I am in the process of starting a new blog based on my experiences. I have a fairly good plan in my head.
I just thought that I would pass on some of my tips to any of you starting or thinking of starting a new blog.
1. Start with the posts. Even before you start setting up the blog you should have around 10 posts written or outlined and ready to write.
2 Make some of those articles pillar articles. Make sure they will do well with social media. This means they need to be useful, funny, and quick to read. How To’s and Lists work well for this.
3. Start a Twitter account and make sure you start befriending people in your field, not just randoms.
4. Make sure the blog looks good. It does not have to be perfect, just presentable with a strong brand and an easy-to-navigate appearance.
5. Give people multiple ways of subscribing. On my new blog, I have first given them a mailing list option (which is preferable to me). This is set up with Aweber Autoresponder. Then I gave them the option of Twitter and finally old-school RSS.
6. Find the community and interact, trying to get them involved in your project. Before I launched the blog I contacted the members of a mailing list letting them know my plans and asking for some advice. As a consequence, I have gained some readers and great advice from people that I will be targeting. You could find forums and do the same thing.
7. Before planning your social media campaign make sure the blog is full of useful posts so that the reader is more likely to stick around and subscribe. I’m still publishing posts to my new blog before I do ANY social media. Hopefully, I will have 10-20 posts in place before the promotion begins.
8. Start using article marketing to bring in subscribers and readers. Submitting to Ezine Articles alone can be effective but much more than that can be done. Josh Spaulding’s excellent Article Marketing Domination goes into much more detail on the subject.
9. Write with passion or hire someone else who can. An obvious tip but I am believing more and more that this is important to retain readers and gain authority in your niche.
10. Tell everyone about your new site and get all your friends to comment. If people arrive on a blog that looks like it has a community then they are far more compelled to comment themselves. Make sure you try and get at least a few comments on every post before you really start pushing the blog to the outside world.
