Foundations For Blogging Success

ARTICLE BY James Costa | POSTED ON December 31st, 2009 | Blogging, Marketing | 13 Comments

This month has been a roller coaster of a ride for our blog. We’ve gone through having an unexpected amount of traffic that has caused our server to crash quite a few times, and had a load of people giving us helping hands to get our articles out there. Truly, this blog has been a goal for a long time now. To have it running is such a relief, but it doesn’t stop there!

I always said to myself (and the team) that once we got the blog running it would be downhill from there. I’d prepared months in advance for content, marketing plans, and more. We’d had everything laid out in front of us even before I started designing. Still, others told me that the design and development (all 40 hours of it) was going to be the easy part.

I didn’t believe them, but here we are, a month later. We’ve gotten over 4,500 unique visitors with over 7,300 page views. We have over 200 subscribers via Facebook, RSS, and Twitter. Surely this is a landmark for us – but it took a lot more work than whipping something together and posting a few posts. I found out pretty quickly that there are hundreds of other blogs doing exactly what I’m trying to do. There’s a lot of competition.

While most of this competition may be purely friendly, it’s something to be aware of. I like to relate blogging to owning a dog. You say you want one because they’re cute, fun, and are always there for you. You don’t get them because you want to take them for walks, buy their food, take them to the vet, etc. There is a lot of responsibility that comes with having a dog – and likewise, a blog.

So here’s a list of some tips I came up with to help all the people (like us) who are trying to start a blog and don’t know what to expect, or want to be prepared for it.

Install Analytics – But Don’t Look At It

That’s right! I’ve been wanting to use Mint for the better part of three years now, and I finally have a project I can use it on. So what’s the first thing I do right before launch? Install Mint on the site, and add a widget to my Dashboard on my Mac. On top of that, I install Ego on my iPhone that allows me to check my analytics from the road. I even went so far as to bookmark the Mint dashboard on my iPhone so I can check out how my site is holding up at different points during the day.

So, as you can imagine, everywhere I look and everywhere I go, I know how my blog is doing. It’s a little sad, and my friends have found it a usual point of conversation for me to scream out when I’ve hit a certain mark of visitors during the day.

But (as I’ve been oft told), this is very unhealthy. You wake up just to check how you’re doing on your feed and analytics. You get very excited when you’ve got over 200 unique hits in a day, but you’re hanging your head in shame when it’s noon and you haven’t hit 100.

What I would suggest is to get a friend to change the password of your analytics program, and only let you have the password a month or two later when you’re a little less stressed. I find that in constantly checking my analytics throughout the day, I get overanxious and I let it affect my day and my work. Analytics is like the stock market.

Unrelated to analytics (this doesn’t really fit anywhere else), don’t look at your site either. This might be hard, but the only two places I look when working on my site is the Mint dashboard and Wordpress dashboard. I don’t like to look at the site because I know if I do that I will want to revamp it or add features. Before you launch, take a look at your site and figure out what you want to add or change, and choose when you’re going to make those changes. Other than that, sit tight and relax!

Be Ready to Change For Your Visitors

Before the blog launched, I had been posting 10 tweets per day, one every hour, five days a week. In doing so, I had about 100 followers that were complaining to me about how often I was posting. I also saw a huge fluctuation of how many followers I had since I posted so frequently. What I decided to do after a few days of the launch was to send out a survey (obviously through my beloved Wufoo) to friends and coworkers to find out what they thought about our habits and what we could improve on. What we got out of that 5 minute survey was a priceless amount of data that gave us ideas on how to market ourselves over the coming months.

Today, we have almost 200 followers on Twitter. While that may be nothing special (with blogs averaging anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000+ followers), it showed a massive improvement over a short amount of time.

Have Some Content Ready For Padding

We’ve heard this one time and time again, so I won’t go too far into things with it. Before starting a blog (really, before you should even start development), write at least a month’s worth of content. This will not only tell you that there is enough content for your blog, but will prove that you can do it. This doesn’t mean that for the entire month you won’t be doing anything else, but for that month you can worry a little less about the next article and worry more about the one four weeks from now.

We wrote about ten articles before starting the blog, for example. We actually went so far as to team up with Matt, our dedicated editor (and fresh meat in Germany!), to help us out with planning out the content, the writing, and obviously finding all my terrible grammar-related mistakes. If you know a content writer or another blogger, do what you can to keep them with you. Not only do they remind you and push you to keep working, but they’re a huge heap of help when it comes to pushing out quality articles.

Have a Schedule

I find one of the best things for me is having a schedule. I have a seven day post week schedule. This means for every day of the week I’m posting somewhere different. On Sundays, I post our weekly “Sunday Special” Round-Up that consists of our favourite tweets from the week. Mondays and Fridays I find myself working on some photojournalism-related articles that show my exciting adventures. On Wednesday and Saturday I work on my own personal tumblog that showcases my favourite music, or me talking about something that I’m adamant about. Of course, that leaves Tuesday and Thursday for two posts on this blog.

The reason for this is twofold: One, I find I like giving my users a consistent schedule for my posting. This way, they can expect to have three fresh posts from The Phuse’s blog every week. On the other hand, for me this keeps me with the challenge that keeps me going. I schedule posts a long way ahead of time. That’s why some bloggers may find e-mails in their inbox days to weeks before I post an article related to them informing them that they’ll be mentioned

Form Allegiances

You definitely can’t do it yourself, so start making some connections. Here are a few ways you can do this:

• Comment on other people’s blogs. Not only does this give you a good chance of getting recognized by others for your well thought-out comments, but you might find yourself with a new client based on them liking what you said. This being said, make sure you’re posting relevant comments that aren’t just two word “awesome article!” comments (although those are nice to have every so often as a blogger). People will be so interested in what you said that they’ll want to find out who you are.
• Tell people that you’ve mentioned them in articles ahead of time. Make them prepared for the fact, and they’ll oftentimes help you push the article. I’ve made a large amount of my partnerships through these weekly e-mails I send out for people who are mentioned in the “Sunday Special” Round-Up.
• Most of us who have been in the field for long enough have a good amount of contacts to help us out. Make sure you keep these people in touch with what you’re doing, and use them when you feel the time is right. When it’s appropriate as well, offer them something back in return.

Use Social Networking to Your Advantage

The Internet is huge. Sorry to say, but by just posting, no one is going to see you. Getting out there is part forming allegiances, and part social media. For us designers and freelancers, there is a myriad of different places we can post our content. Make sure that as soon as you post, you’re tied into these different third-party sources. I find myself 15-30 minutes before a blog post goes live getting all these places ready for the post so that when it goes live, all I have to do is hit “Submit” across 20-30 tabs.

As well, make sure that you’re using Twitter to your advantage. Before the blog launched I started gaining interest in others and started to form a following by posting resourceful articles through it. That way, when I started the blog I wasn’t starting off with nothing. When the blog launched, I immediately started interacting with others and started posting notices of my articles through it. I also got these allegiances I made retweet my posts so that their readerships (often with thousands more followers than ours) found out about the blog as well.

Everyone is on Twitter nowadays so it’s hard to avoid it. There are other social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Delicious that you can use, but I don’t find them to have the same amount of return. Hell, if you’re launching your site as well, make sure you’ve submitted your site to the design galleries out there. That might not get you as much readership, but will get you a good amount of page views!

Write For Someone Else

Let’s face it: Your blog is out there trying to do what the big blogs are doing. The thing is, the blog things have the advantage of being around longer, having a lot more money from ads, and have 10,000 to 50,000+ more subscribers than you do via social media. Not only can you make some good coin off of writing for others, but you get some awesome traffic as well. Just make sure that when you’re getting this surge of readers that your blog is ready for it (this means your server, too), and that you push out fresh content during this time. Yes, timing is everything, and make sure you align your guest posts being published with your blog’s schedule.

I have personally been asked to write for blogs like Web Designer Depot and Six Revisions, and love to work on articles for my friends over at UX Booth. I try to maintain an average of 3-5 guest posts per month which not only helps pay for diapers, but also gets me a large wave of traffic. And hell, this brainstorming is something I’m oftentimes doing already for my blog. If they don’t want an article to be posted on their blog, I can use it for mine. You don’t have to be asked, though – If you go to any major blog with some ideas for articles, most compensate their writers for the time they put into articles.

Editors for these blogs usually ask for you to pitch them article ideas before you write them. I like to spend an hour to brainstorm ideas and do some research. I bookmark all the resources I need to write the article, print them off, and put time into my articles. What this results in is quality articles for these different blogs with a lot of thought put into them.

In writing for others you’re creating a name for yourself out there and wanting people to find out more about you and where you frequently write. Make them want to check out what you’re doing and interested in keeping up with you!

Keep Writing, Keep Thinking

Writing isn’t the only thing I do (although lately it seems that way). When I’m working and interacting with others, I get ideas for articles through everyday experiences. I like to keep a nice long list of article ideas in Basecamp that I can use. This means less work for me later when I need to write, as I can pick up where I stopped with some idea.

Don’t Write Articles Last Minute

This ties in with writing a months worth of articles before you start the blog. I try to keep a week in advance of my articles. This is easy because I have a schedule that keeps me in line. I try to have routine with my blog entries. I choose an idea from my database that I want to write about, and on the first day take 10-20 minutes to do research, brainstorming, and print off some documents to read over. The second day I hack out a first draft, oftentimes edit it, and a day or two before the post goes live I style it and make any finishing touches with graphics, etc.

This means I have a lot of time to think about my articles and I’m not feeling rushed to push out things. I also find myself doing less round-ups and list posts than the competitors, which I think other people like.

Create Community

This is something I don’t think I’ve been doing enough through the comments here because of how little spare time I have. I find that through RTing other people’s articles, I get a good amount of people message me back asking me to comment on the entry if I liked it. I also found that when I comment on some blogs, the owner takes time out to e-mail me asking me what I liked about the article, what I’d like to see, and thanking me for commenting.

This makes a community that wants to interact with the site more than just reading an article and blindly retweeting it. Some have said before that as writers we need to hit our readers in the beginning, in the middle, and make them excited at the end. Give your users a reason to comment as well with systems that show their latest blog entry from their website, contests, or by spurring discussion at the end of your article with a heavy-hitting question.

Creating community can also be through social media and interacting with other blogs, retweeting others, and just having general conversations.

Improve, Improve, Improve

None of us are perfect! I always like to ask people I guest write for to help me by critiquing my work and suggesting ways of improvement. Also, while I do moderate all comments on this blog, I like people who challenge what I have to say and call out my mistakes. The field of graphic design and development is so large it can be intimidating to write for – but I use it as a way to improve my writing and to improve my work.

Make Sure You Know Why You’re Doing It

Without motivation, you’re not going to want to write, and by forcing yourself you’re going to only suffer. If you have a post schedule, missing a day or a week won’t make that big a difference if you need to take time off to improve. While you may lose some readership, you’ll only gain more in the long run through having quality entries.

In our opening article we posted why we are doing what we’re doing so our readers know, and we have it there as a constant reminder.

Anything else?

We’re a month in and we’re still learning, so this is a small list of only some of the ideas we’ll come up with down the road. What suggestions do you have as a blogger?

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