Starting a Blog Day 3 – Researching Competitors & Brainstorming
Welcome to day number 3 of starting a blog. Yesterday, you hopefully wrote your introductory blog post including information about yourself, who you are, family life, and what readers can expect to see going forward by visiting your blog in the future. We also covered the task of finding an effective WordPress theme that fits into your personal preferences and meets the navigation and usability needs of your future visitors.
And by now, you are most likely still waiting for that 48-72 hour period to expire as your domain propagates and is ready to use with your web hosting provider. Hopefully, this period will finally expire sometime today, and you’ll be in the position to move forward with installing WordPress on your server. But if you happen to be closer to the 72 hour mark, this process should be complete tomorrow. Regardless, there is still much that you can be doing during this downtime. So let’s get to work!
Writing another blog post
Day 3 of starting a blog starts out with writing your second blog post. From here on out, you are going to see my emphasis on writing content. Content is King, and supersedes all other blogging efforts. A successful blog is built on an increasing number of daily visitors. The time that you spend researching potential tools and plugins, tweaking site performance and layout, and all of the other time-wasting activities that bloggers can easily get sidetracked with, is not driving traffic and growing your blog audience. All time spent on activities that are not focused on writing blog posts is counterproductive.
Additionally, you will want as many pages and blog posts (emphasis on blog posts) as humanly possible for when your blog officially launches. An empty site is like a quiet cemetery at midnight. No visitor is going to have an urge to revisit a blog that gives the appearance of emptiness.
So today, write another blog post. Cover a topic of your choice, but something that is related to the topic and purpose of your blog. Be creative and take your time to provide quality information. Even though you wrote your first blog post yesterday, that was a practice run to get you acquainted with the idea of writing content. Even though your personal introduction is a nice touch, visitors did not arrive at your blog to read about you. They will arrive at your blog to read whatever information or opinions that you might share on whatever topic your blog is intended to focus on.
Once your 2nd blog post is completed, go ahead and save that to the same location on your computer where you saved the first. You’ll be uploading those posts into WordPress in a few days.
Time to research your competitors
The rest of day 3 should be spent brainstorming ideas. The best way to do this is to visit competing blogs that serve the same niche as your new blog. Take a look at their site, colors, layout, categories, navigation, information they are offering. Find strengths that you like. Find qualities that you dislike. This is not intended so that you can copy them (bloggers hate copycats), but will give you a better overall picture of “what to do” and “what not to do” on your own blog.
If you are feeling adventurous, reach out to the site owners in the form of comments or through their contact page. Introduce yourself, ask questions, get advice, and provide additional information or a different perspective on a topic covered in a blog post that they did not previously cover or mention. The key here is to make friends. Although these are technically your competitors, these are going to be the same sites that will in the future link to your content, and share your content through various social networks, etc.
Blogging is one huge social environment, and it behooves you to make as many online friends as possible, especially in the niche that you are serving. Share the love, and the love will be reciprocated in the form of backlinks, likes, tweets, +1s, etc.
Also, while you are lying awake tonight with insomnia, begin brainstorming different blogging categories that you intend to use. How are you going to categorize your information to make it easy for visitors to navigate and locate relevant and related content? Categories give you a good opportunity to group related content and topics, and also give you direction on what you are going to be writing about day-to-day. What are your categories going to be that are related to the overall picture of your blog? What are the subcategories going to be?
Call me a blogging nerd, but these are the sort of things that I think about when I am having a sleepless night. Might as well use that restless time wisely!
Finally, your third day of starting a blog has come to a close. Be prepared for day number four tomorrow. Have a great night and we’ll catch up with you tomorrow.
1 Comments on "Starting a Blog Day 3 – Researching Competitors & Brainstorming"
Interesting and useful information.Let’s try it!