I was reading Lee Odden's blog comments on his post for 25 tips for marketing your blog and came across Stacy asking why they should pay vast sums to get blogs set up for them.

The simple answer is you don't need to. Having said that if you have the money you should delegate to experts whenever possible. That way you can get the maximum from the time used to make a blog. Rather than you learning by trial and error!

On Lee's most excellent blog I noted a few things that Stacy could do...

Here's my 10 step process to setting up and running your own blog:

10 Vital Steps For Blogging

1. Decide the keywords your audience are likely to search on
2. Vitally, get an offline blog editor because they're an enormous help with formatting, tagging and using offline
3. Schedule your post writing and editing time each week
4. Post regularly (I post 4-5 times per week) using the keywords you've chosen
5. Use relevant pictures
6. When posting don't advertise your company, links to interesting items yes. Requests to buy houses no ;o)
7. Add keywords from the post as tags at the end of the post
8. Use a Ping site to ping multiple blog search engines (including Technorati) to let them know you've a new post
9. Allow comments and respond to them quickly
10. Go and comment on other related blogs

The areas a good blog coach will help you with include the following:

• Whether to use Blogger, Wordpress or Moveable Type
• Whether to host your own blog or go with a free one such as Blogger or Wordpress
• Which widgets to implement, and why
• How Firefox helps bloggers
• How to tap into the Social Media side of the Internet through your blog
• Getting visitor information and analysis
• Which directories to register your blog with

And so on...

Anyway, that lot is going to help you get started. So don't wait to get it right. If you choose the wrong blog name, the wrong niche or even the wrong blog platform it can all be changed.

If you've another vital step to blog effectively let me know so we can share it with everyone.