3 Ways To Get Your Blog Off To A Flying Start

Blogging is such a powerful marketing tool, yet the sad truth is, it’s such an underutilized tool in the online world, often being reduced to as a tool just for affiliate marketers or, get rich quick AdSense schemes.

Whilst it’s true that there are thousands of blogs created daily, the majority of those blogs never see the light of day … in other words, they remain in the development stage or, “under construction.”

I’m sure most people ask the same question I did when my first blog was built … “I have my blog … now what?”

If this has been your experience or, you’ve taken off but you’re about to crash land, I want to offer you 3 things you can do to start building credibility through your blog, starting today.

1. Write your first 5 blog posts.

In fact, do this even if you’ve already started adding posts to your site.

Why five?

It will help build your confidence and begin the all important process of populating your blog.  And whether you’ve already starting populating your blog or not, I want you to write these next five articles with these 3 key elements about your prospect in mind:

• What are my prospects goals?
• What are my prospects fears?
• What are the problems that my prospect is facing and, how can you solve their problem

Another alternative is to consider the theme of your site, say weight loss and then pick 5 sub themes that you could speak about on the topic of weight loss.  Once you have your 5 themes, get 5 sheets of paper and write 1 sub theme on each sheet of paper.

Under each sub theme write 3 questions that you know people who are struggling with weight loss will want to know or have asked you in the past and then, answer the questions. Write a sentence or two, add a beginning and the end (just like at School) and there, you have your first 5 blog posts.

2. Optimize your blog.

Now you’ve written your first 5 blog posts, you want to ensure that they are found by your potential prospects and, picked up by the search engine spiders.  So, before you post them you’ll need to optimize both your blog and your  blog posts.

The first thing to do, is change the default permalink to either a custom one if you know what you’re doing but if not, change it to the name and date based setting.

Next, ensure your blog title includes your sites keyword.  If your site is about weight loss, ensure the keyword weight loss is included in your blog’s title.  I also suggest you include the keyword in the tagline but, it’s not essential.

If your theme doesn’t have it’s own SEO settings, I highly recommend that you use the All-In-One SEO WordPress plugin.

Now Optimize Your Posts.

Whilst you’ve probably heard a lot about SEO and how important it is to use keywords all over the place on your post, I should warn you that keyword stuffing will get you into more trouble than it’s worth and you will build far more credibilty if you write for your human readers and not the search engine spiders.  Do put the keyword in your title and, in the body of your post if possible and, if it flows well, since people will find you using search terms (keywords) in the search engines.

It’s now time to post your articles but, rather than post all five articles at once, either manually post them say every two days or, use the auto post facility found in the WordPress dashboard.  Apologies for those using any other platform, but I’m definately an evangelist for WordPress.

3.  Promote your blog

I’ve been asked to do indepth SEO and analysis for people’s static websites and I’m still amazed that although I tell them to save their money and start a blog or use other methods of traffic generation, that they still insist on “needing” SEO services.

It seems their determination comes from a fear of losing out if SEO isn’t a part of their marketing strategy.  Well my theory of SEO is very simple …

“Get Found Online!”

And, you can do this via a multitude of ways including web 2.0 promotion strategies such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, My Space, Squidoo and Digg.  You should also add your blog to technorati – the biggest blog directory online – submit articles to article directories, create 3 minute video clips with nuggets of information, podcasting, forums and, the list goes on.

If you focus on just doing these three steps, keep adding posts to your blog and, distributing good quality content to the various online services, I guarantee you’ll start building momentum, your confidence will soar and pretty soon people will start referring to you as someone with authority in your market.

Until next time,