I am in the process of starting a new blog based on my experiences here in Cairo. I have a fairly good plan in my head to make sure that WelcomeToCairo.net gets off to the start it deserves. 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 promotion begins.
8. Start using article marketing to bring in the 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.
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Good round-up. I think lists are one of the easiest methods to gain backlinks and they are really easy to put together even though it may take a while sometimes.
Of course. Lists are an excellent way to get a useful post up and have some new readers from social media that will stick around too.
Thanks for commenting.
@Stefan- I appreciate your view. Your right that it may take some time it is easiest methods to gain backlinks.
In many ways I think starting with the good posts is the hardest thing to do. There is always the feeling ‘what if I put all this effort into writing 10 good posts to start, that nobody will read?’ as well as the excitement of moving forward quickly. But I agree, and these are some great tips for getting started properly.
Thank you very much. I love your blog and writing style so appreciate that you like my approach
.
Great tips .. thanks … when I have a new blog I started to keep information about it on Twitter, and on up to 50% of visitors came from Twitter … all advise you to use Twitter ..
Strangely I have not yet started to use Twitter for this blog… But I do plan to soon. Thanks for commenting.
Good starting off tips! I think the hardest tip to do, is the waiting until you have 10 posts before you start promotion. I have very little patience, and so I want to start advertising after one post. But you’re right, you need the pillar articles, and the blog structure in place otherwise you turn people away.
The hard thing I find is that often some of those original posts get ignored and you end up with no comments. However you can always republish them at a later date and delete the old one if they got no attention. Or publish a new post pointing out to people that they should give those old posts a read.
That’s true, but then you get in a messy SEO situation with the whole duplicate content thing. Once you’ve posted it, it’s already in the Google Archives even if you delete the post. So I’m always scared to repost something because it hurts your SEO.
I think having a weekly or every other week post, that reminds people of great past posts, could work really well. I’m going to have to try that. Because new readers come all the time. haha I like that, thanks for the tip!
You can just re-date the entry and it will come to the front page… However you could be right that google may see it as dup content and a roundup post may be the better option as it will increase internal linking which is thought by some to have a positive influence over pagerank….
Very good advice! Too often new entrants into any marketplace jump in without putting in the required time up-front to make things happen – then when things don’t happen they drift onto the next “big thing”.
Then you have the other extreme – they analyze everything to death and are scared to try anything!
One thing that I would add is blog commenting – by leaving good comments on related blogs, you will help build your reputation and peoples curiosity will drive visitors to your blog who may become regular readers and contributors.
How to find llike minded blogs? Easy – just look at the blogroll if anyone was expecting something more difficult like tedious amounts of research… well, I guess you could do that also.
Mohamed
Thanks Mohammed, I should have put something in there about commenting. It’s not as effective as it used to be but it’s still a great way to personally get to know other bloggers in your field and maybe even end up forming some very beneficial relationships.
what platform should I start with? wordpress.com or .org?
thanks. I’ll wait for your response
@jewelry supplies – your own domain, perhaps? It’s cheap to register a domain, and even less expensive to have it hosted.
Hey Jewelry Supplies, Mohamed is correct. You should buy your own domain and host Wordpress on your own hosting account, which is downloadable from Wordpress.com.
If you don’t have the money yet you can test the waters with blogspot.com but it isn’t always the most effective.
Thanks for sharing these tips. Ive been doing all of them. I’ve been trying to interact with some bloggers through comments most especially on my niche which is personal finance and investments.
Hi Tyrone,
That’s great
. Are you finding the interaction is really helping you?
This is a really informative post, these tips are really useful to start off your blog. I hear twittering is a great way to promote your blog but you have to make sure you don’t spam your followers and only give them what they want or would be interested in.
Yes I agree Twitter is great…. I will be putting it into effect on this blog soon.
I hear twittering is a great way to promote your blog but you have to make sure you don’t spam your followers and only give them what they want or would be interested in. This is ture!
Great post, I was thinking of setting up a personal blog soon myself so I have bookmarked this page to come back to as your list seems very helpful.
Hi,
That’s fantastic. Please let me know if you set up the blog and I will come take a look.
hi
its a nice post and really the ideas are awesome for blog posting
Thanks.
Thanks for sharing man those where great tips to follow!
No problem Derek, thank you for coming by.
The first one gave me an Idea, thank you. I will start a blog soon as I get my Paycheck to pay for the host.
Awesome. Let me know if you need any help.
Again Garbage!! I’m putting you onto NOFOLLOW!! You can keep spamming me but it won’t help… and then soon when I can be bothered I’lll go through and remove all your comments.
thanks for sharing such a informatjve information.
No problem.
I tried to start a blog not to long ago and failed, because I decided that starting a new blog would take too long to get off of the ground.
There are just so many checkpoints to success that I didn’t have the time for it.
I mised some of the steps you mentioned, though, I can see how they would work. I’ll remember them for next time I try to make a blog.
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Looks like you are using Squidoo…. all these points apply to that too.
Great post! I believe that nothing compares to word-of-mouth traffic. So if you really like to make your blog a bang, start by telling your friends, family or anyone you know. Socialize and traffic will come in.
I agree… Thanks for the comment.
Contests is a good a new blog. This will make readers to come back, and there is nothing better than returning traffic.
Thanks for the post.
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Agreed…. I may have to look into this.
also make sure that make a blog commenting related to the niche of the blog. it is very useful because you can find also many blogger friends
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Totally agree… Although it’s worth commenting on any post that you liked to read.
how can we tell anyone about our new website ?
Im not too sure what you mean?
This is very helpful by referring this we can surely have a nice blog.
Thanks for sharing it.
No problem, thanks.
Ah thanks for categorizing them all in one place! My favorite topic up there – the one where I found the most useful information.
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What about launching a social website presence such as Facebook and/or Twitter and start engaging with customers? This will build your brand, increase your website exposure and drive traffic to your website.
I am actually writing a list of 100 quotes and I am going to publish it tomorrow! My website is fairly new and I am working like a mad man to get the ball rollin. I am bookmarking your site right now.
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Hmm…nice ideas.. i started off with my blog writing some crappy posts ( I realized that now ) …Will be looking to post pillar articles once in a while
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