From time to time, a new blogger comes across Lazy Man and Money and sends me an e-mail. Typically they have only a handful of posts and are looking for is a link to their site. I like to see a plethora of posts before giving my stamp of approval. Instead I offer them something better. I would have traded 100 inbound links, to have this information, when I was starting out
1. There’s Blueprints for Financial Prosperity’s 25 Steps To A Wildly Successful Personal Finance Blog. Here are some of my own thoughts:
- Buy the domain from FX Domains, where you can get private registration for less than $2 a year. It can be nice to be anonymous.
- Get a theme that allows for WordPress widgets. Widgets are an easy way to add great functionality.
- Take the date out of the permalinks and just use the title. This can be a personal decision, but I really like the clean URLs you see up top and it’s really hard to change after you get too far along
- I want to stress the read and comment on other blogs. I do this almost exclusively and I find people come to my site because they read a comment posted on theirs. A good place to start? Each day I try to read PFBlogs.org’s Popular Posts. I leave comments when I can find something to say, which is almost always.
2. When you are done with that there’s The Simple Dollar’s Building a Better Blog for 2007 Series. More of my thoughts:
- You’ll notice that “SEO doesn’t matter” contradicts the previous article. I’d say it’s worth spending two hours learning about when you start and maybe 8 more two months later. Overall, it’s not going to make or break you, but it can definitely help. Just put 90% of your focus into your writing, 9% into your design, and 1% for things like SEO.
- I’d like to emphasize the idea of not cluttering your site with ads and not blending them to trick the user.
3. Lastly there’s one more series you have to read. Free Money Finance brings you How to Get Your Blog to 100,000 Visitors and Beyond.
- I loved the part about picking popular search terms for your domain name. I don’t know how popular Lazy Man is, but I’m pretty happy with my choice.
- I like the idea of including your blog in your e-mails, but if you are going to be anonymous, this might not helpful.
- Join a Network? I need to listen to this myself. If you are a new blogger though, you shouldn’t worry about this for some time.