Mistakes to avoid when launching your blog

It’s nearly two years ago now that I converted my static HTML website to the blog you see before you. As this was my first blog and also my first WordPress theme some mistakes were to be expected. In retrospect though, there’s a lot I could have done better.

#1 A finished WordPress theme design.

I knew when I started that I wanted a clean, simple, content focused design to my site. 3 column, header and footer as you see before you. I was overly eager in wanting to get content posted, and once I had this basic layout and my design was approaching completion I began spending more time writing blog posts instead of finalising the design.

Due to the division of attention little flaws went unnoticed, sections of coding were sloppy or invalid, basically my site wasn’t being all it could be. Once the initial frenzy of posts slowed down I fixed all the issues, but I’d had been better off delaying the blogging itself for a few weeks and finishing the design.

#2 Quality & quantity of content.

“Content is king” as they say, but in the race for quantity the quality of some posts was extremely lacking. Posts/comments on YouTube videos, single logos with a pinch of copy that basically boiled down to “I really like this logo”, anything that was reasonably quick, easy and design related.

While these posts might warrant a quick glance they weren’t going to inspire any conversation (which somewhat defeats the purpose of a blog), weren’t very original and definitely weren’t going to gain any social momentum or backlinks.

As time went by the quality of my articles got better and in comparison the rushed posts looked even worse. When I reached around the 150 post mark I went back and deleted at least 50 articles that weren’t contributing to the quality of my blog.

In the time I wasted churning out these 50 I could have written 5 quality, interesting articles that would have served me far better.

#3 Planning for potential advertising.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I had the thought of advertising on my blog for a passive income, though as the design came together it wasn’t really taken into consideration. There are many standard sizes of advertising available and planning a web design around them is pretty flexible.

When looking into advertising more at a later date, I later found that the columns of my blog were not the correct size to accommodate the closest available ad formats.

Luckily I was only a few pixels out and was able to change the widths without any negative impact on the design. If and when I decide to monetize my blog further they will now drop into the design fine, but again it would have been time saved if I’d done this in the beginning.

#4 Social networking / bookmarking.

I suppose it’s fair to say search engines are where you want your site to perform best, but social networking and bookmarking sites are such a huge part of online marketing now-a-days that they’re hard to ignore.

I was originally of the opinion that twitter etc. was little more than people following each other for the purpose of promoting there own content while not actually caring about anyone else. It was about 7 months before I got involved with Twitter and Digg etc. and they’ve since turned into sources of significant traffic, links and the occasional bit of work.

Who knows what opportunities might have been missed. A front page article on Digg certainly would have kicked my site into gear early.

C’est la vie.

It’s easy of course to look back and see all the things you could have done better, but what can you do. With 250+ decent articles attracting business and traffic growing since the launch things are going good.

I’m in the process of launching a second blog at the moment, and armed with hindsight it’s coming together at twice the speed of the first. Hopefully this blog advice helps you do the same. Image credit.