If you have not already got a Google account you will need to set one up. It is free and is necessary for many of the things I teach in my free Niche Marketing Course.

Once you have the account set up go to Blogger.

Once you have signed in it will take you to the Blogger dashboard. In this area you can edit your profile, add a picture and manage all of your blogs. You can create as many blogs as you like within the one account.

Now click on the “Create a Blog” link in the top right corner.

Now this next step is IMPORTANT. This is where you will begin the process of giving yourself an edge over your competition in your chosen niche. It is basic SEO but many people do not understand it. That is good news for you.

• You MUST put your main keyword phrase as your blog title.
• You MUST put your main keyword phrase as your blog address. If your main phrase is not available then add a word to it. For example if your keyword phrase is “besthybridcars” and it is not available try adding the word “find” or “get” or any other word to it until you find one variation that is available.

Google will give more weight to your niche blog if the url and title represent the content of the pages. This means you will get indexed faster and rank higher than other sites that have not optimized their title and url.

Once you have done that, you will get the blog creation success page.

If you want to register a domain name for your blog or transfer a domain you may already have, this is the place to do it. Click on the “Advanced setup options” link and follow the instructions. For this tutorial I am going to focus on the free .blogspot.com options. So click on the start blogging arrow to continue on to the dashboard for this blog.

This area is where you will manage this blog. You can see at the top there are 3 tabs besides your posting tab. Lets first go to the Settings.

Now if you put your keyword phrase in the title when you were creating the blog it should appear in the top box. If not, you will want to put it in now.

Below is a box for your blog description. Again you will want to be sure that your keyword phrase appears in the first sentence of your description as I have shown you above.  In this example I have written just a very short description for demonstration purposes. You should go into more detail. This is what the search engine will crawl and display in the search results when someone types your keyword phrase into the search engine so be creative and truthful about your page contents. Nothing ticks Google off more than having a url, title or description that does not match the content on the site. Do not be tempted to put catchy or trendy words in there just to capture traffic if you cannot deliver the goods.

There are a series of boxes below. Go through them and make sure they are set to your liking. Especially make sure you select “yes” in the one asking if you want search engines to be able to find you. Unless you are waiting until you have a project completed, the sooner you get Google to index your pages the better.

Once you have completed the Settings page let us move on to the Layout tab.

Now comes the fun part of customizing the layout of your niche blog. I highly suggest you do not change the header. Keep it your niche keyword phrase. If you are dead set on using an image instead, try a simple background image behind your keyword title. I recommend you just keep it simple though and leave it as just the text as that is what the search engine will be looking for.

You can arrange your sidebar any way you like. To switch the order around of the sidebar components just drag and drop them into the order you would like them to appear. You will also notice an “add gadgets” link. This is where you can add many features to your blog such as affiliate products, custom links, Adsense, etc. Let’s click on the link and take a look.

When you click the add gadgets link a pop up window will appear and you can select any features you would like to add to your sidebar or footer. The arrows I have placed are particularly important if you want to monetize your blog with Adsense or Affiliate products.

When you click on the Adsense gadget it will take you to an area where you can choose to add the ads to your sidebar. I recommend you blend the ads into the color scheme of your blog so they do not stand out glaringly as ads.

The HTML/Javascript is the one you will select to add your affiliate ads. You can cut and paste the code for your ads into the box. Please keep in mind the size of the ads as they will have to fit into the sidebar of your blog. This is a great place for things like Clickbank, Paydotcom and Amazon ads or an ad to any of your other websites. You can also create ads within Market Samurai to be placed here.

Play around with the layout but don’t get too obsessed with the looks. It is more important to get your site up and running. You can come back to the layout at any time and make it pretty. You can change the template anytime too.

If you would prefer your Adsense to appear within your blog posts, you can click on the Monetize tab and fill that out and customize where you want the ads to appear within your blog. Remember that Adsense will only post ads a limited amount of times on your blog per page so do not try to force more ads than allowed as it will just end up with blank areas within your posts.

Your Blogger niche blog is now completely set up and search engine optimized and you can begin posting content to your blog.

I will be covering keyword density in my article writing lesson of the Niche Marketing Course so be sure to read it so you will understand the proper way to optimize your posts for the best page ranking.

A word of warning: Do not keyword spam. Too much of a good thing is not good in Google’s eyes and you WILL get buried in the lower ranks as a result. Learn how to do it properly and follow Google’s rules and they will reward you with a better ranking for each and every post of your niche blog.