Write Extraordinary Articles when You’re Starting a New Blog
The weeks or months after the successful launch of a new blog is fairly important. While it isn’t exactly a make-or-break situation, you do stand a better chance of getting more readers or feed subscribers if you create outstanding content and market it effectively.
Here’s a scenario that many of you have encountered: You’ve just set up a new blog and picked a brilliant site design.
You decide to write several articles to fatten up the blog so you can start promoting it to others. What type of content should you create?
I’ve recently received an email from Jonathan Fields, a Blogger Tips For Beginners reader and he asked me a great question concerning the type of blog posts he should put out for some of his new blogs.
His question in full:
I am about to launch a few new blogs and will be putting together a number of big pillar posts and series posts. Do you think it’s a better idea to publish them right away or hold your best stuff for a while until there’s enough traffic for your best work to really drive social buzz on a more viral level?
Here’s my answer: Publish cornerstone content or extensive, in-depth articles and a blog series right away from the onset instead of holding them for a later date.
Here are some reasons why:
1. You Want to Market the Best Material Possible
The most aggressive portion of the blog marketing and promotional process is done within the first few weeks and months of a new blog.
In essence, blog marketing is the same as promoting or selling a product that makes you money: You want the highest return on investment for all your time spent on commenting on dozens of high traffic blogs, advertising purchases, email pitches and social media promotions.
A mediocre collection of blog posts will limit your blog’s growth. You want to put out the best stuff and intensively market it for maximal effect. New blogs usually come under some scrutiny or sizing up and you definitely want your target market to feel that your blog is one that is worth monitoring and following.
You don’t want them to think that your blog is yet another new blog and then overlook it with the thought that they can always come back to your blog once it has developed some solid content.
It is also helpful to note that most social websites do not discriminate against new blogs or blogs with very little posts. I’ve seen many new blogs getting tremendous buzz on the strength of some excellent articles which appeal to social audiences.
What this means is that the age and size of your blog’s archives do not matter if you are pursuing a social media marketing strategy.
2. You can Always Create More Great Content Later
Putting out a strong series of articles from the onset doesn’t mean that you can’t create more great articles at a later stage when your blog becomes more popular. In fact, you should.
To attract and retain your target audience, it is necessary to develop interesting and link-worthy articles throughout the life-span of your blog. This is particularly important if you aren’t just blogging for fun but for monetary profit.
In any case, producing strong material from the onset allows you to gauge the response of social media audiences, general readers and other bloggers, thereby allowing you to tweak future articles according to the feedback you’ve seen.
3. Remarkable Articles Define Your Blog Immediately
Want to create an identify for your blog? There’s no better way to show any visitor that your blog is dedicated to it’s niche topic by putting out a extensive and well written collection of articles concerning the topic.
In the visitor’s eye, your blog will become inextricably identified with the topic at hand, which makes it much easier for word of mouth recommendations. Here’s a vain example: “Hey.. do you know any great blogs about making money online? Answer: Check out Blogger Tips For Beginners, it’s new but there’s a lot of relevant and good material there.”
4. Extensive Articles Provide Reference Points
Pillar articles or a post series serves as reference points. One of the great benefits about writing extensively about a specific topic is that you have a large amount of quality material to reference in the future.
For example, Blogger Tips For Beginners is a blog about website monetization and making money online. When writing a new post, I can drop references to my multi-post series and beginner’s guide to direct advertising sales whenever I talk about topics such as website monetization or advertising in general.
It is useful to build your series or pillar articles around fairly common topics in your blog niche so you can refer new readers to your take on the specific subject in question.
Another benefit of creating flagship articles from the onset is that they are likely to attract links over time and hence gradually rank better for the specific long tail keywords that you’ve targeted (Yet another reference to an article I wrote).
What do you think?
These are my thoughts on why you should put out your best material from day one and I’ll love to hear your opinion as well.
I know for a fact that many of you have been starting new flagship or niche blogs recently, with quite a number using the ProSense WordPress theme.
Do you think its a good idea to put out your best posts from the beginning or should they be reserved for a later stage, after you’ve built up a decent audience?
What are your thoughts on this matter? Do share it in the comment. Thank you for your time
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Written by Admin on April 7th, 2011 with
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