Everyday, more than 10,000 new blogs are created. But how many are still maintened 3 months later? Probably less than 1%.
Launching a new blog is never easy. First, you have to make it known to the audience and get it indexed by search engines. But the biggest part of the work is to show your authority and make visitors come back to your blog. After launching several websites myself, I’m going to show you 5 tips to launch your blog successfully.
Start working before your blog is live
Once they decided they want to blog, most people just pick a domain name, buy some hosting, install WordPress and start blogging. Cool, you have a blog, now what?A young blog have to prove it’s usefulness and the blogger behind it have to show his ability to keep the blog running. This is why you should always have 10 to 20 posts ready to be published when launching your blog.
In order to keep your first visitors interested, it is a good idea to publish often (Once a day or once every two days) but don’t forget to always put quality over quantity.
Don’t waste your time with a “Welcome on my blog” post. Excepted if you’re already well known from another blog, people don’t care about who you are. What they’re looking for is quality content. They’ll get to know you later.
Communicate
While success is definitely not going to happen without quality content, content is nothing if you don’t promote it. People will not guess that you have a cool blog. It’s your job to told them about.
So, how to communicate about your new blog? First, get on Twitter and start making friends. To gain attention from more experienced bloggers, retweet their posts, digg/bump/stumble when they ask for it and then, start the conversation.
Twitter is really a great tool to promote your blog, but of course, that’d be too easy if you just had to create a Twitter account and tweet about how great your blog is.
Another efficient way to make new friends and get your blog known is joining a forum. I just created one on CatsWhoBlog where bloggers can meet with others and discuss blogging or monetization.
Have a look at it, and join if you like..
Cross promote your new blog on your other sites
One of my favorite promotion technique is cross-promotion: The “art” of using site A to promote site B, and vice-versa. If you already own a blog, don’t hesitate to use it to promote your new site. Try to avoid boring anouncement posts and introduce your new blog on a more subtle way.
A good example is this post I wrote on CatsWhoCode, which used my other site PHP Snippets as a live demo.
If you don’t have any other blogs, what about finding a blogger in your niche and cross-promote your respective blogs? I have never tried it myself, but that sounds like a good plan.
Work as hard as you can
Despite what some people (those who try to make you buy their clickbank products) says, success is not going to happen without work. While there’s no miracle formula for success, from my own experience I can say that if you have the following 4 points:
- Interesting content
- Frequent updates
- Heavy promotion
- Strong communication
Then it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be successful. A good example of it is Jad Limcaco, owner of Design Informer.
In less than 6 months, due to his hard work, dedication and strong communication skills, Jad managed to make his blog popular among the design community, even if the competition is particulary hard in that niche.
Don’t give up
I already said it numerous times, but time is the blogger’s best friend. Today CatsWhoCode.com is pretty popular in its niche, but two years ago it was just “one more web development” blog.
I had to work very hard to make what CWC is today. I had to write, promote, and more important, I had to believe the blog had the potential to be successful.
Sometimes you may be tempted to say “I failed. I worked hard but my blog isn’t successful”. It happens to everyone and it happened to me. But don’t give up. A blog is rarely successful before at least one year of presence on the internet.
Blogging is not a sprint. It’s a long distance run.
19 Comments
You forgot to mention that you need to pick a good niche as well. Picking Mauritian politics was not a really smart move for me, with only 20 daily visits O_o and I did: promote and post. :S
Sure thing, though sometimes a smaller niche can be a great starting point.
Is it more easy to become a reference in a specific car model than on the whole car industry
The best thing is to choose the niche you are interested in. This way everything will be much easier.
Good ideas here.
I have a half-dozen blogs and they all have links to each other. I find that I do get a significant amount of cross-traffic that way.
Wow – 10 to 20 posts? I definitely did not have that many planned, but in hindsight, it’s something I probably should have done. Really good strategy.
It would be hard work, but as long as you keep flexibility in mind, it’s probably the better way to go. Having that many posts in the queue will free up time for the early promotion you’ll be doing once the blog goes live.
Cheers,
Tia
Good tips here Jean
I just published a small article today where I mention how communicating and getting involved is already making a difference in my blog.
These are all great tips, but I have to make a point:
Following all these rules is completely and utterly POINTLESS if your content sucks. For me, the #1 rule is have great content. It may not be what draws the readers in, but it’s what keeps them.
Of course, blogging IS about content so you’ll not succeed without it. I’ve NEVER seen a blog with bad content becomming popular
hey jean,
i just started a blog – as you have seen not long ago, and I am possessing such drive as of you speak. however, sometimes it may seem a bit discouraging and ‘tiresome’ when it comes to building it up.
lol, honestly speaking, i have had times where i look onto my stats and wonder why the number of traffics aren’t increasing the way i expected it to be..
but, like you mentioned, all this takes effort and not giving up is very critical. I have made a few decent earning online through affiliate marketing and when i think about the initial start of it, it was not easy too. I believe if i would have the exact drive as how i did with affiliate marketing, my blog would subsequently flourish through time.
no i am not giving up.. and yes am giving all it takes.
cheers
thank you for your post.
Great tips, besides twitter I also promote my blog to other social networks, but to make it easier I use onlywire, it’s quite simple. Work hard is also important, no success without work hard, but don’t forget to always learn new things to broad our knowledge.
Great advice Jean-Baptiste!
Almost exactly what I´ve tried to do with my design blog fromupnorth.com/ and it has grown to approx. 130.000 impressions over just 2,5 months. And its still growing quite rapidly. I promote the page over Twitter, a Facebook page and through other design sites. And I also have a RSS-feed so the people who want to subscribe, can get updates that way.
One thing that I really dont focus on is the making money part. Design is my passion and I really enjoy blogging about it. But if the blog becomes successfull and I can make som income doing it, nobody would be happier than I.
Btw, love your blog. Keep up the great work!
These are great tips. I agree, one of the most important steps when launching a blog is to have a relatively large arsenal of good posts. Not only is important so your readers have content to read, but when you have plenty of posts built up, it give you more time to work on promoting your blog when you actually do launch it.
hey Jean,
Nice Post dude. Some awesome points there.
Thanks for sharing this great Post.
~Dev
Great article! I find some interesting ideas thanks to your post
Sorry for the short comment, but yeah! I jsut wanted to say, don’t give up!
Don’t forget to post with a sense of humour, the blogs that I follow are personal and written in the first person sense. Your audience really need to get to know you and trust you, when you start getting 40% of your visitors returning on a daily basis you know you are doing something right.
Also take critiscism with a pinch of salt.
ALWAYS re-read and spell check everything you type, nothing will turn people away like bad grammar,spelling or other glaring errors.
“Everyday, more than 10,000 new blogs are created. But how many are still maintened 3 months later? Probably less than 1%.” That’s a scary realization for those of us just starting out and trying to make it to have a good following down the road.
Nice post here Jean, I actually just re-designed my Blog and launched the design today!
Will keep these points in mind for future projects.
Great tips Jean. I actually made a guest post another site with some tips similar to this. One thing that I have been recommending (which you have) is the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin. This gets people to come back and remember your blog. It can do wonders for your blog.
Also, Facebook is a huge place to interact and establish friendships/followers for a new blog.
-Eric
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