Starting a blog is a major and commendable decision which takes days, and sometimes, months to put into action. It is quite a different thing to have string of ideas in mind but to put them into action require lot of efforts and will.
As a blogger, I faced ample dilemma about penning down my thoughts and time and again, it would occur to me if this idea was even going to be successful, let alone be gather visibility on the online space. This is when I decided to analyse how I could make my blog more visible and bring it under the limelight. Here are some practical facts that I identified as being crucial for the successful running of a blog. I identified that implementing these strategies during the first 30 days of the inception of a blog can make a huge difference when it comes to making an online impression.
- Write at least a couple of posts every week: When starting a blog, it becomes imperative to remain disciplined and stay active at the job of blogging. If you let go on your schedule out of lax behaviour, you will find yourself losing the inspiration and motivation which got you started in the first place. Rather than churning out that perfect piece of blog, discipline matters in the initial days. Always remember that there are ample blogs out there which are quite popular for their theme or idea and if you want to achieve a feet like that then you have to work hard to remain consistent like them. Most blogs die a natural death within first few weeks as no one cares to update the content on regular basis. It is up to you whether your blog lives or dies! And yes don’t get disheartened by the lack of audience. With writing discipline, audience will also gets built with time. If you are finding less time to devote to writing, you might think of hiring freelancers. Here is a good post on how to manage freelancers.
- Is your On-Page Fine?: Most of the people who start their blog doesn’t know about the nuances of SEO therefore to have On-Page as one of the things to be done in first 30 days might seem to be a farce. But it is so important that this list wouldn’t have been completed without it. So download and install Yoast SEO plugin (if you are using wordpress as the CMS) and just fill in the details that it asks. Here is one online resource that will help you with basics of On-Page SEO. Here is also a good SEO guide for budding bloggers.
- Distribute the content on Quora: As one of the proverb rightly says, the proof of the pudding is in eating. Similarly, distributing your content over Quora will get you users in no time. Quora is one platform which has an answer to most of your questions. So putting up your content on Quora means that you are giving an answer to some people’s questions and perhaps, they are going to find it on your blog. This will lead to one of the either things. Either they will find the content interesting and worthy, which will make them engage with your blog and bring more audience or else, they might not find your content as fruitful, which will manifest itself in the form of low engagement rates. This will prove to be an excellent launch test pad for you to analyse whether your content is up to the mark.
- Start capturing emails from day 1: Until and unless someone is a professional, for most bloggers, capturing emails and building list comes as an after thought. And this is one mistake that needs to be avoided at all cost. If there is a better time to start building the email list then it is NOW. Sooner the better. Put a side widget for people to subscribe to the blog. Implement an exit pop-up. You would be surprised to see results from exit pop-up.
- Set up Emails: A subscriber list is of no use if no emails are actually being sent out to them. You could easily integrate a tool such as Mail chimp with WordPress and let your subscribers stay connected with you. Plan to send out at least one email a week, which would contain details of all blog posts written by you in that interim. This will help your subscribers remain alert about your blog activity and bring them closer to your content. This is the best way to remain in touch with your subscribers and let them stay tuned to your blog. The need for this activity simply arises out of the fact that no one has the time to check back on you if you do not constantly remind them about your presence. Automatic emails do this job just about finely so that your subscribers can remain alert about your blog activity.
Do gives these tips a try and let me know the results. I am sure you will be happily surprised to see the outcome.
