Getting A Blog Off The Ground – What Works?

One of the biggest challenges any blogger will face is the actual launch of their blog.  If they succeed, they will take their blog from being just another blog to something that has visitors, participation, and actual followers.

Regardless of how good of a writer you are or how knowledgeable you are about the topic of your blog, getting a blog off the ground is tough work.

When we started How-To-Blog.TV, we had a very long list things to accomplish before we felt we could officially launch the blog.  We also realized that failure in getting this blog off the ground would not be good for our careers…after all we are professional bloggers and social media consultants.

In the end, we also knew we’d need some lucky breaks.  Maybe Chris Brogan would tweet about us?  Well, actually he did!  Believe it or not, though his tweet set a traffic record for us, there have been other aspects of our promotional efforts that rendered more meaningful results.

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The Game Plan

Hannah, Matt, Jerod, and I started How-To-Blog.TV with a game plan that included a content roadmap and a bunch of ideas to promote it.  When it came to the promotion of the blog, we assumed that the usual suspects would be our best friends.  These included search engine optimization and social media promotion.

Still, I thought about writing this post since the day we started the blog.  I envisioned writing a post that talked about the power of social media and natural search, but I quickly balanced my one sided thinking and forced myself to include traditional promotional activities in our game plan.  This game plan was to include a few things that could be downright embarrassing to a social media marketer.  Still, I was committed to leaving no stone unturned.

Traditional Marketing

Before we began to focus on SEO and social media promotion of How-To-Blog.TV, I pulled the trigger on the following classic marketing materials:

• Auto Decal – For $75, I purchased an auto decal that read “How-To-Blog.TV”.  After all, my car is exposed to thousands of eyes everyday.
• Post Cards – I purchased 100 post cards to send to Small Business Development Centers in the State of Texas.
• Business Cards – I ordered 250 promotional business cards for How-To-Blog.TV
• Word Of Mouth – We all began to socialize with our contacts in the business community and talk up our new blog.

Web 1.0 Marketing

Our Web 1.0 efforts were simple.  Jerod and I decided to throw up a couple of banner advertisements on the Orangecast website and MidwestSportsFans.Com.  After all, we get a lot of traffic on these sites so we figured it couldn’t hurt.  We also began to talk up the launch of this blog in our monthly newsletter that we send out via Constant Contact.  Last, I put a reference to the blog in my email signature.

Search Engine Optimization

Matt, Jerod, and I are SEO junkies.  We are constantly thinking about search engines.  One of the reasons why we seeded the blog with three months worth of content prior to launch was to create some link bait (articles that would hopefully be linked to by other bloggers), and we also picked a few topics that would rank in Google.  We content optimized our blog posts to compete on specific keywords.  One of the tools we were beta testing at the time was Scribe and it actually became a permanent fixture in How-To-Blog.TV.

Social Media Promotion

Social Media is what we do.  Thus, it made perfect sense for us to use our social media accounts to promote this blog.  From Hannah’s presence on Twitter to Jerod’s devotion to other powerful sites like StumbleUpon, we leveraged social media to its max.  We also got lucky in that social media powerhouse Chris Brogan actually tweeted about a post that Jerod wrote.  Chris has over 100,000 followers!!

Leveraging The Power of Others

We also embarked on a couple of strategies for promoting How-To-Blog.TV where we marketed through others.   This included asking Grace Boyle of Lijit to write a guest post for us and our decision to use How-To-Blog.TV as the home of our newly launched WordPress Plugin.

So What Worked?

We’ve gotten a handful of surprises in launching this blog.

The first surprise was that the overall mix of search engine traffic versus referrals from social media and other sites was completely opposite from what we expected.  Sites like our sports blogs see over 70% of their visitors coming from search engines.  Though we’ve had some great visitors through search engines, and have ranked much better than we expected in both Google and Yahoo, only 17% of our traffic comes from our SEO efforts.  The majority of our traffic comes from social media referrals(66%) and direct visits (18%).

The second surprise is what contributed to growing our subscriber list.  Subscriber lists are kind of like restaurants.  If a restaurant looks empty, people won’t come in.  You can’t make the restaurant not look empty without people.  We caught our break with our subscriber list when the Collin SBDC included us in their electronic newsletter that reaches thousands of small businesses owners.

To be fair, each of the authors of How-To-Blog.TV have volunteered for this Small Business Administration funded organization for over 3 years.  Thus, we had built up a reputation and a level of trust inside the organization.  This single newsletter took our subscriber list from 22 to 125 over night.

We also saw subscriptions to the feed from a one click subscription link we included in the dashboard widget of our WordPress Plugin, WP-MalWatch, provide a steady increase in subscribers.

Traffic Records

We caught a few lucky breaks in our pre-launch promotional activities.

The first was the aforementioned tweet by Chris Brogan.  The tweet from this social media powerhouse led to a record of 240 concurrent users and our first 500 visitor day.

The second break we caught was when Jerod’s post comparing two popular Twitter clients hit the front page of Digg.  This was responsible for our first 1,000 visitor day.

Still, with every swing for the fences, there are standard base hit posts that bridge the gap.  Hannah is responsible for the post with the most page views that doesn’t have any promotion from Digg or Twitter.  The post is just a great article on social media and innovation.  Matt wrote the post that drove the top keyword based search.  Matt’s post is a straight forward preview of WordPress 3.0.

Summary

In the end, there is no magical formula for getting a blog off the ground.  Still, I can draw several conclusions from our experience. The first is to utilize your network of both traditional and online relationships as these can give you meaningful traction. Second, definitely target search engine based traffic but also diversify as social media can be an equally ,if not a greater ,source of visitors. Last, controlled failures are OK, so feel free to experiment.  We tried a lot of different ideas in promoting our blog.  Though we failed at a few, it was this broad reach that gave us our surprises.  Still, failure has to be controlled so be cognizant of opportunity cost.In my case, my brilliant idea of putting an auto decal on my car cost $75 and will cost me a Saturday afternoon getting it off.  I could have used that time to write a blog post and the $75 could have gone toward a few months of a service like Scribe!

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Tagged as: blog advertising, blog launch, blog strategy