Take a couple of minutes to think about why do you want to blog and who is going to read it. In our case, the PocketSmith blog is an awesome way to share our experience with people around us. It is also a great opportunity to introduce our team and the product to our future users. Creating this relationship from the start is really important for us as our success will directly depends on users’ willing to share their experience with us and help us to make the product better.
This first step done, we had a lot of work to get done! To cover the multiple aspects to consider when setting up your blog, I advise you to read “Blog Setup: 40 practical tips” by dailyblogips. You can then follow your own step by step process as we did:
Blog set up:
- Register your domain name carefully as changing url as been proved to be detrimental to your blog attraction.
- Install wordpress in the root directory. We found wordpress very intuitive and customizable enough to meet our needs.
Theme and design:
- Choose a theme that suits to our idea of “keep it simple, keep it real”. The design of the blog will change as we develop our brand. We will take some time tomorrow to look at first mockups by Jason, our crazy designer!
- Write down a blog description including a short introduction to your product. Putting in writing a blog description must be taken very seriously as you point out what you hope your reader will learn or gain from reading your blog. Moreover, you can use this description later to submit your chef d’oeuvre to blog directory and topsites.
- Organize posts by categories. Use appropriate titles for your categories as it will facilitate the navigation through your blog.
Plugins, SEO and Analytics:
- Install google webmaster tools. These tools will be essential to analyze and increase your blog traffic
- Validate your site so you can access your google statistics and crawl errors about the pages in your sites.
- Install meta-tags plugin for wordpress. If your are new to SEO techniques, have a look at Seomoz.org, a true reference!
- Submit your blog to search engine
- Add share/save/bookmark links
Increase traffic:
There are plenty of excellent articles giving tips to increase traffics. I have particularly enjoyed reading “21 tactics to increase blog traffic” and “How to advertise your blog” which provided me with the basics. It is also important to learn from other bloggers experiences who went through the all process of blog creation (check the blogging mistakes project to get more information) . From my very little experience, the combination of good content + simplicity + regularity + web promotion + constant improvement = awesome blog!
To conclude this post, remember that there’s no urgency to get it right from the very beginning. Play around a little. Experiment. Try different things and keep what works for you!
Tags: Blog, blogging, tips, traffic, web promotion
Great article…this is sure to help many bloggers. Here’s another helpful article for people looking for help setting up a blog — http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-set-up-a-blog-advice
Great post. Thanks for the helpful information. I’m sure many bloggers will benefit from this. In my opinion the greatest way of developing a great blog is to regularly deliver valuable content to your visitors. If a blogger does this…visitors will come with a moderate amount of promoting.
Steve
http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-set-up-a-blog-advice
Thanks for your comments guys, it’s much appreciated
What’s Up! Just wanted to leave a comment. I truly loved this article. Keep up the awesome effort.
You have clearly pointed out some highly thought provoking SEO tips that my partner and I were discussing, excited I ran into it, so thank you for that.