1.Support your blog with good SEO.
If
you are considering using your blog to boost your search engine
rankings, make sure your blog supports all of the features that search
engines want to see in your content, such as explicit, unique title tags
and good meta description tags.
2.Get stats on your blogs performance.
The
same way you want to know how your website is succeeding, you'll also
want to know what's working on your blog. How many page views and unique
visitors are you getting? Where are visitors coming from? How do they
find you in search engines? Which posts and categories are most popular?
You can either use the analytics software your blog hosting company
provides, or install Google Analytics. WordPress.com has its own stats
tool and self-hosted WordPress has a Google Analytics plug-in that makes
installation relatively simple.
3.Schedule automated e-mail updates.
As with most
marketing, you have to do it consistently in order to maximize its
value. But consistency can be awfully time-consuming. This is why we
love technology! Feedburner and Feedblitz are two great tools to use
that simplify your blog e-mail marketing. They both will take care of
two major tasks for you: 1) enabling visitors to sign up to receive an
e-mail when you make a new post to your blog; and 2) automatically send
an e-mail each time someone posts to your blog.
4.Download the TweetMeme retweet counter.
This little tool
is a quick and easy way to get your posts re-tweeted to show their
popularity. Note that it doesn't work so well if your title tags are not
unique.
5.Help people find archived blogs with categories.
Make it easier to
find things on your blog. It's great to have things organized by date
but this isn't particularly intuitive to a reader who is looking to find
out what you write about or looking for help or answers on a specific
topic. Use categories to help readers find what they're looking for and
put the categories in your sidebar. Don't be afraid to put a post in
more than one category. Remember the categories are for your *reader* so
make them as intuitive as possible to the reader.
6.Set up a RSS Feed.
Feedburner and
Feedblitz can also help you set up a feed and do all kinds of neat
things with your feed. But most blogging software comes with an internal
feed tool. If you've ever wondered what RSS is, it's a feed that
collects articles and content from different online magazines and
websites, similar to myAOL, iGoogle or myYahoo. It allows you to see the
most recent headlines from CNN or Inc. or The Economist
without having to visit the site. The headlines are clickable. Click on
the headline and it takes you to the article. Neat! You may also want
to add links to related articles that you like and want people to read
also.
7.Stop spam with (re)Captcha.
Captcha is the
tool that asks users to type in a set of letters or numbers before
submitting a form. This tool is now available as a plugin for websites
and blogs. (re)Captcha is captcha with a conscience. While commenters
are typing in the confirmation text, they are also helping to decipher
text from very old books being saved by digitizing them. If you allow
comments on your blog, you will definitely want some sort of spam
defense. Even though it will not eliminate all comment spam it will help
A LOT.
8.Keep an eye on your comments.
Commenting
is an important part of the two-way dialogue you want to develop with
your readers. Tap into the voyeur in all of us. Make sure that people
who make a comment will be notified when others comment on the same
post. Also, if you open your blog to comments (which you don't have to
do) you must review the comments. You will get spam. Spam looks silly on
your blog. You will want to prune your blog of spam on a relatively
frequent basis depending on how much traffic you get.
9.Link to your clones.
Make
sure that if people like your style they have ways to connect with you.
Enabling them to subscribe to your RSS feed and automated e-mail update
is great but how about you on Twitter? You on Facebook? You on
LinkedIn? While you may not want to promote all three of these choose at
least one and close that loop in the relationship with your reader.
10.Add language to hook your readers.
Make sure to
include at least one call to action statement. Provide some indication
of what you want people to do if they like your blog. Just read more?
Consider hiring you? Buy a book? Come see you speak? Shop at your store?
Make sure they know the next step..
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