1.  Pick your site topic, something you are knowledgeable and/or passionate about.

2. Register a domain name, preferably with your topic as keywords. I  suggest a registering a “.com” instead of a “.net”, “.biz”, etc.

3. Set up a web site hosting account. The cheapest plan is usually all you will need until your traffic soars, and you do not need dedicated hosting at this time.

4. Build your site. Many domain hosting accounts offer Wordpress installs with a click of a mouse. If not, you can download Wordpress for free at WordPress.org.

5. Pick a theme. WordPress comes prepackaged with a generic blue theme.  There are a variety of sites that offer free templates. The only downside to using free templates is that other sites are out there using the same theme, and the creators of the templates may insist you keep a link on your site to them (in exchange for their hard work of designing the theme).  Or you can purchase themes, such as Thesis Theme,  that are more unique and no reciprocal links are required

6. Wordpress Mechanics. A few tips: Under Privacy, make your blogs visible to everyone. Under Permalinks, change the custom structure /%category%/%postname%/ which is the best structure for the search engines.  I don’t recommend using the default as you don’t want a question mark (?) in the URL.

7. Now Add Content! Write what you know, how you feel. Try to add posts at least three times per week.  Wordpress allows you to program posts in the future, so you could simply blog once a week, but make it look like you are posting every day!

8. Monetize your site. You can make money with affiliate marketing links, sponsored reviews and targetd ads such as Chitika.

9. Get Visitors! First tell all your friends and family to visit your site (hopefully you have some of both).  Then submit your site to blog directories and search engines.

10. Helpful Stuff. AddThis.com lets you add a button for easy bookmarking & sharing. StatCounter is a just want it says, a stat counter, and it’s free (select the “invisible” option). Plus check out my list of recommended Wordpress Plug-Ins.

Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I recently spoke on the “Affiliate Marketing Blogging Secrets” panel, part of the Monetization track at Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas with….

Jim Kukral, Moderator
Brian Littleton, President of Shareasale (shown in pic with me)
Angel Djambazov, Managing Editor of Revenews.com
and Todd Sawicki, stepping in for Ben Huh from ICanHasCheezburger.com.

I’ve had several people since then ask me for a list of the “tools” I mentioned that I personally use on my sites.

Many of my websites use the Wordpress platform, therefore I incorporate a lot of WP-Plugins (as I haven’t taken the time to convert to Thesis Theme yet).

Link Cloaking – I use this to mask my affiliate links, and it automatically adds the “nofollow” attritube. There is also NinjaAffiliate which is more robust, but is not free. Someone also mentioned SkimLinks.com, but I haven’t had time to experiment with them yet.

I also like to import content from my other sites that aren’t powered by Wordpress and my Twitter status updates into the sidebars of my blogs, therefore I use the Aggregate Plug-In and Twitter Tools. More recommended Wordpress Plug-Ins.

Speaking on monetizing my blogs, my main source of income is generated through affiliate programs, but I also generate revenue through additional sources, such as…

Chitika – The organic traffic visitors that I receive via Google Images generally aren’t looking to buy anything, so Chitika is cool in that it only shows relevant ads to the keywords they used to search with that pay per click.

List Building – Collect email addresses on individual post pages. I use AWeber to create hover pop-overs (usually unblockable), sign them up to receive the RSS feed via email, and set the thank you to a CPA offer (ie MarketLeverage Email Submit).

Affilistore – I have played around with this free downloadable script to make datafeed stores. If I can make a website with it in under an a hour, I’m presuming most others can as well. I downloaded datafeeds pertaining to my niche from ShareASale, changing my user id and re-uploaded to my new site. The only “marketing” I’ve done is adding the website and it’s sitemap to Google Overview and watched the sales come in.

Banner Ads – Since most people do not actually click through a banner, I prefer to shy away from CPA and CPC offers, but instead sell banner space or use a banner network such as Glam Media or TodayShow Network that pay per impression.

Google Adsense I presume everyone already knows about Google Adsense? Chloe Spencer from NeopetsFanatic.com fully monetizes her website with only Google Adsense.

Chloe was on the panel before mine “Are You Getting the Most Money Out of Your Blog as You Can?” with Dave Taylor, Tim Jones and Chris Pirillo, which was similar to our panel.

Some people wrote blog reviews about our panel, including Ms. Babble and Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media. I think our session was too “basic” for them and aimed more towards newbies.  Can’t please ‘em all.

Last Friday, this wizard (aka me) was trying to publish a post on one of my blogs and got the following window pop-up saying “The server WEBSITENAME at Magic requires a username and password” (example on Flickr from yonghokim). My initial thoughts indeed included profanity. Magic? WTF! Am I seeing an optical illusion?

Scared that I have a virus, worm, parasite, whatever, I google its demise and end up in the WordPress forums.  Many cited that upgrading WP alone did the trick.  So I upgraded to the latest version of WP and was able to post normally.  My blood pressure went down.

Until yesterday when I got the same Magic error on the same blog!  Double WTF! My first instinct was to pick @yonnage’s brain, hoping he could make the magic disappear into thin air, but he had to go and get married on me and take the day off! Doesn’t he know marriage is sometimes overrated? Anyhow…

Back to the forums I go. To solve the problem for good, I had to manually edit all of my plug-ins as 50% of them had a line a crap code (example) at the very top of them that I had to delete (Yes, Chris Pearson, I know I need to convert to Thesis Theme).  A couple plugins wouldn’t let me edit them without an error, so I deleted those via FTP and reinstalled.

Wait, I wasn’t done yet! I then had to reinstall the wp-includes/vars.php file to get the final Abracadabra! Now, hopefully (fingers and toes crossed) everything appears to be working fine!

Do you Believe in Magic?