7 Tips to start your blog with a bang

Thinking of starting your own blog? Yipeee!

It’s one cool thing I can tell you. To put yourself out there and offer value to people from all walks of life. WOW.

Best darn thing I’ve done in a while.

If you haven’t settled for that yet, it’s OK. No need to rush. Now singing “One step at a time” by Taylor Swift, lol.

Alright, I’ll be sharing with you a few tips on making sure you get off on the right foot with blogging. I don’t have scientific facts on failure rates of blogs (just checked Google and I didn’t find anything conclusive). But I’m sure a lot of them start up and just go right down, possibly because they started wrong.

But today you’ll be armed with a few tips to get you going and going hard. Your blog’s gonna turn out fine, no worries.

 

1.Choose a blogging platform

Firth thing you would need to do is choose a blogging platform that’s right for you.

If you would not like to do any maintenance of your own or have to purchase a domain and all that stuff, you would be best with a hosted solution like WordPress.com or blogger.

And while they both have their pros and cons, a research by Atrdriver.com shows that hosted WordPress is used by over 71 million websites around the world. And WordPress as a hosted and self-hosted solution is used by over 17% of all the websites in the world. That’s proof enough for me.

 

2. Get a lot of resources

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to go in blind.

I like it when I’m armed with enough resources to ensure that I never burn out. I love it when I can answer to any question that comes up, that feeling of being in control rocks!

But I’ll tell you this for sure, you don’t have enough content to feed all your readers all the time.

You need to constantly be on the lookout for more information on your chosen field. Get to the top influencers and watch what they are saying, make sure you are always fresh because people love fresh content. Heck, even Google does.

I personally love copyblogger, it’s the best place for my kind of resources.

So look around, find those at the top of their game, and watch what it is they do and talk about.

[quote]You don’t have enough content to feed all your readers all the time[/quote]

 

3. Guest post /Network

If you are new to the blogging world, you don’t want to go in quietly… nope. This isn’t a game for the isolated islands, this game involves the most complex bridge networks of all time.

So start networking with those in your field. This was one thing I really did wrong, I got the tip from Adrienne Smith’s blog. You should check it out, lots of useful tips there to help you.

But to get started, you might not really guest post, especially if you constantly get rejected, most people might not pay attention to you. So check out bloggers in your niche and comment on their blogs. Just keep going around commenting and making yourself known.

Sure, some bloggers won’t even reply you, but some would, I can vouch for Adrienne, she always does. And I do too :). And where you get the chance to guest post, by all means do. And talk about your upcoming site there, never miss a chance to do so.

 

4. Write lots of posts before launch

Yup, i can tell you, you don’t want people coming to your site and seeing just one post. That’ll just get them out as fast as they came in.

So before launch, write out lots of posts, 10 posts should keep people engaged when they get there.

Take out the creative time and pump out valuable content.

image source

 

5. Run campaigns on your networks

Be sure to build anticipation for your new blog. Never go in quietly. That’s the whole point in a bang right.

Use everything you’ve got to publicize your blog, social networks, private networks, like BBM’s, your IM status, family, friends… you get the point. Pull out all your big guns on this one. Make sure people are aware.

 

6. Publish on social media

Best way to get your content shared is by first sharing it on social media with your circles. When people find it interesting, they most probably would share with their friends.

So be sure to make your site sociable, and let people easily get your content across to their own circles.

 

7. Give something away

If you can, then by all means give away freebies. People love free. Don’t let anyone talk you out of that one.

But try to make it relevant to your niche market, so you don’t go totally off point with it. Offer a discount on your product or service, or give away free samples. There’s a whole lot of ways you can get started on this. So get creative.

 

Extra tip: Watch and react

One thing you want to do when you get all that traffic to your site is to see how people are interacting with your content. So have Google analytics installed, and watch out for the bounce rate.

That tells you if people just come and go or if they come and move around a bit.

Personally, I had a really high bounce rate when I started out, around 70%, which was really bad. So I pulled a few strings, one of which was to install the related posts plugin, which makes people check out other posts you have written.

One week later, it dropped to 50%, but my aim is around 30% at least for now, and I’ll keep driving it down with all I’ve got.

 

What did you do to get your blog off right? Or what do you plan on doing, please do share with me. I’ll love to hear from you.

And don’t forget to subscribe to my blog to get all this juicy content in your mail. Thank you for reading.