This is the tenth article in the series Blogging 101 series.
We have spent so much time looking at how we are going to prepare for this website, what blogging platforms to use, and how to integrate a social media strategy into your blog. Everything has been theory or strategy based, except for the practice of articles and even then we did not publish anything because we need to have a set of articles for “just in case”. But today is the day, we are ready to launch. Are you ready?
The launch of your website is going to take quite a bit of effort. Do you want to cannonball into the blogosphere or go through the shallow end to get acclimated? Which ever you pick, it has a different approach to D-Day and each choice has their own positives and negatives. For those who are marketing a product on your website, you want to make a splash and this will take time, energy, creativity, and really capitalizing on all of our effort so far. If this is a hobby or an initial phase that you need to get started now, you will not get the initial huge amount of views, but you could start the blog today.
We want to look at three things that you need to do to prepare for launch, regardless of which avenue you do go down.
- Pick A Date For Launch
You may have already done this a long time ago when you first decided on doing a blog, but we need to have a specific date to launch. It may be fun to poise your launch with a memorable date or something of significance to yourself or your company, but ensure that you are giving yourself enough time to have everything prepared so as not to short yourself or your audience. At the same time, do not put it too far in the future that you become bored and lose your passion for the blog. This target gives you a goal in mind and for those that will be helping you market (see next point), they will have a physical number to point towards. - Get The Word Out
We talked about in a previous post how others can help us market this blog. The launch may be the greatest time for this assistance. They already have an established audience to share your website with and you should utilize them. The best people are friends, bloggers who you have guest posted for, and if possible, competitors. When you ask them to share about the launch, give them a specific Facebook status to post, details to write a blog article, or fun facts about your blog. In marketing, this is called a boilerplate, content that is prewritten to give off the best aspects of a product. This way, people will be more able and willing to share what you have and get more buzz. - Put Your Best Foot Forward
Play to your strengths and utilize this launch date by launching your blog with high quality articles. In fact, I would encourage you to post more as much as you plan to do. So if you are looking to one article a day, for the first week or two, post two articles a day. This will allow for people to get a pool of content to know if they want to continue to visit your site. If your blogging strategy is to only post once a week, that’s fine, but that first week will be really boring for your viewers to only have one thing to read. You may lose a huge portion of viewers just because you had too soft of a launch. Take a week and post frequently, then adjust to your regularly intended schedule.
Anyone planning to launch their blog soon? Regardless if you are launching or not, share your link in the comments below!
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