How to start a blog and make money off it?

[zippy]

So I've had this idea for a while, but I'm not really sure where to start! I want to have an astronomy blog, (mainly focusing on observation, but also on space news in general) and eventually a blog that I can use to help promote my music as well. But I don't know where to begin. I know I can promote the blog on twitter, but how do I get followers and viewers to the point where I can start making money off of it?

[Junior]

Hi Zippy,

First to all, you have to make sure that you have a specialist blog, so that you could have a loyal readership that would accumulate overtime. Then you need to promote your blog. To let more people know about your blog, you may do some SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This way, search engines may possibly land you some people who are searching on some particular sets of keywords. And to have a successfully SEO optimized blog, you need external links too. In this case, you may also try setting up mirror blogs on different blogging host, say if you set up your blog at blogger.com, you may want to consider setting up mirror blogs at http://self.my, wordpress.com, livejournal.com etc, and each of them pointing back to your primary blog.

To save time publishing to multiple mirror blogs and to do back up for your blog, I recommend that you take a look at WebStory, a very convenient blogging client for this purpose. HTH.