This post is part of our ‘How to create an effective website‘ series. If you followed the series, then by now you have a website that looks good and is customer focused. Today, we’ll be adding a blog in the mix and teach you how to promote it.

Yesterday Sirius, an online member of our Community, spoke in our Forum about his strategies to make money online. You can read the discussion here.

We just wanted to add to the discussion by giving you a quick overview of the 15 steps we recommend to create a popular blog and make money from it.

1. Create a blog about something you are passionate about.
2. Design it well. First impressions matter on the web.
3. Develop your personal brand e.g. ‘the marketeer who guarantees return on investment’, ‘the chef who tells you what really happens in kitchens’, ‘the merciless burger connoisseur of DFW’ (burger joint review site), etc.
4. Clearly profile your target audience
5. Try to blog in audio, video and of course, written word. Make sure you do it well. If one of these methods just isn’t you, drop it.
6. Create social media pages: Facebook Fan page, Twitter account, YouTube, etc. Update them in one sweep with Ping.fm and TubeMogul.
7. Create your call to actions for your blog: Facebook connect, Facebook Fan page, Follow on Twitter, Social bookmarking, email to friend option, contact us info, provide a RSS feed for your blog and publish a newsletter with subscription, etc. Capture leads and use every medium to keep your audience engaged with your brand
8. Post content to all these channels
9. Create community: use blogsearch.google.com and find relevant blogs, engage through valuable comments and blog post exchanges. Search for topics on Twitter and communicate. Join topically relevant forums and engage. Join Facebook Groups and fan pages and network with the audience you find there.
10. Keep doing this, day after day: write one blog post, network in social networking sites and forums, interact with bloggers, it will build awareness of your blog.
11. Once you have plenty of content and some following, offer yourself up for speaking engagements. Come up with an original theme, offer to speak for free to begin with until you are known in the circuit.
12. Approach magazines online and offline and offer to write articles.
13. Leverage all the attention you get: start creating seminars and teach people. A seminar of 10 people works for now. You’ll get big soon enough.
14. Now that you are building some worthwhile traffic, start adding affiliate programs to your blog: Commission Junction, Amazon, local businesses, etc. Now you’re making some money.
15. Write a book. This will get you more exposure, more speaking engagements, more seminars and some TV and radio gigs.

Now you website should be attracting lots of traffic. Start reaching out directly to advertisers who share your target audience and begin raking in the money.

Remember that as with everything in life, it is all about a combination of hard and smart work. Blogs and books about online marketing tap into the 80’s yuppie culture of making big bugs fast without much effort. For most of us, this is a dream. Some of us do win the lottery.

But you can slug it out for 18 months, creating a blog post every day, raising awareness of your blog daily using the methods we suggested in our 15 step program, and you will start seeing results. Make it easy for yourself and do work with offshore workers, virtual PA’s, etc. You’ll get more done and it doesn’t cost all that much.

Don’t get fooled, this isn’t about making astounding fortunes. Your blog, providing it has valuable content, you communicate with a carefully selected audience in the social networks they hang out in and treat them with respect, will provide you with a steady income. The ammount of income will be dictated by your negotion skills with advertisers and the amount of traffic your site gets.