Blogging is fun and potentially profitable, but finding the right blog platform to get your blog really going is a PITA at best. So, what do you do? First of all I highly reccomend using Wordpress. Out of the box it's the best blog software I've used. It's got tons of great themes and extensions to make it an absolutely killer blogging tool.

That being said Wordpress out of the box also requires a lot of tweaking before I would consider it "optimal". For me, I've spent a lot of time in the last few months tweaking various blogs to see the outcomes of all kinds of different optimizations.

Overall, I've had a lot of success and I've come up with a good set of strategies to use when building a blog. Yet, when I put up a new blog I find myself spending a couple hours tweaking the blog template and adding in various plugins just to make it work the way I need it to. Now, obviously I run a fairly specialized group of plugins, settings, etc to get my blog "just so", but it occurs to me that most people are going to run into the same basic problems and time-consuming changes for their blogs.

My solution? I think the best way to manage creating new blogs is to have a list of plugins that you want to install on each blog. Then, you also should get a list of elements that you want in each theme that you use. When you install run through your list as quick as you can and then see how you can improve your list. I've done this and I've found that there are some things that are not something I need to do right away for my site to succeed.

For example, there is no point putting DP Co-op or Link Vault on your sites right away because you get no benefit until your site is indexed. Thus, just wait a month before spending time on that. Getting your AdSense ads on your site is important to do right away, but spending the time to make them optimized might not be a good way to spend your time until you start getting traffic. There are going to be other things like this, but you get the idea.

The point in all of this is to realize that your time is valuable and that you should want to be as efficient as possible when developing a new site. Not every blog you develop is going to be a winner or even profitable...ever. So, instead of trying to optimize everything right away, you should get the basic optimizations in right away and then spend the rest of your time developing content and links. If you already have your content, then just worry about grabbing links. Once your blog is indexed and getting traffic, then go back and optimize ads and add link networks if that is your thing.

By spending on things that need to be built before you get traffic, then you have a better chance of your blog being a success earlier on. Also, the sooner you get your blog up, the sooner you can start working on another blog. More blogs == more money. Good luck!