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You are here: Home / Author Blogging 101 / Top 10 Tasks to Get Your Blog Ready for Prime Time

Top 10 Tasks to Get Your Blog Ready for Prime Time

by Joel Friedlander on November 26, 2012 24 Comments

New blogs are popping up all the time. New writers, new authors, new businesses and new ideas find a friendly space and set up shop. Authors are encouraged to use author blogging to help build their careers.

There are lots great reasons for authors to blog, and I think most writers understand that right away.

But when you get started, you face a sort of dilemma: your blog exists to host visitors, but when will it be ready to start inviting people to come over for a visit?

Well, you wouldn’t throw a party for special and important guests if you don’t have any furniture yet, would you? So you don’t want to start marketing your blog and trying to build an audience if you aren’t ready for visitors.

Even though you can start a blog any time you want and post your first article in minutes, both you and your readers will enjoy it a lot more if you’ve put some basics in place first.

First impressions count for a lot, and your typical web surfer is pretty quick to come to a conclusion about your new site. That’s why it’s a good idea to be ready before you try to get traffic to your sparkling new articles.

So here’s a list you can bookmark and refer back to that will help you if you’re just warming up a brand new blog.

You don’t have to treat these items as absolute requirements, but the more of them you have in place before throwing open your doors, the more confident you can be that you’ll show your best side to new visitors. You’ll encourage comments, send readers to your “archive” to read more, and sign them up as subscribers. It’s all good.

Top 10 Tasks to Get Your Blog Ready for Prime Time

  1. 6-10 Posts—This one should be easy, since you want to have a collection of at least 6 to 10 articles already on your blog. These should all address fundamental ideas, definitions, or principles of whatever your blog topic is. Presented properly, these are what we call foundation content, evergreen content, or pillar content.
  2. Title & byline—You probably thought of a title for your blog when you first decided to set it up. But do you have a good tagline? This brief statement, often found in the header of a blog, helps orient new visitors right away to what kind of approach they’ll find in your articles.
  3. Plugins—This blog runs on WordPress, and while the software is outstanding, you still need to install a few crucial plugins to keep things running well. For instance, the first plugin I install on new blogs is the Akismet comment spam eliminator.
  4. Subscriptions—It takes a lot of work to get people to visit your blog. It would be a shame if they just came and, even if they liked your articles, simply left again. Blog subscriptions allow people to stay in touch with your content without having to remember to keep checking back. This is essential to building your audience.
  5. Opt-in—You could consider this another subscription, but it’s very different. You want to sign up with an email provider, a company like AWeber or someone else, and put an opt-in signup box on your blog right from the beginning. No matter what goal you have for your blog, an email list is likely to be critical to helping you achieve it.
  6. Customization—There are hundreds of cool themes available for WordPress blogs, many of them free. Once you find one you like, whether free or a premium theme, you want to make it your own. At the minimum, you can create a graphic, or hire someone to create one for you, and add it to your theme to give you a custom header. It will be the beginning of your blog’s branding, and you won’t look like every other new blog out there.
  7. Submit to Google—When you have a new site it’s very important to get noticed and indexed by Google and other search engines. After all, this is how many of your yet-to-arrive visitors are going to find you. Whether you submit a sitemap or get links from more mature sites, or both, you’ll want make sure you’re getting noticed.
  8. Create basic pages—One of the great things about WordPress is the way it allows you to create static pages as well as posts. For instance, you need to have an About page and a Contact page at the minimum, but you might also want to have a page for each of your books, for a media kit or to offer services.
  9. Copyright—I don’t know of many bloggers who copyright their blog, but I believe it will become increasingly important to content creators. The process is a bit complex (see this post) because blogs are completely different kind of publication than existed when copyright was invented, but you can still do it. If nothing else, make sure you have a copyright notice on your blog, like the one in the footer at the bottom of this page.
  10. Policies—You may or may not be ready to put your privacy, comment or other policies in writing yet, but it’s a good idea to give them some thought. If you plan to stimulate discussion, it might be good to have a comment policy in place right from the start.

Looking over this list, I think you can see that a blog that’s been prepared for visitors, even if you’ve only done half of these 10 items, will be a more welcoming and richer environment for them when they arrive.

Time to start finding those readers and inviting them over.

Photo by danzo08

Filed Under: Author Blogging 101, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: Author Blogging 101, author platform, blog setup, blogging, self publishing, top 10

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Elaine Baldwin says

    May 7, 2013 at 8:39 pm

    What subscription plugin do you recommend? Feedburner or something newer?

    Reply
    • Joel Friedlander says

      May 8, 2013 at 10:02 am

      Hi Elaine,

      It’s my understanding that Google will be retiring Feedburner at some point, so you might be better of with Feedblitz.com or by using a mail list company like AWeber who can also delivery blog subscriptions.

      Reply
  2. Tom Evans says

    November 29, 2012 at 10:26 am

    I’m wondering when and if Amazon are rolling this out outside the US …

    Reply
  3. Louis Shalako says

    November 29, 2012 at 5:46 am

    I used to put a copyright notice on all my blog posts, but at that time I was getting less than ten hits per story and it seemed a bit presumptuous. You’re probably right, though.

    Under the blog title I put a bunch of key words, another valuable SEO tip. In a given week the SEO traffic can be considerable without posting and re-posting material. Another thing is just to keep on topic. I resist the urge to go on political rants. If I wanted to do that, I would set up another blog, and keep it focused, but since it’s about the books, for me, there’s not much point in it.

    Reply
    • Joel Friedlander says

      November 29, 2012 at 10:18 am

      Louis, thanks for your comment. Yes, basic SEO is vital for getting search traffic. Although copyright is inherent when you create your posts, I still think it’s a good idea to publish a copyright notice on the blog because the lack of one can lead people to the faulty assumption that you don’t mind people copying your material.

      Reply
  4. Tracy R. Atkins says

    November 26, 2012 at 11:18 am

    Great advice as usual! If I had anything to add, it would be to setup your blog in a place where you own your content and don’t fall under someone else’s terms-of-service. Free blogging platforms are nice, but they may close up shop or remove your site for any number of reasons, or none at all. Hosting is cheap and all major hosting providers will install WordPress or similar for you without any hassle.

    Nothing worse than getting your blog rolling and discover it has vanished from the face of the Earth one morning.

    Reply
    • Joel Friedlander says

      November 26, 2012 at 1:51 pm

      Tracy,

      Excellent point. We don’t want to become—in the words of Brian Clark—“digital sharecroppers” where we do all the work but the land is owned by someone else.

      Reply
  5. Michael N. Marcus says

    November 26, 2012 at 3:40 am

    Retail stores often have “soft openings” about a week before their “grand openings” to make sure everything works right and looks right and employees are properly trained.

    A soft opening is good strategy for blogs and websites, too.

    Before you announce your new creation — and risk embarrassment or even financial loss — look it over carefully and live with it for a while. Maybe ask for comments from trusted advisers. Make any necessary adjustments — or even scrap it entirely, rebuild it and rename it — and when you are content, then tell the world.

    Michael N. Marcus

    NEW: self-publishing company parody, http://www.99BuckBooks.com
    http://www.BookMakingBlog.com
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    http://www.Facebook.com/SilverSandsBooks

    Reply
    • Joel Friedlander says

      November 26, 2012 at 9:23 am

      Michael,

      The voice of experience, and other readers should take your advice to heart, so thanks for that.

      Reply
      • Michael N. Marcus says

        November 27, 2012 at 9:22 am

        Here’s another tip for the same price. View your blogs and websites with multiple web browsers, multiple monitors, PC and Mac, tablets and smartphones.

        Reply
  6. Bonnee says

    November 26, 2012 at 1:13 am

    Those are definitely some good basics to think of, and I wish someone had told me about them when I first started. I had to wing my establishment, but I got the hang of it. Blogging is a really good way for authors to connect both with each other, with others in the industry and with a potential/dedicated readership, but making that first impression always makes it easier. Thanks for sharing and hopefully someone who needs this information will find it.

    Reply
    • Joel Friedlander says

      November 26, 2012 at 9:22 am

      Hi Bonnee,

      I’ve often used lists like this one to help me get organized, so I’m hoping it will be of use to people just starting out with a blog.

      Reply

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