This is written primarily for blog beginners and people thinking about blogging. It is also intended to apply to blogs in general and not solely to adult.

Search engines love blogs. Search engines mean traffic. Traffic means money. Instant riches.

Although that train of thought contains a few kernels of truth and heaven knows it is appealing, the reality is rather different. First, you are not likely to earn more than a very modest income from even a fairly popular blog and if you do not have your own traffic source for it, you are going to need patience as well as making sure you get everything right.

Splog or Blog?

Search engines do not love blogs in particular, but they do love original text-based content, lots of it, in depth. And that is exactly what the earliest blogs were providing.

Ignore this at your peril because although you can run splogs (minimal, sales-pitch type and/or non-original text), you will not see near the search engine benefit for which “real” blogs have become legend.

There are ways in which certain strategies and circumstances might make it worthwhile accepting that loss, just do not be under any illusion that they work as well as the model they mimic. I may cover splogs another time, this article is about making the real thing work from scratch.

Hardcore Blogging

Do not take on blogging lightly. Blogs are long-term projects which must be worked on consistently: you need to add at least one meaty article a day. On top of that you will need to develop (inbound) links, since that is something else the search engines value highly.

And unless you are ready to have your modest earner as part of a varied empire, once you have your first blog under your belt, you will need a second, then a third and so on. A lot of work by the time you are done.

Do not worry about visual content, RSS feeds and all the other tools at first. Blogging is about writing, so start by identifying a niche or angle you will be able to write about every day.

How will you write? If you Google pretty much anything you will get thousands of results, so what style, personality or authority can you bring to your site to make it different, to pull in the bookmarkers and feed readers, as well as the search engines? This is something anyone building any kind of site should think about, but with blogs you cannot afford to simply pay lip service.

If by this point you have not decided that maybe you should be looking at mass-producing splogs, then the next thing is to identify who you are going to promote. If you are building a mainstream blog, Adsense might be your best bet, but if an adult blog, then you will benefit from sponsors who offer good content for affiliate use.

It matters less what exactly they offer, than whether among their zips, FHG’s etc, is stuff you can write about with conviction. More than say, if you were running a TGP, it is also a good idea to pick sponsors whose sites do not disappoint. Blogs by their nature involve repeat visitors, not one-off sales shots. Promoting third-rate sites is a very bad idea.

Next, come up with a reasonable domain name and a theme. If you cannot afford a designer, there are hundreds of free designs out there which are relatively easy to adapt, or you can build a theme from scratch. Above all focus on usability and not gloss (Smashing Magazine recently published an article which is full of design clues) and if you do hire a designer, make sure he or she is going to deliver a table-free design which enhances and not overpowers your content.

I strongly recommend either finding a site to use as a model, or sketching/roughing out the layout you want. There are lots of links and elements on a blog page and if your visitors cannot find what they expect easily, they will be gone.

Once your site is live, work especially hard to produce catchy topic-relevant titles. Create a list of keywords, but do not overuse them, just keep the list handy as a reminder to use specific terms rather than generic ones when you can.

Make sure you keep stats for both your site and your search engine, so that you can see what is popular and provide more of the same.

In search engine terms, hard exchanges with other sites such that your link appears in a long list with many others, are close to useless and possibly even damaging. Much easier to accomplish in mainstream than adult, you need to spend some time each day finding ways to place links back to your site from other sites.

You can do that via non-spammy comments on other blogs, by organizing post exchanges, and by being willing to cast some bread on the water, with unconditional mentions of other blogs in your posts. By all means let the site owners know you have plugged their sites, but do not be discouraged if most never return the courtesy.

The few who do will make it worthwhile and meanwhile your visitors will appreciate being offered extra resources.

Sign your site up with Feedburner, make sure you are using a decent ping list and provide “chicklets”, the icons to encourage social bookmarking and feed subscriptions.

If you are doing everything right and you want to speed your growth, when you begin earning money use it to buy yourself promotion (promotion, not traffic), on the search engines and/or on relevant sites.

Onwards and Upwards

Once you are feeling fairly confident that your site is solid and you have its maintenance under control, start over with something related but different. You can begin cross-promoting and as your network builds, you can if you wish, gradually spread into categories quite distant from your starting point.

Just make sure that each new site builds on those you already have, so that you really do have a network and not just a collection of sites. That will also make it easier (with care) to use your posts on more than just one site (see below).

Sponsors RSS Feeds

If you are lucky enough to find some good feeds relevant to your blog(s) there is absolutely no reason not to use them. If you do build a network, they will make it possible to expand further (unless you hire writers or regularly exchange posts) than would otherwise be possible.

So what is “good”? Well in this context it must mean that visually and textually the feeds are consistent with your site(s). True too if reusing your own posts, it is an excellent idea to at the very least swap out some keywords or even rewrite bits of imported feeds, to ensure uniqueness. If you don’t have the means to edit feeds before they appear on your site, you can always set up a hidden site for importing and editing feeds and then import from there to your live site(s).