Starting a small blog is easy- any 3 year old can do it Question is how do you start and grow it into multi-million $$ megablog like Huffington Post http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffington_Post ? Assuming you have small budget of say about $300, you would probably have to use following method: -Get free guest expert blogger to contribute authoritative content as you do not want to blog yourself. -Utilise free/cheap and viral marketing/ promotion techniques. -Gather community of volunteer bloggers to post and later if blog becomes multi million $$, give shares to these contributors? Any other ideas?
1. start a blog ON TOPIC 2. Have great design - people should die for it (keep SEO in mind) 3. hire 20 people (good writers) 4. Make that 20 people to write 2 blog posts per day (ON TOPIC + something useful to reader) 5. That means in 1 month = (20x2) x 30 = 1200 blog posts per month 6. Spend $500 for advertising per month (at least for first 6 months) <= advertise on search+social tools 7. In next 1 Year from today - You are a Mega...Mega...Mega...Blog Do this work ? i believe YES !
Content is king. Keep it original and of a high quality, soon you'll find people not only linking to you but discussing what you've written.
Very good points but the OP said they have a $300 budget. Not sure this is possible with that budget. Instead I guess you could trade out something of value to the bloggers like links, future earnings, etc. OR....just save up until you can do what MrVen states. Good game plan.
LOL. Sounds like a good plan but very expensive. 1200 blogposts per mth and assuming they are above average quality posts, may have to pay at least $5 per post so that is $6000 for content. Plus $500 for marketing so that is $6500 per mth. For 6 mths, that is $39K . OMG. If have $39K budget, can do many more projects instead of just 1 blog. Your plan may work but probably need to pull in investors with deep pockets who are willing to fund it.
Unique quality content is of course very important. Then you have to spread your blog via social bookmarking and blog link sites and blog toplists and such.
I saw this sort of idea on "wall stree- money never sleeps", you need BREAKING news and doing a wikileaks would help. Do some under cover work and gather all the dirty stuff.
Easy. Before starting the blog, be famous like Arianna Huffington. Then, just the fact that you are starting a blog will get tons of press and publicity, be featured on national TV, etc.
This is the #1 reason. The OP needs to be Huffington or someone well known. Famous people automatrically create traffic for their website.