So I'm starting up a fresh round of blogs as part of a joint venture with a big client of mine & I wanted to do to things: 1) Share what I normally do to get a blog off & running so that it produces solid ROI within 1 - 3 months and then continues growth as rapidly (yet solidly) as possible and 2) Ask if you guys wanted to share your tips to make this thread something of a resource for new people starting up their own hosted WordPress blogs Whaddya say? Wanna pitch in? Here's what I generally do because it's worked well for me (this is a brief summary I will probably miss points here and there): Get good hosting (this is a given, but still - I don't like using WordPress.com hosting even if it is a bit of a boost in terms of traffic at the beginning. It's a hassle). Then I install the blogs (duh) but I avoid having the host do it in 1 click because I find it a lot harder to monkey with the installation later. Then make sure you change the password and delete the Hello Dolly stuff, etc lol Next, I try to make sure I don't skip an About section, put in the Privacy Policy (needed by Adsense) & make sure all the directory structures are as simple as that version of WP will let me make them be. I try to come up with good categories that make sense to the reader, also - I think this helps in SEO. Then it's time to move on to plugins. I think a sitemap is essential so I make sure that's installed & running well. Then I go for an SEO plugin & Adsense plugin (but I don't turn that on right off the bat). An SEO plugin is helpful, but honestly I don't think it helps THAT much - I just do it to be on the safe side. If the blog will have a Twitter, I get that connected in. Feedburner gives me decent results so I've used that in the past - I don't know if these latest blogs will or not. Once everything's set up I do some posting.. say 2-3 articles scheduled out.. then I ping the blog and/or tweet about it. There's lots more to do but these are the basics - what about you guys? Any big absolute-musts for your blogs? To me, it's all about the contents & then promotion after the set up phase. If you have good stuff people want to read then they'll generally start trickling in with ups & downs until it makes its money back pretty fast. Maybe we can make this into a helpful blog starting thread - one of many on DP that helped me. So fire away and if this helps, feel free to say or maybe rate the thread!
rather than creating the pages and posts with errors or all at once, My tip is build the site locally or on a site which has the SE's blocked, pluilish to your hearts content refine the pages for the best appearance and when you have atleast 8-10 pages which you are happy with kick your site off, as mentioned above remove the unneccessary posts from the default install, then copy your posts into the new install, save the posts as a draft and then schedule them to publish, this technique is better when you have 20+ posts/pages as you can drip feed and google will keep coming back