Building a New Blog
Mar 27th, 07 | 1 remarkOne of the most useful tips I’ve ever heard about starting a new blog in particular, but could be applied to starting a new site in general, is something Darren Rowse said on a podcast I recently heard. He said
“What I do if I’m launching a new bog - I’ll write 20 or 30 posts before I even launch, and make them posts that are attractive, linkable… that will cause discussion. Posts that are not newsy but are actual solid, cornerstone content, and then I’d release them every day or two over the next month, and promote them to other sites that have the traffic that you’re looking for.”
Makes sense of course, and I feel foolish about my approach before hearing that tip. I had been writing posts and “publishing” them as I wrote, even though I had pinging disabled and SEs blocked, because my site wasn’t live to the public yet. My logic was, if I have more content available from the start, perhaps I’ll be able to obtain more interest from people the first time they visit.
In thinking it over, Darren’s approach seems much more viable. So I went through the 17 posts I had already written, and switched their status from public to draft. I feel a little silly doing so, but no one (save a couple friends) has seen them yet anyway, so technically they’ll be new posts when they’re published. ;)
The benefit - by releasing each entry one at a time rather than launching the site with a ready-made archive, is Pinging.
Pings = activity = attention = more eyeballs, right? Using this approach, the blog engines, search engines, and social bookmarking sites are being notified of frequent updates. This is a great strategy for starting out. Clever Darren, clever.
Nice work . But you can find more information on http://www.blogoninja.com/10/launching-a-new-blog.htm
Jul 6, 08 | 9:38 pm