Building a Blog/Site That People Will Read

I have several family members and friends who have asked me about starting a blog or website that will get a lot of traffic. It isn’t an easy task. In fact, this blog currently only gets a few hits per day. It is a new blog and I haven’t even let friends and family know about it yet. My own wife doesn’t even read it. Up until now I have focused my energy on other projects and sites for clients. I figured if I can do it for others I might as well do it for myself. Weekly, I will share how many subscribers there are to this blog. I will also post how many twitter followers I have for each of my two accounts. I will then also share what works and doesn’t work.

I invite you the reader to join me in the journey to build a blog that actually gets read. Here are a few basic tips and words of advice.

1. Content, Content, Content: Search engines like fresh content and people like fresh content. It takes discipline but try to post new content at least 3 times per week. People tend to also like predictability. If you’re going to post often try not to slack on the quality of your content. Think about your readers or potential readers as you write.
2. Join a community. Whether it be another blog you like, a forum, flickr group or meetup group, join and participate. Build some good contacts and find people that may be interested in your topic. Try not to constantly tell everyone to check out your blog. Just get to know them and contribute your opinions, ideas, skills and the rest will follow as long as you include a link to your site in your signature.
3. Track your progress. I recommend Google Analytics. You will want to pay attention to how people are finding your site and what content is most popular. This will help you learn what is working.

Start with these tips and each week I will share new information. In future posts I will discuss other tools that can help bring people to your site and get your name out there. Facebook, twitter, digg, technorati, youtube, etc.

If you haven’t created a blog you can start one at http://blogger.com or http://wordpress.com You can also setup your own domain. I recommend registering a domain at http://godaddy.com you can get a .com domain for about $7.50/year. Be sure to search for godaddy promo code to get the best deals. I recently used the code OYH7 to get a .com for $7.50/year If enough people are interest I will write a post dedicated to actually creating a hosted wordpress blog with your own domain.