I’ve set up a lot of blogs for myself and friends over the last years.  One of my ideas for supplemental income that never took off was to start a custom blog service. I realized that I wasn’t well suited for building blogs for other people and decided not to continue. I still do all my own work and help out friends from time to time, but I don’t accept money for the work I do.

Without doing much research (Which is always a mistake) I decided to sell a service where I would build a blog for people who didn’t know how. My platform was (and is) WordPress. After I built a few blogs for friends for free I realized that I wasn’t good at taking their idea and creating it on a web page. I know what I like things to look like, but it’s very hard to design something for someone else. The only service I really could provide then was to install WordPress for people. I’m sure there are people out there doing that but I didn’t want to spend the time figuring out how to make money doing it. So I dropped the idea.

Along the way I came up with a good check list for building a blog. Anyone that wants to start building their own blog, or blogs for other people would benefit from using it. When you sell a service online that requires a lot of steps you have to use a checklist. While this checklist is about building a blog, it should serve as a good example for anyone that is selling a service. When you sell a service, you have to sell it perfectly. You can’t afford to make any mistakes.

So back to building a blog. Here are a few other posts I’ve written that will help anyone that wants to build a blog themselves as well as the checklist I used. There are tons of services you can learn to provide online to make supplemental income.

How to start a blog
How to set up a Dreamhost hosting account
How To Install WordPress with Dreamhost
How to add a customized WordPress theme

Build a Blog Checklist

Purchase
Domain Name		DreamHost
Hosting Plan		DreamHost
Configure
Hosting Account		DreamHost Account
Database		DreamHost Account
Transfer Files
WordPress		See – Set up A Blog
Themes
Plugins
Install
WordPress wizard		See – Set up A Blog
Record passwords
Create user accounts
Enable/Configure plugins
askimat – w/key		Installed by default
SEO		http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
cforms		http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cforms/
exclude pages		http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exclude-pages/
sitemap		http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/sitemap-generator-plugin-for-wordpress/
privacy policy		http://www.synclastic.com/plugins/privacy-policy/
backups		http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/
Footer
Add copyright		Modify the footer WordPress page
Link to contact page
Remove unwanted links
Link to privacy policy
Tracking
Add Google Analytics		Install Google Tools
Add to Google Webmasters
Add Aweber Form		Create a Form at Aweber and add the code so people can subscribe
Site Configurations
Modify CSS		Change the design of the theme. See CSS basics.
Create about page		Describe what the blog is about
Add ping list		Add the following sites to my ping list: Ping sites
Add to technorati		Submit my site to technorati
Modify Permalinks		How to modify permalinks
Add www prefix in settings		Change the blog settings in my wordpress settings tab
Submit Site to
Google		http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo		http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/