Before starting a new blog it helps to define what your goals are for it as that will guide you in every aspect of its development. Somebody who wants to build a blog to promote an existing business will do things differently to somebody who is blogging for a political cause for example.

It doesn’t matter whether you are just starting out on your blogging career or you’ve already started. Read through the factors in this article and begin to form the answers in your mind.

Know Who Your Target Audience Is

The first thing to consider is your target audience - the people that will read your blog. Are they men or women? Are they young/old, married? What kind of jobs do they have? How is their income? What are their internet skills like?

A young tech-savvy male is far more likely to Digg your posts than a mom who doesn’t even know what RSS is for instance. Your audience will respond differently to monetization also. The same tech-savvy male is much less likely to click an ad than the mom.

How will your visitors read your blog posts? Some people such as older people tend to read slowly, taking in every word you write. Younger people with busy lives are looking for a quick read and haven’t got time to read long posts. This will very much affect your content and writing style.

Map Out Your Blog Monetization

If you intend to generate a revenue from your blog you need to be thinking about how to monetize it from the start. For example, a popular method is to sell private advertising space but you can’t do that if the design of your blog does not have prominent ad spots so this is something you need to think about before settling on a design or blog theme.

If your blog will be monetized primarily through some kind of service such as consulting or client work, you will want to ensure that the promotion of your services is integrated seamlessly into your blog.

Another popular strategy that bloggers use is to place contextual ads such as AdSense. Even this requires some thought - should you place them straight away or wait until you have more traffic?

If you know that you are blogging for profit then you may as well start placing ads from the outset. You might not get much income at first as your traffic will be low but it means that when new readers come to your blog they know what to expect. Some readers can become offended when bloggers suddenly introduce advertising at a later date.

Also, you will often pick up future advertisers from within your blog audience but if you don’t have any ads on your blog they would not even know that your blog would be a suitable place to advertise.

What Is My Brand Going To Be?

It’s important to think about branding as early as possible because it can be difficult to change later on. What image are you projecting from your blog? What is your brand? Are you branding yourself as a blogger using your own name, or do you have some kind of business name or product that you are branding? If you promote yourself think about your avatar - do you have a good picture of yourself to use?

What If You Already Have An Established Blog?

It is not unusual to start out a blog and then later on realise that you want to change the direction it is going in. If you have an already established blog think about where it stands currently on the points mentioned above. What kind of audience does it currently attract? Is that the audience you want? What monetization are you using and are you happy with it? Is your audience responding well to it? Finally, what image are you projecting, if any?

If you do find that you need to make some changes, don’t worry about it because it’s better to figure that out now rather than blindly going on in a direction you’re not happy with.