Figure out what you will sell on your site. Adsense and similar are ok but they pay very poorly. If you can use that ad space for your own products the margin is much, much higher.
However, AdSense does pay per impression (in addition to per click). Affiliate links don't do a thing unless someone clicks and buys. It depends on your content and how you intend to get traffic - specific followers, or organic search.
For me, an awful lot of my traffic comes from organic search (I'm on the first page of Google results for an oddly large number of searches related to my content), and "Wow, look at this piece of junk!" is not something that drives much affiliate traffic.
Pick a catchy URL.
Matters perhaps more if you're going for daily followers, for organic search driven traffic, doesn't matter as much.
How to set up the ecommerce widget for wordpress (which one to use, fees, ease of use, deposits, etc.).
WooCommerce is pretty good for Wordpress-integrated commerce stuff. I can't say anything particularly good or bad about it as I don't sell items, but people who use it seem happy enough with it.
How to incentivize readers to follow the blog and um, buy stuff.
Content? :)
It turns out that I have at least a few people who follow my blog or have it in their Google feed, because this last post I tossed up was a throwaway "Sorry, internet has been down for half a week, my ISP is run by a bunch of baboons..." post with zero promotion (not even my normal Google Plus and Facebook posts), and it has 100 views.
And all the other stuff I don't even know that I don't know yet; like security, scalability, etc.
Security: Don't run Wordpress yourself. I've heard security folks joke that Wordpress is a remote administration tool operating under the cover of a blogging platform, based on how often either Wordpress or the plugins have remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.
Scaling: Don't run your own servers unless you really, really like that stuff.
If you want to go with Wordpress, I would
strongly suggest WPEngine or something like that -
https://wpengine.com/They handle the security, they handle the scaling, and it costs about as much as your own small instance.
If you're not tied to Wordpress and as much control, I'm insanely happy with Blogspot/Blogger - Google run services. I suspect this may have something to do with how rapidly my stuff appears in search, and the scaling and security are excellent. I normally get a few hundred views a day. I had a very, very popular post that front paged Reddit and drove about half a million views in a single day. A small server, suited to my normal daily traffic, would have fallen over in a heartbeat with that kind of traffic (and I'd probably have paid a ton in bandwidth fees). Blogger? I doubt anyone even noticed. It worked perfectly. WPEngine will do that for Wordpress installs as well.
Thanks for the list. How many posts should you have prepared before you hit the go button? I have read that most readers will check your site but if they get any indication that you do not post regularly they will quickly exit stage right.
"Get over yourself thinking you're going to be a big shot from day one and just start posting." I doubt it matters for the first year or two, but you should post regularly - pick a schedule and stick to it. Weekly, twice a week, whatever. Do it at the same time of week as well.
