My Thoughts on a Blog in its Nascent Stages

A friend e-mailed me asking about advice for building his blog....based on my experiences here, here are some thoughts.

(If you are detecting a pattern with my blogging, it's that I'm so busy with moving, etc, that original content is going to be a little rare for the next while....)

There are a few steps I would take:
  • First is to post links to your blog from whereever people read about you: linkedin, facebook, a-twitter, etc. Your blog's first audience are the people that are interested in you, and by extension, your blog.
  • Second, I would install something that tracks your blog's traffic. I use sitemeter, which allows me to see the patterns of visitors/pageviews. It does this by posting a little image on your blog, and then recording every time your blog (and that image) is loaded.
  • Third, you want to reach people that are interested in your topic. That means finding other political blogs and commenting with your blog in the "website" or "link" title of the comment field - this will leave a link to your blog. Your website should have a quick, easy-to-recognize name/URL - willslack.blogspot.com is short and sweet.
  • Fourth, you want to make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog via RSS, etc. Google/Blogspot makes this easy with a default link.
  • Lastly, I would make sure that your blog has a strong design / content that makes it memorable - I try to have lots of interesting links up and down the rightblog  hand side, and while I'm not super-focused on visitor counts (I don't update enough for that), I do hope that my blog's content has some use to people - which is why they come back every day.

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