Blogstart checklist - the necessary steps for a successful start
Nowadays there are dozens of income traffic possibilities for a new blog - be sure to use them all. Of course the following steps are not all necessary when you start a new blog, but it's best to get them done as soon as possible, so later you can concentrate on the most important thing - content.
Technorati Tags: blog setup, blog traffic, finetuning
You might want to print this list, and as you're setting up your new blog, check the items that you're done with. This helps seeing how you progress, and makes sure you won't miss anything.
Before you start
Assume you've found a niche area for your blog, you're enthusiastic about it, and determined to be a number one blogger in your field. Then you'll need the following:
- A one-sentence description - it clears your focus if you have it at the beginning, and you'll often need it when submitting your blog to various directories.
- The most important keywords - some services require you to enter keywords to register - you better have it consistent, prepared in advance.
- A good domain name - this might include one of your keywords, but avoid the keyword-stacking .info spamblog look. Say it out loud a few times, does it sound good? Can it be easily typed? Do you need to spell it when you talk about it to somebody?
Once you have all these, find a blog hosting solution, and set up your blog engine.
Finetuning
Even with preconfigured blogs, you will need some additions:
- Set up social bookmarking buttons to your posts, so visitors can easily submit them to these engines if they like what you wrote. This site can be a great help.
- Configure your blog to notify tracking services. An easy all-in-one solution is Pingoat.
- Create a sitemap XML of your blog and submit it to Google. This helps Google crawling all your pages, plus you get information on how Google sees your blog. Instructions can be found here.
- Submit your site to MSN Search and Yahoo! Search (to Google you've already submitted at the previous step). That's really all you might need, since search engines will find your site sooner or later anyway.
- Put your contact email address on the blog. Create a new account that's under your blog's domain name, and maybe redirect it to your usual email address - so you don't have to give that out to everyone. Don't forget to hide it from spam robots.
- Set your templates to show the name of your blog and the title of the current article in the <title> tag, and write all your titles in <h1>. This helps search engines to show your articles in better positions.
- You might want to consider running your site feed through Feedburner. First, they give separate statistics on reading and article popularity; and second, they serve as a proxy for your feeds, taking some of the load off your blog.
- Include measuring tools now, so you'll have data from the day you started your blog. Performancing Metrics is aimed at bloggers, but the trusty old Sitemeter and the über-sophisticated Google Analytics can also be good.
- Register and claim your blog at Technorati. This, used together with showing keywords in your feed can help bring in those who search for one of your keywords in Technorati.
Once it's running
Altough it might seem that after you've done all the above, traffic will flow to your website immediately. Not at all. The whole point of doing these in advance was not to boost your startup-time, but to eliminate any distractions and let your concentrate on the most important thing to the success of your blog: providing quality content.
Regardless, there are a few things you should also do after you've launched your blog:
- Write at least once every day. That's the minimum you should be able to keep to keep your blog alive.
- Participate. Leave relevant comments on similar blogs, track back whenever you mention an article, etc.
- Build a community of around your blog. Answer to your comments, help your readers, ask for and take suggestions, etc.
- Advertise. I'm not talking about AdWords - altough you might consider that too if you have the resources - but more traditional stuff, like having your blog's url in the signature of your emails, talking about it to friends, etc.
Again, be patient about traffic and success. Don't worry if it seems to go very slow, it might take months, even a year until you reach your target. But until then, make sure you've done everything to be there and stay there.
March 28, 2006
Submit to del.icio.us
| Digg
| Furl
| reddit
| Y! MyWeb | comments (0)
Subscribe to feed