When you first decide to take the plunge and build yourself a brand new website from scratch, it can be quite daunting what you should focus your efforts on. Afterall, many people that first create websites do so as an individual project so managing the time you have at your disposal is crucial to kick starting your website. With this in mind, here are some priorities, I feel, bloggers and first time website creators should put first before anything else to make sure their website continues to head into the right direction.

#1 Content Comes First Always

Let’s be honest, if you have started a new website, to get any decent amount of traffic to it, you need to post content on it. Without content, the internet would have no information on it, would it?

For this reason, for at least the first 2 or 3 months, make sure you get content out onto your website. As well as this, also remember to submit your website to every large search engine so that the search engines know to index your new website. Otherwise, the search engine simply won’t know your website is there at all and will not index it to show on their search engine results.

If You are a Content Mill, Forget about your Theme  Temporarily

‘Content mill’ is the term that defines websites that have the sole focus of getting organic traffic with good SEO. The main limitation to search engine optimisation, though, is that it takes quite a long time – for me, about a year for content to start getting good levels of traffic.

This makes it especially clear that during this time, the theme will not make much difference to the success of your website, since you will not be getting much traffic at all to it. Therefore, my advice would be to concentrate on content. Once you start to get traffic coming to your website organically, then look to improve the website design. Just take my website, FreePoemAnalysis.com where this was the theme for the vast majority of its life during the start up phase:

You don’t have to tell me, I know the design is awful! It’s so plain and just, well, plain. But, I didn’t care because I wasn’t getting traffic for people to see this! Once I did, I then invested time and money to get a website theme that was good for the traffic I was getting, which is what is still on the website even today (18/01/17).

Set Up Social Media Channels

Before your website becomes popular, it is important to get the Twitter page, Facebook page and more set up so that the infrastructure for your website is there when it starts to become successful and use social media as another source of traffic. This is critical to Twitter since getting a username can make or break a Twitter page: if you don’t get your first choice username.