to download and you don’t have to be a Blog Mastermind Member to get it.  I’ve read it once before (about a year ago) and it is packed full of very useful information that anyone can implement on their blog to increase their blog earning capacity.

Click here to download the Blog Profits Blueprint

Click here to join the Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program

I created Babylicious when I first signed up for the Blog Mastermind Program.  Babylicious was originally a free-hosted Blogger blog called Baby’s Diary.  Although Babylicious is now my focus, I still occasionally blog on Baby’s Diary because it contributes to my monthly income.  It might not be much but at this current income level, it is still something I can’t let go of.  Perhaps when Babylicious really takes off, I will phase out Baby’s Diary completely.