101 Blog Tips Part 2: Things to do during the early stage of blogging

In the previous blog tips post, I have given you 7 tips on what to consider and what to do before starting a blog. By now I assume that you have already decided what topic to write about, and you have chosen what blogging platform to use. Now, let us talk about what to do during the early stage of blogging. When I say early stage, I mean during the first three to four months.

Before we begin the discussion, let me reiterate that the golden rule of blogging is to ⁸write quality and original content. Even if you follow all the tips that I am going to discuss here and in future posts, if the quality of your content is poor, it is more likely that your readers will not come back, and they will definitely not recommend your blog.

The following are the things that would recommend to do during the early stage of blogging.

Early Blogging Tips

• ⁹Start with a Bang! In any endeavor, the best way to start is to start with a bang;  that is, to be unique to catch the attention of everyone.  Start with something sensational, something controversial, or something that would be very interesting to read. One blog which started great early by writing about math in layman is the A mathematicians guide to…. A lot of readers craved for more, but sadly, the author stopped blogging.

• ¹⁰Inform you friends and colleagues about your blog. It is likely that your first ten to twenty followers will be your family, friends, classmates, or colleagues; so, it is important that you inform them first. ¹¹Request them to recommend your blog to people whom they think might be interested. You can do this in person, by email, social networking site, micro-blogging site, etc.
• ¹²Submit your blog to search engines to get indexed. This is the first thing that you should do after a month or two of blogging. Although, according to blog experts, this has a very small impact for new blogs, but there is no harm in trying.  You should submit your blog to the three giant search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
• ¹³Strengthen your links. ¹⁴One fast way to get indexed in a search engine is to get back links from other reputable blogs or websites. You won’t have a lot of back links in your first three months, but you can improve your internal links. Try to link as many as you can within your blog.  ¹⁵Having three related posts link in each article is a good practice.
• ¹⁶Create a Facebook Page for your blog (see Mathematics and Multimedia’s Facebook page and ‘Like’ it to follow). Facebook is probably one of the most popular social networking site; it is an effective way to promote your blog. ¹⁷Invite your friends and people who might be interested to ‘Like’ your page. ¹⁸Like other Facebook pages with the same category as your blog. This will give you a chance to promote your blog later.
• ¹⁹Automatically post to your Facebook wall. I am doing this, since some of my friends are also math teachers and some are my students.  I have a Facebook Account that contains all my blog posts so you may want to add me up.
• ²⁰Create a Twitter account for your blog (you can follow Math and Multimedia on Twitter). ²¹Ask your friends and people who might be interested to follow you on Twitter. ²²Follow others on Twitter with the same interest as your blog topics. Once you follow them, some of them will follow you in return, and hence will have feeds from your blog.
• ²³Comment on other blogs. Once you comment on other blogs, most blog comment forms have URL text boxes. This will give you a chance to get exposed to other readers by leaving your URL. It is worthy to note, however, that it is important that you read and comment about the post. ²⁴DO NOT SPAM other bloggerss, and as much as possible, do not comment like “Nice post” (I have been doing that when I was new to blogging), and then leaving your URL. Some bloggers may not approve this type of comments.
• ²⁵Create a Bookmarking account (I use Diigo). This will allow you to bookmark and share your ‘finds’on the internet. If many  people follow you, bookmark your interesting posts from time to time.
• ²⁶Write as many articles as you can. The more articles you write, the more chance getting found on search engines.  Free Technolgy For Teachers is not only popular because of its helpful posts, but because it is averaging four posts a day.
• ²⁷Create a Google Account. We will integrate your blog with Google in a future post, so it is important that you have one.

So, that’s it. In the next post in this series, we are going to discuss what should appear in the home page of your blog.

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