Get social.
Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for your blog, it’s time to get engaged. You have great content and you’re tracking your visitors. Now you need to get out to the community and interact. If you’re focusing on the gaming niche, do things like hit up gaming forums and talk about the games you’re playing. Don’t blatantly advertise your blog. Just put it in your signature. People will click on it, I promise.
Be creative when you’re baiting people to come visit your site. Back on gaming: if you’re playing, why not set things up to do live casts of whatever you’re playing. People can interact with you while you’re trying games out and that entices users to visit and subscribe. You can take the archived video and turn them into posts later.
Commitment
12 hours or more.
Constantly be Producing Content
Back to that content thing. You’ll most likely see this every week for the rest of the series and then beyond. This is the groundwork and foundation that your website rests on. Without nice, high quality content people won’t have a reason to visit. Try to vary things up a bit. I have three major topics I focus on with mine: diet, exercise, and motivation. I try to hit at least one a week, and never three of the same one in a row.
Twitter
Search.Twitter.com is a powerful tool to interact. You can use this to find out what people are talking about in your niche(s) and correspond with them. You want to be spending at least an hour a day doing this. If you’re not an expert, use it to find experts and ask questions. You can also aggregate news stories in your niche that you find. This will provide value to your followers as well.
There are some more advanced ways to interact with Twitter that I won’t go into here. There are all sorts of things you can do, like setting up bots to aggregate information for you to using services to respond to high volumes of followers. I just want you to know that they are out there and I might cover them in the future.
Facebook
You should definitely have a fan page for your blog. You can do one of two things: if you have brand awareness already you can just create a page for your blog; if you don’t, you can create a page about the niche for your blog. What does that mean? It means that if you’re in the gaming niche and you blog is: MyGamingSite.com you could either make a fan page called: 1) MyGamingSite.com or 2) Playing Video Games. The latter will attract more likes from people that don’t know who you are.
You can then leverage that population to advertise your site. When you reach a higher level of traffic, you can create a new fan page for the same blog and name it whatever the site is. That fan page will be much more targeted and convert better when you’re soliciting your fans, followers, and users. You should spend at least an hour a day conversing with people on Facebook and creating awareness of your pages.
Problems I Had Last Week
I didn’t really have any problems last week. I did change my mind about some plugins, etc. That was mostly a function of response to the post I did about plugins. That wasn’t anything major. I’m mostly talking about plugins that added widgets that could easily be HTML in a text widget. For example: Feedburner subscription boxes.
How are things going so far?
Please let me know if this was useful to you and how things are going. I’m truly interested in helping you do this and want to help you along the way.