12 Steps to Launch a Successful Blog

This is a guest post by Ilias Chelidonis. If you want to guest post on http://www.dailyblogtips.com/, 

I decided to launch my first blog back in February 2011, I was all excited and ready for being able to share my knowledge and experience with the world. Although, in the beginning traffic was very low, after having a specific plan in place and knowing the subject I was blogging about very well, managed to reach 4000 unique visitors last month. In a nutshell, the key ingredient for a successful blog is to create great content that teaches people something, optimize the content for search engines and distribute it via social media.
I made a list of 12 steps you need to follow in order to create a successful blog. They are all coming from personal experience, starting from a single idea to creating a blog that help people learn lessons on social media, search engine optimization and blogging.

1. Decide what you are going to blog about, this is by far the most important decision in order to create a successful property. It is acceptable if the subject is broad in the beginning, as you gain more experience and learn what your readers want, you can become more focused. For example, in the beginning you may blog about online marketing in general but down the road realize that you want to focus on just seo practices or social media marketing.

2. Decide for your blog’s name. The name needs to be memorable, easy to spell and it would be advisable to include a keyword of the topics you will be blogging about, that is if you blog about online marketing and social media it, try to add words like social, media, marketing, in your domain name.

3. Get a professional blog theme, I would advise Thesis theme and Woothemes, they are very easy to customize with tons of features. Do not try to save few dollars by getting a free theme, because most of them do have limitations and do not come with support. You do not need to have a custom design for your blog, at least in the beginning, as you gain more experience and readers, you can consider that for a major update.

4. Get a professionally designed logo, it will cost you few dollars to have a designer do that but will put you ahead of competition, furthermore, readers will take you more seriously and they see you invest money and time in creating a serious blog.

5. Select a good and reliable web host, shop around for a reliable web hosting provider that can help you in setting up your blog as well, do not go for the cheapest but for those specializing in wordpress. Start with a share hosting account and if you grow big, move to a dedicated server.

6. Install few but powerful wordpress plugins. I have personally used them and highly recommend them. Avoid stuffing your blog with as many plugins as possible because they will eventually make your blog hard to navigate and make readers lose focus.

7. Install google web analytics. If you cannot measure it you cannot improve it, so make sure google analytics are on place. Check your stats often but do not get over obsessed with traffic especially in the beginning as it will not be much.

8. Write down any ideas for topics you may have, sit down 1 hour a week and brainstorm on what to blog about next week, do not worry if you eventually change the topics but having a list of idea topics will help you to stay focus. How to and list topics work the best e.g How to run an online store or 10 ways to run an online store.

9. Install social media sharing widgets and buttons, this will help your readers share your content with their friends and fans, thus bringing in more traffic and loyal readers, people love to share only content they like.

10. Optimize all your posts for search engines, make sure that keywords are on the subject title and repeated at least once every 150 words in the main text content. Use images to increase readers’ curiosity, internet is all about photos.

11. Blog as often as possible but try to have a post at least 3 times a week, do not expect to build a successful blog if you have just 1 post a week, blogs need content and lots of it.

12. Develop a system to get new content ideas. You do not need to create the content for all your posts because you will eventually get drained. Find interesting content from other resources that will help your readers learn something new and do a post at your blog, do not just tell them to visit the link but do an analysis instead. For instance, if you found a great post on another blog about Search Engine Optimization, do a 150 word analysis on the post, what is your opinion and experiences on the subject. Do not forget to add the link and the blog you found the topic.