promote-a-blog > phase 1

OK, with a bit of luck you’ve read the bigging up a blog post I wrote a few seconds ago, so now it’s time to get straight into it.

Here’s the article whose instructions I’m going to follow: Calling All Newbie Bloggers! This one has the advantage of being aimed at people who have Blogger blogs (like me).

Here’s what I have to do:

1. create my blog on Blogger.com, and set it up nicely

er … already done that.

2. submit the blog to search engines, and verify it through Google Webmaster Tools

OK then.

[time passes]

Right, I’ve just checked, and my blog is already listed in Google, Yahoo and Live Search. That’ll do for me.

[more time passes]

Site has been added to my Google Webmaster account, and I’ve verified it (dead easy). 

3. Open a Paypal account and put in some donation links in your blog. 

On the Main Page of the blog show only an expandable summary of the posts followed by a Read More link. This makes the main page load faster.

Er … no.  I’m not trying to make money from this, and I can’t be arsed to change the template to get rid of posts from the front page.  Sorry

4. Burn your blog feed at Feedburner.com and copy the new feed url and paste it in Settings>>Site Feed>>Post Feed Redirect box and save. Now you will be able to know your full subscriber count. Put in a prominent Feed Icon at the top of your blog sidebar so viewers can subscribe to blog updates.

OK – done that now.  My feed address is a href=”http://feeds2.feedburner.com/feed-voodoomike”>http://feeds2.feedburner.com/feed-voodoomike

5. Lastly add content regularly at least thrice weekly.  Do not make very long posts and add pictures and videos inbetween to break the monotony. Add Labels and social bookmarks to all posts.

No problemo. I do most of that anyway (or, at least, I will do).  I’ve already got a social bookmark tool – it doesn’t add a link to every post though.  Maybe I’ll sort that out.

Right, that appears to be it for now.  I’m sure there’s more stuff on that site which is aimed at promoting a blog, so I might look at that later. However, for now I’ve done everything (well, nealry everything) that this article suggests.  Next I’ll get another article and follow its instructions instead.