Online Paintball Retailer 'I've got a blog, what now?' - 16 Blogging Quickstart Tips

Recently, a paintball gun eccomerce site owner asked a question many business owners ask, "I've got a blog, what now?" His question has been repeated in its original form below and my response follows. These 16 blogging quickstart tips are meant to: increase traffic, encourage community, get better search rankings. -------------------------------------------------- Subj: Blog is up but what now? Alright I made a blog site, but I am a little confused on what to do now. I have pinged all of the major places that I have been told but I am wondering what this does? Do they index the posts in there search engine or what? Do I need to do anything else right now or how does it work? perrier ---------------------------------------------------- My Response By visiting your website, I can see you have installed a Wordpress blog. Many of these tips apply to blogging in general, but some specifically are for Wordpress. 16 Quickstart Blogging Tips

1. Sign up for Technorati.
2. Establish yourself as an expert in your field.
3. Offer non-commercial content, commentary on industry news, lists, How Tos. Examples: A.) 12 Paint Ball Gaming Strategies for Beginners B.) C.) Top 25 Best Paint Ball Fields in the US.
4. Add others in your industry to your blog role (only if you actually read them).
5. On other people's blogs start making relevant comments without SPAMMING.
6. Use trackbackspingbacks as a a way to further a conversation.
8. Speak to people in a non-commercial, human voice. No corporate "We." A blog is not a press release.
9. Measure and set traffic goals.
10. Illicit comments and interaction by asking questions and offering remarkable content.
11. Optimize your blog meta title at the bare minimum by using descriptive keywords.
12. Make the blog apart of your site's main navigation.
13. Get links to individual blog posts by writing and submitting related articles to article sites linking directly to the permalink URL of the post.
14. Use social bookmarking sites: Reddit.com, Digg.com, and Stumbeupon.com on every new post and encourage your network to do the same.
15. SEO your blog posts using dozens of SEO plugins available.
16. Be interesting.