Welcome to day number 9 of starting a blog. Yesterday, we walked you through the process of adding categories in WordPress and uploading every post that you have written thus far to have ready to publish when your blog finally launches tomorrow. I know from experience that this 10 day period of starting a blog has been stressful, strenuous, and extremely trying on your patience, but there is an end in sight, and you will be pressing that magic button to launch your blog tomorrow.
Write another Blog Post
Day 9 of starting a blog starts out with…you guessed it; writing another blog post to have ready and in place for when you launch. The more posts that you have ready to go, the better off you will be, and the less you will feel pressed for time during that first couple of weeks of when your blog is live and other activities start to eat up your time. With plenty of posts in reserve, the pressure to write during that first couple of weeks will be lifted. But of course, after your blog goes live, if you have the time available to write, keep those writing juices flowing and write as often as you are able.
Setting up your Social Media presence…
After you have written your blog post for the day, you will now want to open your social media accounts and create your fan pages and profiles. A blog will not survive without a social media presence. Not to mention all of the extra backlinks that your blog will generate over time as visitors share and like your content among their social media circles.
Opening all of your social media accounts will most likely take up the rest of your day, depending on how many that you open. But for each one, you will want to take the time to fill in any and all personal/professional information that that particular social media account asks for so that your profiles are as complete as possible. If users happen to stumble across your account, you don’t want to have an incomplete profile and lose that potential friend or follower. You want them to hang around as long as possible to learn more about yourself and to find the individual blog posts that you have published to each account.
Unfortunately, since every social media account operates and functions differently, we can not provide individual tutorials to walk you through the process of setting up each account at this time. We will in the future. But the process for each should be pretty self-explanatory. If you need help, Google the topic and I am sure that someone somewhere has already provided step-by-step instructions.
Now, you most likely already have accounts opened with some of the social media accounts that you are going to use to promote your blog. And any others that you choose to open will be up to your personal preference, but the following is a breakdown of the social media accounts that I use personally to promote my blogs. Many of these are not going to be of any surprise.
I would be shocked if you do not already have a Facebook profile. The question will be if you want to use this profile to promote your blog. Some people do and some people do not. If you do not want to use your existing profile and wish to keep your blogging business separate, open a new profile. Once that is completed, you will need to create your Facebook fan page. Again, I stress the importance of completing each profile and page with as much detail as possible.
Again, you probably already have a Twitter account, and whether or not you plan to use this account for your blog is up to you. I personally opened up a new account to promote BloggerGo because I wanted to better brand this blog. And to do so, I created a BloggerGo Twitter page instead of using my personal twitter account. However, I might add that I tweet my blog posts to each account. It does not hurt to generate a few extra visitors by tweeting to more than one account.
Google+
Google+ is Google’s attempt to jump into the social media frenzy and compete with Facebook. This is a relatively newer social media experience, but has a huge impact on search engine ranking and results within Google’s search engine. Again, you will want to create a profile page and also a business page to promote and brand your blog.
In my professional opinion, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are the “Big Three” social media accounts to take advantage of for blog promotion. However, others would argue that LinkedIn is just as important. From my personal experience, LinkedIn has not done a lot for me to help promote my blogs and drive extra traffic. But also at the same time, it can not hurt. So for this reason, I do recommend using LinkedIn and publishing your blog posts to your account. If it drives extra traffic…great, but if not, LinkedIn is still another backlink.
Other Social Media Accounts that we use
The rest of the social media accounts that we use are more along the lines of social bookmarking sites instead of services that provide a social media experience to connect and share with friends. We recommend opening the following accounts and publishing every blog post that you have ever written and will write in the future to these accounts.
- Digg
- StumbleUpon
- Delicious
- FriendFeed
- Myspace (only because this is an easy one-click sharing service)
Last but not least, more and more people are beginning to jump on the Pinterest bandwagon. I have not used this service personally, but plan to in the near future. We recommend opening your Pinterest account.
There you have it; day 9 of starting a blog is complete. You have written another blog post to have ready for when your blog launches tomorrow, and you should have a good grasp and foundation for launching your social media campaign to promote and share content among many of the popular social media services. The above list is not a complete list (you may wish to add others), but is a comprehensive list of the accounts that we use personally to promote our blogs. At the very least, these suggestions are foundations to build upon.
Tomorrow will be day number 10 of starting a blog, and finally the day that you will be pushing that magic button to launch your blog and open it up to the search engines. You have worked extremely hard these last few days and you should be proud of your efforts. Check back in tomorrow, and prepare for 1, 2, 3, Launch!!!
