Take More Risks

We’ve all created blogs that we’ve left to drop in the past due to a possible variety of reasons. Maybe they weren’t getting enough hits. Maybe they were proving too hard to manage. Maybe they just plain sucked.

Here are a few tips that I’ve learnt the hard ways that should help you prolong the life of your blog or even make it a success. If anyone has any additional ideas about this please leave them in the comments section.

1. If you’re not entirely certain that you’ll update the blog anymore, then remove all traces of the date from your posts. In Wordpress his may involve altering your permalink structure so that it no longer includes the date in the URL, as well as removing <?php the_time(’M.d, Y’) ?> from both the index, single post and category templates in Wordpress.
2. Enable Akismet immediately. I don’t know how many times I’ve created a small blog and within a few months I’ve had 1,000’s of spam comments to moderate. A bad situation is made worse when there are legitimate comments from your readers mixed in there too. The screenshot below is taken from a blog I created only 4-5 months ago.

   

   I’ve 2 options now with this blog 1) Leave the comments as they are or 2) Study some of the contents of the spam addresses, look for common keywords within the messages and run an SQL DELETE query from phpMyAdmin on the wp_comments table using LIKE within WHERE e.g. “DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_content LIKE ‘%viagra%”. (There’s probably a less primitive way of doing this. If anyone knows of a better way please get in touch!)

3. Instead of creating and publishing 20 posts immediately, set the Publish Date to sometime within the future so that if you do try to sell it later on, potential buyers will think it’s been updated more recently and are more likely to make an offer.
4. Install Google Analytics immediately on your blog so that you have a complete history of the sites traffic.  There’s nothing worse than creating a blog that eventually receives  traffic but is forgotten about. Besides having all of the statistics will increase a buyers peace of mind when evaluating whether your website is worth buying.
5. In a similar vain to number 4 it can be helpful to monetize your site discreetly early on in order to tap into the earning potential in that particular market. However you risk harming your sites reputation especially if you go overboard with advertisements. From my own perspective if I see a website is making some money I’m motivated to work on it more. By having a clear indication of how much each of your sites are earning you can then use this as a factor into the projects you want to prioritize.
6. Never underestimate the possibility of your blog becoming an unexpected hit. For this reason I sometimes set up the blog in a seperate blog subfolder in the site, instead of installing it in the root directory if I anticpate that it will be popular amongst users. That way I can build a community around the blog without much hassle.
7. Create categories for your blog as early on as possible. When I’m starting a blog in a niche I start with the Google Adwords Sandbox where I search for the niche and use the suggestions to come up with names for the categories that will appear on the site. I normally then use each of these additional keyphrases to search for more specific topics using the same tool. It’s a great way to come up with ideas for posts.
8. Following on from 7, ensure that you target at least some key phrases related to your niche that appear in Wordtracker or the Google Adwords Sandbox.  This will help increase your chances of receiving search engine traffic early on which is often invaluable, especially when these visitors are targetted and contribute to your community.