Grow a Blog

These reports relate to my blog my honest answer. It’s a genuine blog that’s not about blogging. I’m here to tell you how to succeed blogging about what you love – not blogging about blogging.

I set the site up at the end of April. It was a steep learning curve. It took me a while to get to grips with everything, the terminology, the installation, and then WordPress. But I did.

I’m not going to detail everything I did here – that’s for the How To Set Up a Blog series.

But here are the results:

Statistics

Pageviews: 0

Outgoings

Domain registration and Web Hosting: $82.40

Earnings

None.

I used this month to get things set up and to start building up a back catalogue of posts. There is no point ‘launching’ your site if, when people click through, there is very little for them to see. They need to be able to browse, and get an idea about what you do. No-one is going to subscribe on the strength of just a few articles.

I wrote and wrote and wrote, and changed the colors and layouts, and didn’t say a word to anyone about my blog.

May was an exciting month, but it was nothing compared to June!

Whilst setting up www.myhonestanswer.com I read a lot of blogs about blogging. I was constantly googling, ‘how to increase traffic’ or, ‘what does it mean if I’m getting loads of spam’.

Every site that told me how to blog seemed very sucessful. But of course they were – they were telling people how to blog.

What I found was much rarer was successful blogs that weren’t about blogging. We all can name a few, but what they don’t usually share (understandably, since it’s not what they blog about) is how they built their blog, and how it became popular.

So I decided to start Grow A Blog to show how I built my honest answer which is a real, genuine, normal blog that is not about blogging.

I will show you how I started the blog, how I got on over my first six months, and then, I plan to show you IN REAL TIME how the blog grows, and how I make money from it.

Each month I will publish a report detailing everything – stats, lessons I learnt, and how I did it all.

I started my blog www.myhonestanswer.com in April 2010.

I had lots of ideas, and little blogging knowledge. So, for every hour I spent writing blog content, I spent another two hours figuring our how to blog.

To save you from that trouble, this blog is going to be a one-stop shop for all your blogging needs. I’m going to tell you everything, from how to pick a blog name, to what blogging platform to use, to how to install it and choose a web host.

It sounds complicated, but it isn’t. When you know what you’re doing. The first time I did it it took me weeks. When I did it again to set this blog up, it just took me a couple of hours. Now I’m recording exactly how I did it, so it can take you a matter of minutes.

Let’s get started!