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
- Sign up for Technorati.
- Establish yourself as an expert in your field.
- 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.
- Add others in your industry to your blog role (only if you actually read them).
- On other people's blogs start making relevant comments without SPAMMING.
- Use trackbackspingbacks as a a way to further a conversation.
- Speak to people in a non-commercial, human voice. No corporate "We." A blog is not a press release.
- Measure and set traffic goals.
- Illicit comments and interaction by asking questions and offering remarkable content.
- Optimize your blog meta title at the bare minimum by using descriptive keywords.
- Make the blog apart of your site's main navigation.
- Get links to individual blog posts by writing and submitting related articles to article sites linking directly to the permalink URL of the post.
- Use social bookmarking sites: Reddit.com, Digg.com, and Stumbeupon.com on every new post and encourage your network to do the same.
- SEO your blog posts using dozens of SEO plugins available.
- Be interesting.