7 MUST Steps To Start A New Blog

The most common question that you should ask yourself when starting a new blog is how to get it quickly exposed to as many readers as possible. You can use Google AdWords, Bidvertiser, AdBrite, Chitika or even Facebook …to advertise your site but what happens if you do not have enough budget for such expensive marketing campaigns?

I asked myself the same question when I started this blog. It is new and maybe no one knows it if I do not take any actions. There are a lot of advertising networks out there but I do not choose any instead of using my own knowledge and experiences. You can do that too without any investment. Your blog will surely be indexed by almost search engines and traffic will definitely be generated.

How to do that?

1. Submit your URL to search engines

Most of bloggers that I have ever talked with told me that their major source of traffic are from Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. Direct traffic and referring sites are not much. That is why you should submit your URL to these search engines once your blog is launched.

Submit to Google
Submit to Yahoo
Submit to Bing

Your blog can not automatically be indexed by these search engines. If yes, it will take long time to have your blog exposed. You do not need to wait until then, just take a small action and see your immediate results.

2. Sitemap to guide search engines to crawl your blog properly

No matter what platform your blog is using either WordPress, Joomla, Blogger or Drupal, sitemap should be a MUST for any blog. You can follow these link to add your sitemap to these search engines to track its effectiveness:

Google Webmaster Tools
Yahoo Site Explorer
Bing Webmaster Tools

These tools will show you how frequently search engines crawl your sites and how many URLs have been indexed among total links of your blog…

3. Add your blog to relevant directories.

There are thousands blog directories on the internet and most of there are free of charge. You can sign up and add your blog to relevant niche directories. These directories usually require a backlink from your blog, however, it is win-win strategy and you will get traffic and backlinks from them too.

I can not list out all blog directories in this article and I will share with you that list in the near future. You can do a research with Google and following this link to get most of them.

4. Make up your blog

You hate ugly design? Most of us love professional design with standard coding and our readers do too. There are a lot of free or paid themes that you can use for your blog. If you are using Thesis theme, you can customize your layout with over 130 thesis theme tutorials. I have done this step for my blog and it looks no longer ugly.

Frankly, the first impression is very important and your first time readers can be your loyal ones too if you show them that your blog is a professional one and you are doing a real job.

5. Using some plugins as a stepping stone.

Your contents are unique and original but are you sure it can be easily and quickly exposed to the world? It can be but very slow. However, you can use some plugins to reduce your time.

All in one SEO pack
Google XML Sitemap Generator
SEO Friendly Images
Social bookmarking tools like Digg Digg, ShareThis…

These plugins will help you fix the GAP that you can not do or accidentally forgot. You can create compelling contents but you can miss something during your writing process like wrong coding, missing ALT tag for image…These plugins can do that for you.

6. Parasitic with social media and bookmarking sites

Social media and bookmarking sites are big source of traffic if you know the right way to maximize your submission. However, many of you have never thought that you could parasitic with these networks to get your articles quickly indexed and building more backlinks to your blog. If your blog is new, I am sure that your blog will quickly be indexed if your submit your first article to several sites like Digg, Mixx, BlogEngage…

I have done this successfully and my blog’s first article got indexed in just 5 minutes even not registering with Google, Yahoo or Bing. That is also a good way to build relationships with other readers and they can be your potential clients later on.

7. Blog commenting

Many bloggers are very lazy and not checking around the internet to see what blogs they should leave comments on. There are a lot of blogs that you can share ideas and feedback on their articles. However, my advice is that you should leave valued comments on high profile blogs with high PR and ranking. These HOT blogs are extremely fast indexed by Google, Yahoo and Bing and your link will have good opportunity to co-indexed too.

Don’t spam links as your URL can potentially be blacklisted and never eligible to leave comments on these sites too.

In conclusion:

If you have done all of these steps, your blog must be indexed faster than doing nothing. I have just applied all of these steps and now I can search the keyword “AZ Blogging Tips” and my blog is at #1 on Google.

If you have any suggestions, please share your comments below.