5 things to do after creating a new blog
OK, you did it, you created a new blog! You post a few entries on which you sweat for days, give it the best of your best. But what’s next?
Here are five basic steps I follow for every new blog I create:
1. Track your visitors.
Nothing is as encouraging for a blogger, as to see the amount of visitors going up, but also to explore where your traffic is coming from, which of your blogposts are the most popular,… So the first thing you need to do, is to monitor your traffic.
Activate Google Analytics on your blog. It is a free tool, and easy to use.
2. Submit your blog to search engines.
Search engines are one of the main sources of traffic, so submit your blog to Google, Yahoo and to the new kid on the block: Bing.
But there are more search engines than just these two giants. Use some of the free services, such as SubmitExpress to submit your blog to a dozen engines in one go.
And be patient. It will take a couple of days before they will start crawling your blog.
3. Sign up for some basic webmaster tools.
Google Webmasters allows you to tweak the Google crawler (the website indexer), to monitor how the crawler sees your site, who links back to your blog,…
If you followed step 2, you will have submitted your site already to Yahoo SiteExplorer, which offers features comparable to Google Webmasters.
And you can just as well submit your site to Bing Webmaster Center.
4. Submit your site to blog directories and social bookmarking sites.
Listing your site in directories will make it easier for others to find you precious blog, giving it the deserved attention.
The most popular blog directories are Technorati and Alexa. Try also the DMOZ open directory, even though your blog will be queued for the approval by an editor, which can take ages.
As an option, you can also submit your blog to a series of “blog catalogs”. Here is the list of free blog catalogs I use for my personal blog.
Some catalogs will require you to ‘link back’, i.e. include a link to their website from your blog.
Blogging is all about creating communities, and being active in these communities. Register, submit your most relevant blogposts and start looking for bloggers with similar interests on social bookmarking sites. The most popular ones are: Mister Wong, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Mixx, Reddit, Furl and Diigo.
If you have time, it also worth snooping around on blog forums. I like the friendly and helpful crowd on the Bloggeries forum.
5. Implement some the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) basics.
If you are really thorough, it is worth to tweak the Search Engine Optimization or SEO for your blog.
A well-tuned SEO will increase the probability people will find your blog through search engines, when searching for topics you blog about.
Wordpress has the superb All-in-One-SEO plug-in, but for Blogger, you will need to manually edit the template:
Insert the following in your template, just before the </head> tag:
<META CONTENT='keyword1, keyword2, keyword3' NAME='Keywords'/>
<META CONTENT='Describe here what your blog is about' NAME='Description'/>
<META CONTENT='Fill in your name here' NAME='Author'/>
…where ‘keyword1,…’ are the most important search keywords for your blog, e.g.: ‘Agriculture, development, poverty, agroresearch’.
And now… your blog is ready to go!
Check also 10 Free Blogging Tools I use daily.
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Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, blogger, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order. (
Thanks for the tip. Seeing the small numbers in Google analytics, i was thinking about removing the retweet button.
BTW, considering the enormous amount of you follow i follow crowd in the twitter, would people care to click those links
I don’t know if your retweet button shortens the URL with bit.ly, but -as described in this post- that could give you a black and white figure on the traffic the tweets give.
I do, on my links and have been astonished by the amount of traffic each tweet gives.
It is true there is a “scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours” mentality in the following in Twitter, but not so much in retweeting. At least not in the social community I have created around each of my Twitter accounts.
And maybe that is key in all of it: ensure the quality of your followers. Maybe one tip: I *never* autofollow. This means that “my” social community would never follow me, simply because I would follow back.
I’d like to say they follow my tweets, because they like the content
Hope that helps a bit,
Peter
I have just discovered your site via ICT-KM, and it will keep me busy for hours…. I have been blogging for a few months now, we are one of the NGOs who want to use social media more and are still finding out how best to do that (ILEIA, see http://www.leisa.info). So your site is full of useful stuff (so far I’d only found social media for marketing your business).. thanks and keep up the good work!
Karen
While these sites may be free for us, the end user, google and yahoo take the numbers we provide for them, and they scan the content we enter on their services, and use it as fodder to sell their profitable products, such as adwords.
It is in their interest to keep these sites working well, as the critical mass we provide is the very product they can leverage to advertisers.
That being said, Michael Keizer is correct- if the service is mission critical, buy the pro account, and get on the line with their support if needed.
Do you know of an alternative to Pipes?
@Hank:
Don’t think there is any pro-account formula for Yahoo Pipes unfortunately. The only alternative I found is http://pipes.deri.org/ but looks even more of a hackers tool, and I don’t know how well it performs.
I think I will make my own…
Peter.
i just love to Twitter everyday with my friends. Twitter is much better than blogging in my opinion and it is very addictive too.
. ..
thank you for this good information
nice post . Very helpful information. Thank you.
Hi, this blog post is very well-written and appears extremely useful. But I was just wondering if you could clear something up? You mention Newsgator as a product, but the link to their website shows Newsgator is a company with a lot of products – it isn’t clear which tool or product you used to amalgamate feeds and produce script. Could you explain this step in some more detail?
If you post here please email me to let me know
Many thanks
Jez
Hi Jez,
You are totally correct. Newsgator changed their services end August. The online aggregator functions they used to have is no longer available.
If you are looking for a feed aggregator or RSS-to-script function, have a look at this post:
http://www.blogtips.org/free-rss-tools/
best,
Peter
i think the problem is solved now..
Yahoo Pipes went back up after almost 3 weeks of intermittent problems. There are still problems saving new or modified Pipes, though. That problem exists since at least 2 months….
Peter, thank you for including us in your review. I am happy you like the Dlvr.it service. Stay tuned. LOTS of good things coming. Including many more outputs – Facebook coming very soon.
Also, thanks for the feedback on the stats. In order to “provide interesting statistics,” mash the data and provide some real intelligence we use the Dlvr.it short URL. It makes the data consistent and allows us to do some interesting analysis – lots of things going on in the lab now.
Stay tuned…
Best,
Bill Flitter
Founder, dlvr.it
comprehensive post! Another tools for RSS to twitter is hootsuite, I havent tried it out.. but it gives the feature.
I just discovered Hootsuite’s RSS-to-Twitter function. Will try it out, and update the post.
Thanks for the reminder.
Peter
I agree I think social media is really more important for better communicating with your supporters and building a strong foundation and network of people interested in your cause.
These tips are great. Thanks for sharing.
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