Six Steps Towards a Successful Blog Strategy
- Establish a branded url for your blog.
- For example, if your company’s name is Twelve Horses, then you will want to register blog.twelvehorses.com or twelvehorsesblog.com.
- Obviously, our blog url is twelvehorses.typepad.com. If we could go back in time, it would be done differently. But now we do not want to lose the valuable google juice we have built up for this url. Don’t make the same mistake!
- Burn your blog’s branded url on Feedburner.
- Feedburner helps you manage your RSS feeds, and offers great stats on how many subscribers you have and Live Hits you are receiving.
- Once you burn your feed, take the feedburner url that they provide you, and change out the automatic feed with the Feedburner url. For example, in wordpress it is typically located in the header, sidebar, and footer.
- Now bloggers can easily subscribe to your feed and add it to their RSS aggregator of choice.
- Add Google Analytics
- Google Analytics is a very robust and free site tracking software that will provide a detailed look at the traffic you are receiving to your blog.
- Sign up for a free account, and add the script Google provides you just above the <body> tag. For example, in wordpress you can simply put it in the Footer.
- Begin Posting to your Blog
- You need to get some content on your blog.
- Get at least 3-5 posts down so that you demonstate some reason for bloggers to visit your site on a regular basis.
- Submit your blog to Technorati.
- Technorati is a blogging search engine that allows you to tag your blog and your individual posts for greater search relevancy. It also shows you your overall ranking in relation to other blogs, and what other blogs link to you.
- Once you claim your blog on Technorati they will provide you with a piece of JavaScript to place on your blog (typically the sidebar).
- Technorati will recognize the code and immediately begin spidering the content on your blog.
- Set-up a Sitemap
- Google started a site map program a while back, which is an xml file that maps out the content on your site and the frequency that it is updated.
- Last week Yahoo and Microsoft released support for Google Sitemap protocol, which now allows the top three search engines to easily index and spider your site’s content.
- For more information on sitemaps, as well as how to set one up, visit sitemaps.org.
These six steps will put you on the way to a successful blog strategy. Look out for a future blog post with more helpful tips to further your success.
tags: feedburner, technorati, google analytics, sitemap, blogging tips and steps, blog strategy, twelve horses
