Whilst im quite new to blogging this isnt my first blog and I do have several websites for personal or business reasons, so Im not a complete newbie to all this. That said ive never made any money from advertising or afflilate programs before so I am new to that side of things. With regards SEO (search engine optimisation) Ive done a bit of study into this and know a bit of stuff, but again im certainly no guru in this area. So im still trying to work out the best approach for making money from this blog but I expect that whilst I will learn quickly the ever changing nature of the internet will require me to be constantly updating my approach and learning new things.

Looking for Blog Host 

Obviously (I presume so anyway!) this is the first thing to do and clearly I have already done so as I have this blog up and running. So I’ll tell you how I decided on my host -  blogsome.com. Ive not used a free blog host before but have wordpress running on my own hosting for another site so I am familiar with that. Whilst I like wordpress I was prepared to use any platform if it gave me what I needed and had the following requirements in mind:

• Totally Free - this is part of the challange - I cant spend any money, only make it!
• Advertising is allowed - adsense, text links, affiliate links etc
• The ability to edit page code - this I presumed would be needed to add advertising
• Themes available and possible to edit them (this is kinda linked to the last point)
• I wanted to be able to choose a domain name that would be relevent - it didnt matter if it was a subdomain of the host.

My first stop was wordpress.com as I was already familiar with the product. I signed up and made a little test blog but soon found out that advertising was not allowed so I had to look elsewhere.It didnt take me long to find the info I was looking and found a little comparison list of free blog sites that will let you use adsense. I quickly found that blogsome.com seemed to fulfill my requirements and liked the fact you can edit some of the php pages.

So now I had signed up for my freeblog and made my self familiar with the interface, which is very similar to my wordpress interface on my other blog site so it was all pretty quick . In fact most interfaces of blogs are pretty simple and user friendly and are aimed at average people and not techies. I put my first post up explaining my basic plans and ideas and then started deciding on the theme and layout.

Choosing a Theme & Layout 

I had a basic idea in my head of what I wanted already so was hoping there was a theme included that would be a close match.

• A three column layout - I wanted a menu on the left, main content in the center and a third column just to contain advertising
• A clean crisp look with basic colours or just B/W - I once read someone black on white text is the most succesfull for keeping users on your site.
• Not too many silly functions that are’nt really needed - keep it nice and simple.

From looking through templates in the past I knew there wasnt as many 3 column one as there were  2 column but there are a few good ones I had seen. Luckily I found one I liked called ‘dots2′ by Alex King amongst the ones offered by blogsome. Not perfect but near enough for me to edit and change to get what I wanted.

As mentioned I wanted a right hand column purely for advertising so this meant editing the theme slightly.Im not very good with CSS or PHP but can usually look through the code and experiment until I get it the way I want, even if it does take some time. I removed the calendar first as it just looked cluttered and I think the archives section is sufficient for looking at previous posts.This was easy to find the code and delete in the index.html page under MANAGE - FILES. Next I wanted to move the other items in the right hand column to the left hand column and reorder them.Reordering is easy enough as i just looked for the code that created the section and moved it above or below the code of the sections where I wanted it to be. Getting the sections from the right column to the left was a bit harder. I found that these sections where placed on the right using CSS and I had to edit the CSS stylesheet to remove this placement. The items on the left where not placed there by CSS (which made it confusing to work out) and the placement was purely controlled by where the code was in the index.html file. Once I removed the code in the CSS stylesheet the items moved to the left automatically by default and I just had to reorder them to the way I wanted. It took a bit of experimenting but I got there quite quickly. Next I removed the image above the menu by removing it from the CSS stylesheet, I then had to tweak some postioning settings to get it to line up right but that was quick and easy.

Adding The Adverts To The Right Column 

Finally  I added a skyscraper adsense advert ( I will discuss adsense in later posts) to the right column. I achieved this by replacing some code already in the index.html page, which shows a goggle advert for blogsome, with my adsense code (provided by adsense site). This meant that the CSS (I hadnt removed the google CSS settings)  was already setup for my adsense ads to go into the right hand side column. A few more postition tweaks and I had my basic setup.

So the basic setup of the blog is done and it took a couple of hours all in all, including writing this post.Im still going to change the title graphic but I thought it was more important to start getting some content on here and getting the technical elements setup. No one will be reading it yet so asthetics can come in a while.My next plan is to try to get more content on asap and try to get the blog into search engines and other site where it can be found. Im also hopefully going to add a few useful bits to the site such as del.icio.us,digg & technorati buttons amongst others which I hope will help start to make people aware of the site. Of course I will be looking into ways of monitising the site beyond the obvious adsense ads that I have already got on there - text links ads and affiliates will be the first things I will look at.

Any other suggestions for  getting things off to a flying start or good long term stratagies or even just some feedback please let me know.I appreciate all the help I can get.