How to Fast Track Your Blog Start-up

Today, I’m going to share a few great tips I have for anyone who wants to fast-track their new blogs progress.  But before we get into the thick of things, let me make this 1 underlying thought of mine very clear:

“You need to select your blog marketing tactics with great care!”

Here is the reason: Some of the tips I’m going to present to you may or may not fit your business modal.  So I suggest that you continually “assess” and “refine” your blog strategy as your blog evolves.  You see, strategies that make sense today, may not make sense for you blog tomorrow.

Here at Hultar, you will notice that we deliberately break away from the common beaten path that so many bloggers follow?

Why?

Because currently, we have more clients than we are capable of serving, and this scenario has been present since the first day we opened out doors.  (A good problem to have.) This is why we have temporarily stopped our blogging efforts while spending most of our time creating company wide procedures, and systems.  But without further ado, lets dive right in to 4 of the best “blogging practices.”

Tracking

You need to sign up right away with Google Analytics.  Right away!  The best bloggers in the world all do and so should you!  This tracking tool will help you attract advertisers, as well as help you monitor your marketing plans to see what works and what does not.

Get Social

You need to sign up with:

• Twitter
• Digg
• Facebook
• Yahoo! Buzz
• Technorati
• StumbleUpon
• Delicious
• Content.com

These sites above are some of the biggest free traffic sources in the world.  Facebook allows you to import your blog RSS feeds into “notes”.  This pulls your blog posts and places them on your FB wall.  This technique alone has brought many bloggers overnight success!  You want to add like-minded “friends” to your network though so that traffic is coming from somewhere.

In addition to notes, you need to establish a Facebook Fan Page.  This will allow you to network with others in your niche and post unique content to your fan page.  You can then direct fans to your blog where you provide more detailed information on the subject that you write about.

The trick with Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Delicious is to follow others in your topic, interact with them, and ask them to follow you.  I said “ask,” don’t beg.  If you are using WordPress, there are some excellent free plugins that integrate these social networks into your blog articles.  Your readers can share your articles and bring you traffic.  Now that’s what I call free advertising!

Content.com and Yahoo! Buzz work a bit differently.  Content.com has brought a few of our top clients hundreds of visitors alone without networking with anybody.  Can you imagine if they took some extra time to simply network with other users?

Yahoo!  Buzz is a bit harder and requires you to draw attention to your submitted article while getting people to Buzz up your article.  The higher the Buzz number, the more traffic you will get.  Simple as that!

Technorati is another popular traffic tool.  It is widely used by bloggers and allows your blog tags to be indexed and searched.

Get Floods of Traffic

If you have a brand new blog, or a blog that is struggling to get comments on your articles, then you need to start interacting with other bloggers immediately.

Blog commenting can possibly become your biggest immediate traffic source.  When you go to related blogs and comment, that blog owner is more than likely going to return the favor.  You will also receive their reader traffic and build links to your blog in the process.  If you have a narrow niche, then it is wise to stick to it with your comment strategy.

If you are brand new and do not have many articles yet, you might want to write 5 or more articles ahead of time so that you have the content ready to publish in a crunch.  Once you have a few articles published and commentary taking place on your blog, it is time to write more articles.  But this time, you are writing them for other bloggers.  Write your best work, and contact related bloggers asking if you can guest post on their blog.  Make sure that when your guest post is published that you go to it daily and reply to reader comments.  The link credit in your guest post will bring you traffic, but so will the CommentLuv in the discussion area.

If you followed just 20% of my above suggestions, you should have a steady flow of traffic.  Now, if you don’t take care of these things ahead of time, you will find yourself working extra hard in the future to get comments on old articles.  And that’s no fun!

Get Expert Cred

So now you have a few articles being uploaded with many more scheduled to post on your blog.  You have a few guest posts under your belt and are seeing the increase in traffic and reader interaction.  Now it’s time to establish your expert credibility even further with articles.

You can and should seriously consider writing articles for Associated Content.  Heck, they might even pay you!

Another and possibly the most popular still today article publisher, is EzineArticles.  They have the ability to get top 10 Google rankings because of the amount of unique content submitted to them on a daily basis.  Article sites also allow the articles to be republished elsewhere on the condition that the author credit be kept in place.  This can help you with your one-way link building campaign.

By this time, you will have established yourself as a serious blogger.  Your traffic will be steadily increasing and your Alexa Traffic Rank should be going to a lower level dramatically.  At this point you can slow down, write articles, make an occasional guest post, and continue to comment on other blogs.  Focus on the above tools which should be automatic for you at this point in time.  Within 6 months to a year, you can be making a good income from your blog.

Let’s wrap this all up

Every blogger makes mistakes when they first start.  If you want to make it to the big time, you have to take it seriously and implement the strategy I shared with you.  Your blogging career depends on it!