Five-step plan for building a blog

You probably have noticed that so far I have not added any AdSense widgets to this blog. You might wonder why not? Why don't I try to earn some cash with ads from the beginning?

The answer is simple: at the moment there are no readers for this blog. So I think it is better for me to concentrate on providing content that will earn the site some credibility in the algorithms of the search engines. Only when I see that some people are actually finding their way to the blog, I will add the AdSense widgets to the margins of this blog.

Before adding the ads I have to decide which template I should use for this free Blogger blog. There are many good free templates that I have used. But at the moment I am not sure how I should brand this blog. The branding should be good and stable so that people would immediately recognise this blog and see the difference between this and thousands of other blogs that claim to have unique information about making money online with niche blogging or AdSense.

One might of course argue, that if I had the AdSense in place already now I would have higher motivation for building the readership of my blog from the first article. The few cents I would see in the Google AdSense reports would provide me a clear incentive for getting this blog to the top as fast as possible. I do not deny the logic behind this reasoning. As student of economics I would be one of the last to deny the importance of economic incentives for working harder. But I doubt money is the only incentive people work and write for. At least for me, the importance of learning is at least as important as money is.

With this blog, I plan to proceed in the following five steps:

1. I create some unique content. The more the better, the more unique the better.
2. I choose the template. This is an important step for branding the blog.
3. I add the AdSense widgets.
4. I start to build my readership aggressively by commenting other blogs and joining different discussion forums.
5. I advertise the blog in my other blogs to find even more readers. For this, I might either use text links or add unique banners that look like paid advertising.

At the moment I'm clearly still climbing the first step. When I have proceeded to the step five, I might have ideas for the next five steps.