Starting A New Blog: A Checklist

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Whether you’re starting your first-ever blog or launching a new one, first impressions matter. A new blog, to the blogosphere, is like free beer to frat boys, like shoe sales to fashionistas: it’s almost as exciting as free Wi-Fi. It will get traffic, sometimes a huge surge, even.

If you want to turn that traffic into a regular reading audience, you need to create a good first impression. Accomplish this by making sure you have your blog’s ducks all in a row before that first surge of new blog traffic ever arrives.

1. Make sure your design is visually appealing. WordPress users can use the theme viewer to find and test run free templates.

2. Build content before you launch. You’d invite guests to your home then have no place for them to sit. Don’t invite blog readers to visit your blog without giving them something to read! Spend some time crafting well-written, interesting entries to show what you can do and to give visitors something to comment about. Preparing a few entries will also help you gain familiarity with your blogging platform and how to link to other pages, too.

3. Visit your site as a visitor. Be sure to log out of your blog’s Dashboard and flush your browser cookies, then visit your page so you can see it as a visitor will. Now that the “edit this” link next to your entries doesn’t show (if that’s enabled in your template), does it still look good to you? Click on your permalinks to make sure they’re working. Try leaving a test comment or two to make sure that the comment page works and that comments are being forwarded to the email address you selected. Visiting your own site as a visitor helps ensure it’s trouble-free when the real traffic comes.

4. Offer the option to subscribe to your blog. New bloggers often mistakenly believe that offering RSS feeds and email updates will result in less traffic when, in fact, the opposite is true. Visiting blogs takes time, particularly if some of the blogs on your list are slow-loading. And, let’s face it, there are few blogs written so well that every person wants to read every entry. That’s why many people — myself included — only read other blogs via RSS which eliminates the page load delay and allows readers to choose which entries they read without having to scroll down a page. Make your site appealing to those readers by offering an RSS feed and making sure its button (that little orange thingy) is prominent on every page.

5. Optimize your feed before anyone subscribes. Most publishing platforms generate several different types of RSS feeds which means your subscription base may be split among them. Oh, that might not matter now when you’re just starting out your blog but there will come a day when you’ll want to show off how many subscribers you have. Make that easier by collating all of your various feeds into one using FeedBurner and replacing the RSS links in your template with the address of your FeedBurner feed. (WordPress users can make that happen instantly using the FeedSmith plugin.)

6. Remember your non-RSS readers. Sure, you could rely on readers to remember your site and check back often to read your latest words of wisdom. Or you can notify them about updates and new entries via opt-in email subscription. FeedBurner offers this service (see the “Optimize” tab once you’ve burned your feed), as does Feedblitz and Zookoda.

7. Prepare to defend yourself. Traffic brings comments and comments bring comment spam. Sure, it might look on the front page like you’re getting lots of comments, but leaving spam on your site will quickly alienate readers who don’t like having to wade through it. The best way to prevent this is by ensuring that you have the latest version of your blogging software and installing anti-spam plugins. (WordPress users can activate the Askimet plugin by signing up with WordPress.com.) Since spammers love targeting older entries, cut them off early by closing comments after a set period. You can do this manually or have a plug-in do it for you.

8. Make your site Social Network friendly. You can leverage the new blog traffic by putting readers to work publicizing your blog with Digg, StumbleUpon and other social networking sites for you. You don’t need to clutter up your blog with badges and buttons to make this happen, either. Check out the ShareThis button that makes it easy for users to submit your entries to all the major social networks with one click.

9. Put a traffic counter on your site before you launch. There’s no feeling quite like watching the hits roll in, and that’s just what a traffic counter allows you to do. Most, like SiteMeter and StatCounter offer free traffic monitoring along with invisible counters so no one but you needs to know if you aren’t getting thousands of hits on your first day. Better yet: StatCounter allows you to find out where your visitors are coming from (so you can be sure to thank your best referrers) and what they do while they’re on your site. That information goes a long way toward giving readers the kind of information and entertainment they’re looking for.

Finally,

10. Don’t take yourself too seriously! It’s easy to tell when a blogger’s not enjoying themselves: their entries grow infrequent, their writing is stilted, their blog becomes a chore to read instead of a delight to visit. The single most common mistake new bloggers make is stressing over what they should write about. My best advice: Think less. Blog more. As with any skill, you’ll get better the more you do it. So write about whatever strikes your fancy. Your readers will let you know, via their comments, what’s working and what’s not, and eventually you’ll find that you know this intuitively, too.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 11:55 am and is filed under Starting a blog (Blogging 101). Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Tagged in: blog | bloggers | blogging | blogosphere | traffic

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