It seems like the loneliest place in the world—a new blog that has no followers, no established audience and barely a website domain. However, that doesn’t mean that your goal of building a site, and traffic, and eventually profit is impossible. It’s just a matter of forming a plan, finding your target audience and maintaining quality.
First off, when creating a new blog, it’s important to prepare your site for search engines. This means creating a sitemap and installing (or inserting HTML for) a plugin for “pinging” (specifically a XML-RPC-based push mechanism). In addition, you can also join blogging directories and local city directories for their targeted markets.
Next, it’s a matter of creating excellent content. Write high quality blogs about topics that people in your market are searching for. Aim for a 1% or at least 0.05% keyword density after researching popular broad and longtail keywords. After developing content and naming each page something keyword friendly, it’s time to check your linking structure and make sure all of your pages are connected and can be easily found by a search robot.
If you want to start spreading the word there is an easy way to do this—begin commenting on other blogs and piquing the curiosity of readers within your market. Choose blogs that cover similar material to your own blog. This “connects you” to the network.
However, don’t simply praise the blog owner and come across as an intelligent Spammer. The best thing to do is to be polite and to either ask a question or comment on an item that hasn’t been mentioned yet. Remember, every time you comment on another person’s comments or posts you get a linkback. Sometimes a happy blog owner may even highlight you or request a guest blog exchange. You could also build your reputation by becoming part of a blog network and connecting with other blogs in your niche. You can link to them first and get their attention and perhaps they will link to you next.
Don’t underestimate the importance of social media and integrating your website with your store and your social media pages. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and the like are well known quality links, and recent algorithm updates actually favor social media pages and blogs over article directories and cheap advertising sites.
One easy way to get big traffic is to create a “resource” page, or something viral-friendly if you have the creative power. Resource content is bigger than company copy or SEO tips. These are very helpful pages to webmasters, marketers, companies and web viewers. Make sure you have plugins or links on your page allowing people to easily share these resource pages.
Last but not least, don’t undervalue incentive. Contests and giveaways make the Internet world go round!
