This new blog of mine isn’t going to be about blogging. I’m not sure what it’s about yet, but it’s not that.
And yet, given that I’ve made my living as a blogger for a while now, it feels like a natural place to start as I grope around in the dark looking for a direction that feels right.
So with this post, I’ll answer a question I’ve been asked many times by readers interested in starting their own thing (and one I love answering): Do you have any advice for someone starting a blog for the first time?
I sure do. And the good news is when you boil down the (avalanche of) blogging advice out there, you’ll find that building a successful blog is really only about a few essentials. So here’s what I’d do if I were starting over from scratch, without anyone knowing who I was and without a platform I could use to get it off the ground.
7 Steps for Getting Traffic to Your New Blog
1. Publish a new post every single day for the first month.
Less is more later on, but at the beginning, writing every day accomplishes a lot of things simultaneously. It builds up a decent volume of content quickly, so that Google can start to send you traffic. It also speeds you through the inevitable “suck” phase as you find your voice — I promise you won’t have found it in a month, but you’ll learn a lot faster than if you write just once a week.
Most importantly, writing every day keeps you going: when it feels like you’re writing to nobody at first, it’s too easy to let the gap between posts get bigger and bigger until one day you give up entirely. A commitment to post every day prevents that.
2. Get a Twitter account and start posting helpful stuff.
Even if it’s just links to relevant articles you find, people value that. Use a service like Twellow to search for people who mention your topic in their bios. Follow all of them, and a decent number will follow you back. Now be cool, make friends, share their stuff, and tweet links to your own stuff every once in a while.
3. Read other blogs in your niche and leave as many insightful (non-self-promotional) comments as you can.
Spend as much time doing this as you do writing posts, if you can. Most people think you leave comments for the link back to your own site each one creates, but that’s not the real reason. Instead, you’re doing it to form relationships with popular bloggers in your niche — relationships that will one day lead to their linking to you or letting you guest post for them.
4. Focus on getting subscribers.
Don’t worry about traffic stats, and certainly don’t think about money yet. You want people to pay attention to you over time, and the way they do that is by subscribing to your RSS feed or getting your posts by email. (I’d use Feedburner to manage your feed at first, and eventually move to Aweber or Mailchimp for your email subscribers.)
Focusing on anything other than your subscriber count will lead you to make bad decisions and change course too often as you try to improve this number or that.
5. Build trust, trust, trust.
This is different from building authority, a distinction a lot of blogging gurus miss. Look, being able to write “The Ultimate Guide to ____” is a great thing. One day. But few will listen or care when you write it as your first (or tenth) post. At first, empathize. Be human, be humble, be funny … or be the opposite of all of these, as long as you do it in a way that makes you likeable and trustworthy. But of course, don’t dare be boring.
6. Don’t run ads. It’s just stupid. (I should know, I did it.)
When your blog is new and your traffic low, you’ll be lucky if those ads (that annoy your readers) earn you forty cents a day. Yes, it’s fun to make actual money on the internet, but until your audience is much bigger it’s not worth it. (This, by the way, is a consequence of both #4 and #5, above.)
7. Write amazing content.
This one is so obvious it’s kind of a joke. And if it were that easy, there wouldn’t be an overflowing graveyard of abandoned blogs. But I’ll say three things about writing great content.
First, make it about the reader — it may be your blog, but it ain’t about you. It’s about the person reading it, otherwise they won’t be reading for long.
Second, go really narrow with your post topics at first. You’re not trying to please everyone; you’re trying to absolutely delight a tiny handful of people (and those two aims are mutually exclusive, by the way).
Finally, study good content. Learn from others rather than trying to figure it all out on your own. Copyblogger and Boost Blog Traffic are my favorite sites for this.
Do it
There’s one big thing missing here. And that’s Step 0: Start. So many people meticulously plan everything out, build up some hype on social media networks, write a bunch of almost-finished posts, but neglect to do the one, absolutely necessary (hardest, scary) thing: hit “Publish.” And as a result, their ideas die without ever being heard.
To get anywhere, you don’t need to be perfect or brilliant or impossible to criticize. You just need to be brave enough to begin.