7 Essential Things You Should Be Doing When Your Blog Is Still Young

These days my blog, Zen Habits, no longer has the problems of finding its identity and finding an audience … but there was a time not too long ago when Zen Habits was just a baby going through the inevitable growing pains.

And yes, I remember struggling to find new readers — to just let people know I was even there. The early days of a blog are the toughest, by far.

But they don’t have to be. When a blog is still young, just as in childhood, it can be freer, carefree, and fun. Everything is a learning experience. Best yet, a young blog has endless potential — it can be anything (except perhaps President of the United States).

So if you’re the owner of a young blog, here are seven things I recommend you do, based on my experiences:

1. Create amazingly useful content. This is the most important thing you can do the first month or two of your blog’s existence. The next item (branding) is also important to think about as you start, but in terms of how you spend your time, writing amazing and useful content should be 95% of what you do. Your design, ads, technical stuff … all that can be worked on later. Right now, write your butt off. Create tip-packed posts that will knock the reader’s socks off. Read more: What Makes Great Blogwriting?
2. Create a great brand. When you first create your blog, you should think a bit about the brand you’re going to create. When you create a brand, you are sending an unspoken message. What unspoken message do you want to send? Start by defining your target audience, then by figuring out what desires you will tap into. Then craft an unspoken message that will be true to yourself while tapping into those desires. Use that unspoken message to craft your brand (the title of your blog) as well as everything else you do, from blog design to post topics to the tone you write with and more. Read more: Branding 101: How to Promote Your Blog Like the Big Guys Do.
3. Network with other bloggers. When you first start out, you might not know many other bloggers. Rectify that situation by commenting on other blogs in your niche, and sending friendly emails to other bloggers whose blogs you enjoy. Offer to collaborate with them, to do guest posts for them (see next item) and in general be helpful and friendly. Develop a relationship with other bloggers — it’ll pay off in the long run.
4. Write guest posts. One of the absolute best ways to promote your blog and your brand, and to find new readers, is to write guest posts on other blogs with readers who are among your target audience. Of course, it’s hard to get a guest post slot on big blogs when you’re just a little guy. So start with blogs that are just a little bigger than you — if you have 10 readers, go for a blog with 100-200 readers. If you have 100 readers, go for a blog with 300-500 readers, and so on. Before you start doing guest posts, however, be sure to have 10-12 solid, powerful, insanely useful posts on your blog. You want your new readers to come to your blog and be struck by a great first impression. Every guest post you write should be as amazingly useful and tip-packed as the ones on your blog (see first item).
5. Experiment and have fun. Once you’re a blogging powerhouse, you have thousands of readers’ expectations to live up to. You have to put up great content every day, and each word is scrutinized. So take advantage of your youth as a blog — have a blast! Experiment, try out different writing techniques, imitate other blogs, try humor and rants and moving personal essays. Try to write a post that will become popular in the social media. Find your voice as a writer. Seek inspiration and write whatever you’re inspired to write.
6. Get out there, often. Now is the time to start becoming more visible, and to spread your brand as much as possible. Comment on many other blogs, participate in blog carnivals, send links to other bloggers and see if they’ll share them with their readers, participate in contests. Be visible.
7. Seek out your potential. You can be anything you want to be when you’re just starting out. Figure out what that will be. Aspire to great heights, and seek to raise your level of blogging each step of the way. Find your path to greatness as a blogger. Try new paths, and find what fits you. Follow your passion, your inspiration, and above all, enjoy the journey!

The Power of Blogging with A Long Term View

It’s a long tail to the top if you want to blog and win.

How many times do we see headlines like “get rich blogging” or “1 post a day is all it takes.” Blogging has long been sold as a panacea to everyones ills, but the reality is often far from the hype.

On The Inquisitr recently I took a look at 10 Myths of blog marketers and debunked them all, but there’s one interesting one I want to take a step further here on Problogger: the time it takes to establish a blog.

Take it as a given up front that you will not get rich overnight from blogging. But how long does it take? I’ve always subscribed to the view that any blog needs a good 6-9 months to establish itself based on my experience in previous blogs and blog networks. The Inquisitr ended up being true to form, and it was our 7 month that things really took off in terms of traffic and actually making a profit. Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo and the founder of the Weblogs Inc blog network though thinks its longer, and commented recently that he puts the number at 2 years. The semantics may be a case of how “established” you would term a blog to be. I’m not about to spend Christmas on the Caymans from The Inquisitr, but in 2 years time…well, you never know.

But why does it take so long?

The answer is remarkably simple: long tail content.

Let me explain upfront that I’m taking liberties with the term long tail. Eric from Photography Bay touched on the subject on Problogger back in June. when he looked at posts over time, as well as targeting long tail niche topic areas.

The reality is: the bigger your archive of posts, the big your distribution of traffic is, and the higher it grows with time.

Digital Photography School

In Darren’s post November 18 on Digital Photography School he offered lots of stats and graphs, but there’s one that stood out for me: his search engine traffic graph:

Notice how over time the search engine traffic grew and grew. By no means am I precluding other facts, such as great content, extra RSS subscribers, email newsletters or any other method you can and should be using to promote your blog. But if you take away all of that, why the really steady growth over the time? The explanation is more content on the site.

The Inquisitr

To break it down some more, here’s two sets of figures from The Inquisitr, the first image shows July 2008 (our 3rd month), just before we had our first decent traffic increase. The second shows November 1-19, 2008

Notice the key difference marked is between the number of pages receiving traffic over this time: 2,210 pages vs 6,180. Yes, there are other factors involved in our increasing traffic, but having more content over time has a cumulative affect of more page views across the site.

The Base

Internally we use a term called “base” to describe the scenario of days where we have little to no content going up on the site. We try not to have any days like that, but when they do happen they tend to be on weekends. The base figure is the amount of traffic your blog gets without fresh content.

The long tail of content on your site improves your base. For example, every month our base figure has gradually gone up, from less than 1000 page views in our first month, through to 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 and today it’s around 9-12,000. In part, base is a measure of the effectiveness of your long tail of content, the more you have, the more natural search or referral traffic you’ll get on a quiet day.

Balancing quality and quantity

Some reading this will see the post as a justification to fill a blog with rubbish, and lots of it, but it’s not quite that easy. Quantity undoubtedly helps, but quality should always be a factor. You still need to gain links and search engine traffic, and putting up rubbish for the sake of volume doesn’t cut it. You need to balance both: if you’re doing 1 post a day 99% of the time that’s not enough content, but you shouldn’t be doing 25 posts a day, unless you’ve put on a team of paid writers (as I have) to generate it for you.