Today we are posting Part 2 in a series of posts by Blog for Profit on how to create a successful blog.
The Right Foundation to Build Upon
You are at a point in your marketing plan where you have decided to start a blog as one of the components of your marketing. Lets pretend for the purpose of this exercise you are in the very early stages of trying to decide what to do as far as a blog. You don’t know what design you want, nor do you know for sure how you want it to look. You may not even know for sure what you want to blog about.
And you certainly are not sure how you will even get traffic to your blog once it is up and going. You are also not sure what you are going to blog about and how those blog post should look. You have been lurking around some the blogs out there, but have really done nothing more then lurk. You have not participated in the conversations nor have you involved yourself in any social media nor social networking at all.
You are just starting to consider the base of our diagram below and want to make sure you are building the right foundation for your blog to be successful.
You need to ask yourself, am I really ready to start my blog? Am I ready for what it will take to make sure my blog is successful? Before you get to a point where you are doing a design and picking a designer to do your blog, there are some critical activities you need to engage in. Activities which will certainly help you to build the right foundation for a successful blog. In this post, I am only going to cover a few of them and we will continue with building the foundation in subsequent post.
What are the activities I can do to help my blog have a successful launch?
Start off by searching for and finding other blogs in your niche. Use such tools as Google’s Blog Search for starters. Find the blogs in the niche or market you are thinking about blogging about. You can search for any blog topic you want and it will give you a list of blogs on that subject. As a new blogger, you need to be reading as many blogs as you can. And those blogs should be in the niches or areas you are thinking of blogging in yourself. Consider the writing styles of these other bloggers. What do you like and dislike about how they write their post? Also, pay attention to how they might be linking out to other bloggers in the post and how they are using quotes and these links.
Look at the design styles of these blogs. What do you like and not like? Keep a notepad handy or use an Internet tool like Evernote to keep a record of your blog surfing. This record of your blog searching and likes and dislikes will come in handy soon.
Just because your blog is not up and going does not mean you should not be out there reading other blogs and participating in the conversation in your niche.
Listen to the conversations which are taking place on these other blogs. Now that you have found some of the blogs in your niche or market, you need to be listening to the conversations taking place on these blogs. If you are going to “listen” to these conversations you are going to have to take advantage of the tools available to you to make this easier.
I have been blogging now for almost 4 years. In the process of blogging, finding the conversations and listening to those conversations, I have come to rely heavily on RSS and you need to do the same thing. If you are going to follow any number of blogs and try to listen to the conversations on these blogs, I just don’t see how you can not use RSS.
There are those who are trying to read blogs and do there own blog, who are still bookmarking blogs and actually visiting the blogs they have bookmarked one at at time. Don’t do it. One of the greatest time savers you can use to keep up on these blogs is to use RSS.
When you think of RSS, think of it as your news stand where you have subscribed to a number of blogs. Or think of them as magazine subscriptions in your news stand if you would like. By using RSS, your subscriptions will be fed to you and funneled into your RSS reader of choice. The new articles or post will come to you and your RSS reader will alert you if there are new ones. You will not have to take up your valuable time going to each blog one by one to see if there has been an updated post on it or not.
In explaining RSS to individuals and our clients, I am always on the look out for good blog post from other bloggers. And recently in my own RSS reader I was alerted to “What is RSS and How to Use Google Reader.” Google reader is just one of the RSS tools you have at your disposal. And the post I am mentioning does a great job of showing you how to use it.
Now that you have your reader set up and feeding you your subscriptions, watch the feeds and listen to the conversations going on. When you see a post headline or summary you think might be of interest, go read it and don’t forget to checkout the comments on the post. I know from my own experience and even from my own blogs, sometimes the comments are better then the actual post itself.
Listen to as many of the conversations taking place in your particular niche or market and pay attention to what is being talked about as you can. And while you are listening to all the post and conversations happening, you need to take the next step.
Engage in the conversation which is taking place on the blogs you are following. I often am asked by individuals who I suggest this to “should they be engaging in the conversations when they don’t even have their blog up and going yet?” And my answer is always yes.
Start projecting your blogging voice now by engaging in these conversations. What I am simply suggesting is for you to start commenting on these blogs. However, don’t leave a comment unless you can leave something of value. Too often, I see blog readers leave a comment like, “Great post, thanks for posting it.” This type of comment adds nothing to the conversation, nothing to the blog you are commenting on and it certainly adds nothing to getting you noticed. In fact, I moderate my comments and it is sometimes hard for me to hit the approval button on these comments.
Providing a more thought out and relevant comment will start to get you noticed by these other bloggers and they will remember you. While you don’t have a blog URL to put in the comment area, they will still remember you. And once you have your blog up and going, and you have your URL in the comment area, they will notice and come visit your blog. At least that is what I do and I know others who do too. (I will post more on this in future post in this series on activities you should be doing to build your blog once it is live).
The key is to engage in the conversations which are taking place on some of the blogs in your niche so you can start now getting noticed as a “thought leader” in that niche. I cannot stress enough the importance of doing this one activity in building the foundation of a successful blog.
In subsequent post in this series we will discuss other activities you can do to start to position you as a “thought leader” and/or “opinion shaper” in your niche.
What’s next?
In the next post in Building a Successful Blog, we will continue to discuss building the right foundation for your blog. Take a look at the bottom of our diagram above and you will see some of what we will talk about. In the meantime, here is your home work.
Use Google Blog Search and find at least 10 other blogs in your niche. Read “What is RSS and How to Use Google Reader.” Using Google Reader as you RSS reader, subscribe to those 10 blogs and start to follow the conversations taking place on them. Read the post that jump out at you and take a look at the comments too. Jump right in and leave some relevant comments on at least 3 or 4 blog post that add to the conversations taking place. Leave your comments on this post with your own suggestions and/or questions you might have. And finally, make sure you subscribe to Blog For Profit so you don’t miss out on future post in this series. Also don’t forget to subscribe to the Blog For Profit Newsletter. We include information in the newsletter we don’t feature here on the blog.
Be sure to check back for Part 3 and check out Blog for Profit