Every blog starts somewhere. Unfortunately because blogs appear and then often disappear it helps to look early on like you’re here for the long haul. There are some easy cosmetic changes that any blogger can make to help give a new blog a more established feel.Remember you aren’t trying to decieve your readers, you simply don’t want to draw their attention to the fact that the blog is brand new. So assuming you really are going to have the blogging goods to back up your pretensions, here are nine tips to help get a blog off to a quick start:
- Don’t advertise your subscriber numbers
You may be impressed that you have 18 subscribers to your RSS feed, but chances are that noone else is. Nothing else says brand new blog with no readership than an icon proclaiming how few people are subscribed. While having no subscribers doesn’t necessarily equate to bad blog, it does means that you are now combatting the thought "noone else reads this blog, why should I?" - Get your first 15-25 posts out quickly so theres a decent amount of content on the site.
It is obvious, but I will say it anyway, the faster you get out your initial content the better because nothing makes a site look less worthwhile than it actually not being worthwhile. If your blog is literally brand new you should backdate content so that it doesn’t look like you just put up 20 posts in a single day – unless of course you plan to keep putting up 20 posts every day. - Get rid of date based archives or anything that immediately shows how new your blog is.
Lists of months with very little in them don’t do anything for you. If you’d like to archive your posts, try using categories instead and keep the categories broad so you only have a few and your limited posts are not spaced out far and wide. - Either get comments or remove comments.
When you have 20 posts with no comments it is going to look like not much is happening. Either switch them off or get some. How do you get comments on a brand new blog? There are in fact lots of options: comment on other people’s blogs, bribe your friends, create some users and fake them, get some traffic to the site by promoting insightful articles. There are plenty of other ways to get comments, most well documented. Suffice to say that you either need a few comments or if you can’t manage that then it’s better to make ‘no comments’ seem like it was on purpose. - Jumpstart things with a review, advert or some other traffic source.
As soon you have a few posts on the site, it’s always a good idea to jumpstart the blog by purchasing a review, an advert or if you can manage it traffic from some other source (social media, CSS galleries, other blogs). Since you are going to be investing a lot of time in the blog, it makes sense to invest a little money and pay to bring some people to the site. Visitors, comments and subscribers will quickly make your blog feel more established. - Have non-post content on the site as well.
Blogs are all about posts, but it doesn’t hurt to have a few static pages on the site as well. Start with an ‘About’ page and a ‘Contact’ page, but also look for other ideas. As you grow you can add pages such as ‘Advertise’ and ‘Top Posts’, but early on you need to be more inventive. Try ideas such as ‘Related Resources’ or ‘Essential Links’ for simple but useful pages. - Don’t run advertisements in the first month.
Advertising is kind of like a bad hair style. If you’re Brad Pitt you can get away with a bad hair style and maybe even make it look cool. But if you’re a high school dweeb, a bad hair style just makes you look like more of a dweeb. If your blog hasn’t cut its teeth yet, you shouldn’t cover it in ads. Aside from the fact that you won’t be making money anyway, it just makes it harder for potential users to see your content. - Make sure your content is original!
Although I’ve stressed getting lots of content fast, it should also be stressed that you need ORIGINAL content. If you are just posting news you’ve read on some other blog, there is a good chance users will come to your blog, read it and think "Ain’t nothing here I can’t get somewhere else" and frankly, they’d be right. Don’t be a follower, be a leader. If you want a successful blog, you need to be the blog that other people copy from, not the other way around.Some bloggers take the point of view that they are passing valuable news on to their readers. But remember, you don’t have any readers yet! You need to create valuable news to attract some readers so that later on you can take days off and just post other people’s hard work!
- Use Images and Diagrams
It can be hard to read text only posts, and if a user comes to your site fresh off the bat, using an image can be a great way to draw them in. It also makes your content more dynamic and the blog look richer. So get an image into at least every second post .. of course make sure they are relevant and of good quality! You can find great, cheap images at sites like iStockPhoto.
Of course the reality is that your blog will take time to get established and no amount of cosmetics will fool anyone if the content isn’t there to back it up. But following these guidelines should help your blog avoid shooting itself in the foot.
I agree about the RSS readers, it looks really depressing when a blog only has under 10 readers. I think anything over 20 is acceptable though…..
Embedded “Digg this” widgets unfortunately seem to have the same problem as RSS-subscriber badges and hit counters. Just as nobody wants to be visitor number 000007 to your site, it’s probably doing you a disservice to advertise on any given post that it has fewer than 50 or 100 Diggs.I’ve experimented with the embedded Digg widget myself a few times on Marco.org and I’ve never had any success with it. Meanwhile, when I’ve been Dugg, it was always through someone else’s submission of my articles and I didn’t embed the widget.Anyway, great blog so far. I got here from John Chow. (And I promptly bought all of your shares on Alexadex, assuming that anything linked by John Chow was probably going to dramatically increase in volume. You’ve earned me +$182 in virtual money today. Thanks!)
haha, yes i think you might be right
I’d been holding off a Digg This post until i had something suitably diggable, but i may have jumped the gun *back to the drawing board*I’ve not heard of Alexadex, but it sounds interesting, i hope i continue to earn you this virtual money whatever it is!
oh my, i just logged on to Alexadex, thats the cleverest, neatest little thing I’ve ever seen. And mighty addictive looking too! I’ve bought up some of my FlashDen.net shares
Glad to see such a comprehensive post in your first week. Unfortunately I have already put ads on my site but am contemplating getting rid of them for the time being
Hey, great blog.Just a suggestion, you might want to change the name that appears on your comments, from “admin” to your first name or a nickname. when we comment we like to get personal
this is useful. Thank you.
Good thinking batman! I’ve changed it to appear as ‘Collis’. Still getting to know WordPress a little, nice piece of software, I’ve been very impressed with the ease of plug-in installation. It really makes WP a powerful little app!!
Awesome read, if there was a Digg button i would press it.I will be using some of these techniques on my new blog i started last week (http://www.StreetMagicblog.com/
I’ve been very proud of my posts since I started adding images. However, you have to be careful of where you steal, i mean borrow, them from. Make sure you thank the site you got it from with either plain text or a link.
Pingback: Speedlinking - Reader Edition 17 February 2007
That’s a good point about images, i tend to buy mine from one of those cheap stock websites: http://www.istockphoto.com just to be sure
Pingback: CJCM and IT » Blog Archive » I made it to Darren Rowse’s Speedlinking Reader Submission
All very points.You might also want to registre at technorati, but not put a link to from the blog just yet.No one wants to see a blog that it not linked to by any others.Well done for getting a link from pro-blogger.com
Thanks Jon! Good point about technorati, i’m really fascinated to know if people get much traffic from that site? So far I don’t think I’ve recevied more than 3 or 4 visitors
Thankx for the great tips.It took me like 2 months to create a comment environment.I commented like on every blog i like for 2 and now i have few who comment back to mine….
i signed up for the reviewme but my blog got rejected…
These are some really great tips! I see there are now a few things that I need to change on my blog.
Collis I think your blog also speaks to a #10: don’t clutter your page up so much with buttons and ranks and counters from directories and such that you drive your readership crazy. I think a good, clean design that showcases your content goes a long way.
Great post. I think you should install the Share This plug-in so people can Digg your posts (and add it to other social sites).I agree with not advertising how few people are subscribed to your feed. But I did display the number when I had “only” 31 readers – hopefully that won’t scare people away
Thanks Hannes! As one of your 31 readers, I can vouch for the quality of your blog!!
I’ll check out the Share This plugin, thanks!
Pingback: Weekly Brief
Pingback: Crystal’s Corner » Saturday morning update
Pingback: I made it to Darren Rowse’s Speedlinking Reader Submission -- web hosting
Brilliant post.I immediately brought down my RSS with 6 people on it. And have started to make comments on new blogs.
Thanks JP!
No problem Collis.I love your honesty.I love the fact that you’re doing a great job on choosing your blog design and internet marketing.Sharing your insights as “newer” blogger is extremely helpful to a newer blog as myself.Warmly,JP
for some reason JP your comments keep appearing in the Spam catcher, its very puzzling
I think maybe i should switch to using captcha’s instead of the aksimet spam catcher plugin that I have installed.Well in any case I’ll be keeping an eye out for them in case 
Hi Collis,Great post, Number 8 says it all ready, and it’s the main reason I’ve been hitting your blog recently, just to read up on new AND ORIGINAL material. It’s the main reason I’ll be back again (and that’s another subscriber for your “number of subscribers widget”)
Wonderful post (I removed my subscriber chicklet with only 12 readers). I’ve read a lot about commenting on other blogs, but this list brings more valuable (original) info into one place. I see a lot of blogs when a news story hits they all pretty much plop in a few quotes and a short summary of it. I would rather do research and come up with new info.Keep up the great posts!
Pingback: thepaperbull.com » Blog Archive » 50 things I’ve learned while blogging this month
Pingback: “Regular Reads” Round-up
Pingback: NxE v2 Coming Online in 2 weeks at Web Business with North x East
Very nice point. And good discussions as well.
True true… readers never really enjoy reading a blog’s first post, especially when it is a good post, because they want to look back on previous posts.
Thanks Sriram!
Couldn’t agree more about original content. There really is no reason to have non-original content on a brand new blog, it makes no sense!
Pingback: Trekgek
Getting a custom theme designed, or making one yourself can help. People get tired of seeing the same old wordpress themes again and again.
I listened to your interview with Yaro today and took a look here just out of curiosity.Great advice about a new blog here plus I adore the design at Freelance Switch.I posted comments about both at6M Business Success
Pingback: Making a New Blog Seem More Established : Blogamental
‘Remember you aren’t trying to decieve your readers’…’bribe your friends, create some users and fake them’…lol! (though i do understand your meaning)
hehe, very true David, a bit of a conflict there
By the way David I love ClimaxDesigns, really really fabulous portfolio you have there!
Thanks for the great post. I’m personally very interested in learning how to customize WordPress with your own design. Maybe a future post could outline how to do that?
Excellent post. Thank you for the tips, very useful for a newer blogger. You recommended adding photos, is their a WordPress plug-in you would recommend for this?
Pingback: The First Months of Blogging May Break or Make You : Topic Factory
There are some nice tips here, particularly the idea about removing the date-based archives (I don’t even like them for most types of established blogs to be honest).But I think that backdating posts or faking users is a very dishonest tactic. It might be effective for a while if you don’t get caught, but honesty seems to sell even better in the long run.
I just discovered your blog a week or two and I’m happily chewing my way through the archives. There’s lots to think about in all your posts and I appreciate all the hard work you must put into them.As an artist, I always prefer blogs with a cleaner, more minimalist look rather than ones with tons of clutter but it’s good to know that there are sound reasons to keep it clean too.I’m keeping my dated archives though, I like them and I don’t mind people knowing that mine is a newer blog. I’m aiming for transparency on my blog, including discussing my numbers with my readers when it’s relevant: I’ve been doing a series of articles about how artists can use the internet to promote themselves and I’ve often used myself as an example (on the principle that my blog and my numbers are the only ones I truly know about).
Thanks a lot for the blog tips.
Pingback: Mighty Blogger - Today’s Top Blog Posts on Blogging - Powered by SocialRank
Thanks for the tips, I am about to launch a new blog, and wanted to put ads on it right away, but now I’ll put it off for about a month or so…
Pingback: Distort Your Image for Power | darksociologist{dot}com
Pingback: For Newbies: Posts For Beginning Bloggers | Webmaster-Source
Pingback: Learn From the Best | Darn Good Blogging
Great blog,I mean:really.