Yesterday we covered part 1 of how to start your very own blog. If you have not read it yet I recommend you give it a look.
3. Pick software to publish your blog content
This is where I had received a recommendation from my friend Michael that WordPress was the leading blogging software. Not to make this an advert for WordPress but I have used plenty of open source, community based, php tools in the past and I would rank this one of the best. It is very slick and setting up is very easy for anyone with even a small amount of technical experience.
In addition you can easily and quickly install new themes and plugins. Overall from the decision to launch a blog until being technically ready was several hours.
Themes are personal taste plus differ from blog to blog due to their goals. So far I have only installed a handful of plugins to assist with syndication which we will touch on later.
- Twitter Tools – Lots of twitter options were available as I was browsing for some twitter friendly plugins. Twitter tools offered what I was looking for and drives a great deal of the syndication by automatically posting new entries to Twitter.
- WP-SpamFree – A robust anti-spam plugin to silently prevent spamming of comment sections. The jury is still out on this one as this is a young blog but on paper it sounds good.
In addition to WordPress itself, having additional software helps on the editorial side. I use Microsoft Word to draft the posts (Openoffice.org is the open source alternative) and WordPress 2 for iPhone to make sure I can manage the site remotely.
4. Devise an Information architecture and publishing plan
Having a strong idea of where your content is likely to go will really help you in the long run. I spent around 30 minutes iterating on the categories, both current and future, that are to be used on the site.
Having a clearly defined set of goals with your categories of content already mapped out helps you think of articles to write as well.
Before you actually write any content having a clear idea of your first few days, weeks, months (depending on how often you update) will make it much easier to get off the ground and not abandon it after one or two entries.
As the original plan for The Daily Nash is an update each day I even spent time producing the first week of content prior to launch to make sure there was a solid flow of content on the site each day.
If you have long articles then try and break them up into parts and do not post too many articles at once. After a blog matures it is fine to have hundreds of entries but you should limit your new content to a handful of updates. I am trying to limit this to one so there is a steady stream of content without overloading.
I hope I can keep that going!
5. Create a Communication and Syndication plan
The last pre-launch consideration you need to keep in mind is how you advertise and get your updates to the rest of the internet. There is a lot to be said about SEO, which you can find the links to in naming articles mentioned in Part 1, but today you need effective ways to push communication to people who do not even know they are your readership yet.
As I feel Twitter is such a great tool for this kind of discovery one of my core communication strategies was to make sure updates were pushed out onto twitter as soon as they were made live. Twitter Tools is excellent for this purpose but there are other ways. Another way I read about was to use Feedburner which allowed you to push updated to twitter just by using an RSS feed. This was perfect for me as I had planned on using a second twitter account to push updates about articles and Twitter Tools only supports one account at time of writing.
Why two accounts. The answer is future proofing. Currently on the site I use my personal account @m_nash to drive twitter updates both to and from the blog. Now looking at my goals one of them is to create a community and foster discussions on specific topics. If they grow to a certain size people may be more interested in the professional discussions than some of the more personal items that will inevitability appear. This allows me to then switch the professionally aimed updates/discussions onto the secondary account (@thedailynash) freeing up my personal account to continue those personal conversations.
So that is my 5 step checklist for pre-launch of a blog. I imagine seasoned bloggers will think that was only the tip of the iceberg but as a newbie that was how I saw it. I plan in the future to revisit this topic and see what the lessons learnt were.
Tune in tomorrow for a new topic!
