Yostivanich

This ques­tion is sparked within me for two rea­sons, two new blog­gers entered the world. One, the com­pany that I work for has a blog that is rel­a­tively new (blog.accade.com), and my g/f is work­ing on launch­ing a blog.

1. Find a really good domain name and keep it. If you don’t have a domain name that you like and one that you can remem­ber, spell, and write eas­ily, there is no point in it. We may live in the Google cen­tury but you will still need to com­mu­ni­cate your blog to other peo­ple. Both in the form of pro­vid­ing links to all your social net­works and for other peo­ple to link to and visit your site.
2. Find a great theme and then cus­tomize it to how you want it to look. If you want tag pages, make it have tag pages, if you want author pages, build out author pages, same thing goes for just sim­ple things as mak­ing the title look exactly the way you want it to look. Plus side here if you want to learn about basic web tech­nolo­gies, cus­tomiz­ing a Word­Press theme is a pretty easy way to learn about basic web lan­guages (HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS) with­out much harm.
3. Sign up for Feed­burner and use it to burn your feeds. Trust me on this, yes Feed­burner has had some issues lately, but the abil­ity to have Google host your feeds with­out wor­ry­ing about what hap­pens if you change domains or you want to edit your RSS feeds and such makes it a great resource. Also Feed­burner pro­vides you essen­tially a Google Ana­lyt­ics ser­vice for your RSS feeds includ­ing: # of peo­ple sub­scribed, what RSS reader they use, how many clicked through on your RSS feed. Finally Feed­burner pro­vides one ser­vice that makes it impos­si­ble to beat, the abil­ity to sub­scribe to updates in a vari­ety of for­mats. Want a feed deliv­ered to your email, done, a Google Reader, Yahoo, or Mail.app cus­tomized for­mat, done.
4. Change your theme from using the stan­dard Word­Press RSS feeds to using the one that you cre­ated with Feedburner.
5. Cre­ate a Google Ana­lyt­ics account. Ana­lyt­ics will let you track your site’s vis­tors and give all kinds of infor­ma­tion on them that you never would think you would want until you have it.
6. Add some plu­g­ins. I rec­om­mend the All in One SEO Pack, Dis­qus Com­ment­ing Sys­tem, Login Lock­Down, Sim­ple Google Sitemap, Sim­ple Track­back Val­i­da­tion, Word­Press Data­base Backup, Word­Press Mobile, and WP Super Cache.
7. Write a ton of arti­cles and keep writing.