What Now!!!
So your blog is now all setup, you have you Online Social Identities at the ready, autoposting and other integrations are all done and the question you are asking is: What now?
I will outline some of my thoughts on what is next but you have to appreciate that I have only just got to this stage myself and I have used the process of building my own blog to create these instructions to help me and othersas I go.
What not to do
This is important to get a well liked blog by both Google and the general internet public:
- Popups - People hate these
- Too many adverts - It is ok to have adverts (if you want them) but dont over do it.
- Keyword adverts - not sure what this is.
- Blackhat SEO - This will get your blog penalised.
Don’t be scared to changes things
- If you change categories, slug format or other stuff that might affect Google rankings, don’t be scared to make the changes as Google will sort itself out. You most likely will only make major changes at the beginning anyway.
- I would advise not to make these changes lightly or all of the time. It is true things will sort themselves out but you should only do this when absolutely necessary.
Social Marketing / SEM
Now you have your site up and running your need to advertise it or push it, 'just because you build it, does not mean they will come’. It will take a while for Google to find/index your new site/blog and this is especially true for new domains.
- Create a site map and submit it to Yahoo/Bing/Google
- Google Analytics (does help despite what people say because Google knows you site exists and is run by a human)
- Make sure Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media are linked correctly.
Newsletters
- Having a newsletter can be good thing if you dont send them out all of the time.
- A newsletter when you are a blog is most likely just going to be a list of recent articles, so you will might not need a seperate newsletter in this case. The 'newsletter subscription' could just be a wrapper for the blogging system article updates.
Monetise
General Advertising methods will be discussed in another tutorial.
- Disqus with advertising.
- Google/Bing/Yahoo advertising
- Affiliate Links
- Links to your own products
- RSS feeds with adverts via Feedburner
- Newsletters (with stuff in them)
- Cloaked links (where you see an ad before going to the link) – not a fan of these
- Direct advertising banners
- Sell your own advertising
Running your Blog
Just some general ideas that need a mention. I might add to this as I go.
Writing Articles
long articles: pagination / long page / separate articles
when you have to split an article into many parts, it is acceptable to use 1 folder as you might reference the same image through the article, imagine an article like 1 large word document.
All images and media will be stored in
Blog Attribution
This is a worked example of blog attribution ssing this orginal source Article - Repair a Broken Ethernet Plug: 10 Steps (with Pictures) | instructables
- Search on google for articles 'Ethernet cable plug repair clips'
- And you will see the primary article from instructables heavily copied but everyone has a link back to the original article. Usually it is the article title hyperlinks or the websites domain name.
- Example Articles that uses the instructables article in some way.
- Repair a Broken Ethernet Plug with Zip Ties | Lifehacker - This uses an image from the instructables article but with some of its own text. The article is short and its main aim is to point you tot he instructables article.
- How do You Repair an Ethernet Cable with a Broken Locking Clip? | HowToGeek -This is separate article but in the comments it uses images and text from the instructables article but does give links back to that article.