If you are about to start a new blog it can be a useful exercise to think through the direction that you want to take it in as these decisions will direct just about every aspect of your blog work. For example, somebody using a blog to promote an existing business is going to have different goals to a political blogger.

It doesn’t matter if you are starting a new blog from scratch or if you already have one; it’s always a good idea to think about your blog direction periodically.

Who Are Your Target Audience?

The first step is to figure out who your target audience is. Are they primarily men or women? WHat is their income level? Are they likely to be family-oriented with children? What about their technical / computer skills?

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 are your readers likely to consume your content? Younger people for example are often very busy, read lots of blogs, and try to consume a lot of information very quickly. They aren’t likely to read every word in full but will scan your posts instead. This will effect the kind of content you produce and your 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.

There are some easy monetization options such as AdSense can that slot into just about any blog and there are all sorts of sizes and shapes of ads to choose from. The question then becomes, do I place ads from the beginning or wait until I have more traffic?

In my opinion, if you are blogging in order to earn an income then incorporate some ads on your blog straight away. The details don’t matter at first as you’ll have no traffic anyway but there is a good reason for doing it up-front: As you begin to build your blog readership they will come to expect that you are blogging for money and expect to see your ads. If you suddenly introduce them some time later some of your readers will complain, accuse you of being a sellout and so on!

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?

One very important thing about branding is that it is very difficult to change later on. Right from the start think about what image you are trying to project. Are you promoting yourself as a person in your blog or are you promoting your blog name as a brand within itself (think Lifehacker, TechCrunch, BoingBoing)? If you are promoting yourself then think about graphics – do you have a standard avatar for yourself that you can use? Make sure you do because when you get social media right that avatar gets *everywhere*!

What If Your Blog Is Changing Direction?

It is not unusual to start out a blog and then later on realize 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 need to change anything that is ok, it is better to figure it out and then bear those changes in mind as you move forward rather than just blindly continuing on with something you are not happy with.