WHY you're blogging and then to consider WHAT you will blog about. So give that careful thought and then check the monetization aspects (which I will also write more about shortly). You will find bloggers who either want to preach -- in the nicest, and sometimes the nastiest way, -- or they want to make money using their blog. We're focused on the second group - YOU -- because RealWritingJobs is about how to make money writing -- or blogging. Either way though, this page will get your blog flying. Guaranteed. #2 What sort of blog -- hosted, or 'self-hosted'? One of the key attractions to starting a blog is that you can get up and going not only within a day -- but within minutes! You can use a hosted blog platform like WordPress.com or Blogger.com that many of you will have seen with blogs. They are fine for a fast, 'down-and-dirty- blogging platform but there are some traps here that the newbie blogger should be aware of now -- not months down the track when they find they've made a mistake over their blog hosting. There are some potentially major problems with free blogs.  Here are a 'taste' of some of them and why we do NOT recommend them for anyone serious about blogging -- either for income, creating an authority site, communicating with subscribers etc. They can be removed by Google or other search engines quite easily They are not actually owned by you They are limited