12 things you MUST do after starting your first blog
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Twelve simple ways to promote your new blog.
1. Add an About Me/Contact page
2. Submit to Google, Yahoo and MSN
3. Replace the default template with something better
4. Register your feeds to as many rss directories as you can.
5. Install All in one SEO and Akismet spam filter
6. Sign up at technorati and claim your blog
7. Comment on five other blogs with subject similar to yours
8. Add the address to your forum signature and reply to 5 threads
8b. If you don’t frequent a forum with interests close to your subject, start now.
9. Stumble your main page on StumbleUpon
10. Submit an article to Digg & Reddit, and ask some friends to vote it up
11. Add your blog to a blog directory
12. Sign up for Google AdSense, even if you don’t plan to have ads right away
October 5th, 2007 at 7:24 am
Good selection of tips, though I am not sure I agree with your process for numbers 9 and 10. When I see people that are stumbling themselves, I immediately question the quality of the content. If the work is good, it will be stumbled/dugg/etc. naturally, eventually (or you could ask a friend to start you off).
Now, of course, there are always exceptions to the “rules” - but this is just my 2 cents.
October 6th, 2007 at 4:13 am
For me, it’s always been a good start, even a single digg will get you 15 or twenty unique visitors with each post, and when you’re just starting your blog, keeping even a small part of that digg or reddit traffic is a huge boost.
October 6th, 2007 at 10:02 am
When i begun blogging i kept digging my own articles. This got me about 40 steady visitors on the first month without any other promotion.
February 11th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
@Kate: I’ve stumbled my own posts and I’ve yet to receive any bad karma from it.
As Dennis Schipper says, it usually brings about 15 visitors to your site. If even one of those visitors stumbles it, you have potential for exponential amounts of stumblers.
Honestly, when I stumble someones blog, the last thing on my mind is to check if the blog owner has stumbled his/her own blog. It seems unimportant to me.
All 12 points seem valid to me. Thanks for the post!