You Launched Your Blog, Now What?
This guest post is by Chris Pund, a full time college student and serial entrepreneur who blogs at Dorm Room Biz (www.dorm-room-biz.com) as well as many other sites. Check out Dorm Room Biz to learn about his current projects and for great resources for young student entrepreneurs!
The question was recently asked on the Young Go Getter forum, what do you do once you launch your blog, so I thought that it would make a great topic to write about.
There are many different perspectives about what to do when you launch your blog. You will find by reading different blogs about blogging that there are a ton of opinions and each one has worked, but you may think that it is not the right fit for you.
So, you have your blog launched, you a have a little bit of traffic trickling in, and you have some good articles written – now what? Here are a few ideas or directions to head.
Continue Writing – once you have launched your blog and you start working on ways to advertise and promote your site, it is very important that you keep writing. If you have written 5 good articles that you think deserve to be seen, share them with others, but be sure you keep writing. If you keep promoting the same 5 articles and people keep returning looking for more but do not see more, they will not come back.
With a new site, you are going to want to try and write as much as you can but not over do it at the same time. My suggestion would be to post about 2-3 substantial articles per week that will draw attention from your readers and get them commenting and also make others interested in the rest of your content. If you do not think that you will have time to write during the week, sit down and dedicate a couple hours to writing out all your posts at once and then just release them throughout the week. Mix in some news and links to other posts with your 2-3 big articles and you will quickly build your archives and continue to bring fresh content to your readers.
Link Exchanges – Exchanging links with other sites is a great way to get people to your website. Start emailing the authors of some of your favorite blogs or blogs that relate in content to yours and see if they would be interested in exchanging links. This is especially great for sites that you were going to link to anyway, why not email them and see if they will link to you?
Personally, when someone emails me about a link exchange and I like the site, I usually write a post about it and not just throw it into my blogroll for it to just sit there. I know that most of the sites are just starting out, so I feel like anything I can do for them to get some more exposure will help them. Many other bloggers will do the same – write a quick review/blurb about your site, and drive some more traffic to it.
Offer an RSS Feed – This is probably one of the best ways to get your site seen/read. I would venture to say that the majority of people do not want to visit every blog that they like to read individually if they can just subscribe to the RSS feed instead.
RSS feeds make life easier and that is what people like. If you are not already signed up with Feedburner, do so and start advertising your feed. Put the RSS Feed button all of your site and you can even try to beat the largest feed button if you want. By having an RSS feed, your visitors do not have to continually come to your site to read posts. Even though your traffic statistics may not be great, your feed subscriber count could be. Use your feed to give readers a reason to come to your blog – only offer part of your post and they have to read the rest at your site or point them to other posts on your site that may interest them.
Search Engine Optimization – Obviously this had to be on the list! Be sure to do what you can to make your website search engine friendly, and not just for Google but for others like Yahoo and MSN. Check out different SEO related websites for tips about using keywords, phrases, tags, etc, etc, etc. These sites will be able to give you some good help with getting your site recognized and in search results. With a little bit of hard work and time you can get your site ready to roll! Also be sure to check out WordPress Plugins that can help with your SEO needs.
ReviewMe – I have not had much experience with the website, but it works wonders for some. If you have some money to spend, this is the way to get some traffic. You can find sites with similar content that you can purchase a review of for their asking price and then that website’s author will write (hopefully a favorable) review about your site and drive its own visitors to yours to check it out. Even if a review is not favorable, do not get discouraged, you could still get new visitors this way because people are just naturally curious to check out the link. I am sure there are other similar websites out there where you can purchase reviews of your site, but this is the hot on to use right now.
Blog Carnivals – This is a great way to get your site noticed! If you have some great content, find a blog carnival that relates to your site and submit an article or even multiple articles. Most carnivals feature different categories within their topic, so you have an opportunity to submit multiple articles. Submitting your article to a carnival is pretty painless and easy to do. Just fill out a form or email it to the person that is hosting the carnival and hope that it gets accepted. The great thing about carnivals is that most are hosted by a different blog each week. So if you continue to write great content week after week, you can continue to submit your articles to the carnivals and hope that you get something accepted every couple weeks or even every week if your content is great! Also, look into hosting a carnival at your website. It may seem like a lot of work to sort through all the articles and posts that get submitted to you and organize them all, but the end payout of traffic to your site could be amazing.
Those are my 6 top things to do once you launch your blog and need to start getting some traffic. Just remember to be patient as it will take some time for your traffic numbers to start growing, take time for you to get recognized by the search engines, and hopefully start making some money from your blog! The key is to keep writing articles and posts and do not get discouraged!
