1) Decide whether you want to just be social or if you want to make money. You can go anywhere to be social and that isn’t a bad thing, you can even do it as an extension of money making blog like I do with Live Journal. If you want to make money though, you need to take control of your own blogging by either getting a domain and hosting of your own. Alternately You can make arrangements for sponsorship with places like Hart Blog Network. If you have a good idea they will set you up in a blog of your own and split the adsense revenue with you.

2) After you decide where you are going to blog and if you are in this to make money set up a Google Adsense account, a Google Analytics account, Woopra, and Google Webmaster Tools.

3) Decide what you are going to blog on. You should decide the general interest of your blog before you ever decided to start a blog, but that is different from deciding what the blog is really about. If you jump all over the place you blog is going to be hard to define and not attract very many readers. A lack of readership will greatly impact how much money you can make. You start this progress first by doing a google keyword search. Start doing google searches with a specific keyword or phrase in quotes. The smaller the number of results the better. You will also want to match those results against a keyword search from WordTracker. I personally like Courtney Tuttle’s ratio of 200 searches per day with less than a million hits. It will take time to get ranked for this keyword or phrase, but that is okay. This word or phrase is going to be on every page of your blog. That is a different lesson lesson though. Make sure you read Court’s article too.

4) Decide on your blogging platform. There are a lot of them to choose from, but only one that I can recommend for noobs, WordPress. It is the most powerful, customizable and user friendly of any self hosted platform available. it is also the one with the best support when something goes wrong.

5) Once you are installed and setup, start reading every blog in my Blogroll religiously. These are the people I learn from. Some of what they teach will be way over your head as a noob. Some of it will not be. Become a sponge, absorb it all and ask questions. it doesn’t matter if you look like a noob so long as you don’t sound like an asshole.