20 Must Do’s Before You Reach Your First Year As a Blogger!

August 13, 2007

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There are some things a person must do before reaching a certain level of experience, for example, in order to become an adult, you must do things like: get a job, get drunk 🙂 , learn how to drive, study, thing like that, you get the idea. Well the same happens when you’re a blogger, you have to do certain things to call yourself a real blogger.

For some people these tasks take a lot of time to be performed, but to others it becomes a piece of cake,well, now let’s go straight to the point, this is the list of the 20 things you must do before you reach your first year as a blogger, check them, and see which ones you’re missing, and if you have already completed the list, well then congratulations because you’re in your way to become a really successful blogger.

  1. Reach a decent traffic level. This point can vary depending on the blog, but let’s say around the 300 UV per day, and i’s still low.
  2. Break the Technorati Top 10K barrier. Some blogs can even reach a better rank in few months.
  3. Reach at least 250 subscribers. I know, for some it may sound very low, and to others a very difficult number, but believe me, it isn’t, it a very good number for a GOOD 1 year old blog.
  4. Redesign your blog! It is very commont to see new blogs changing the design constantly, (sounds very familiar to me) but this is normal, until your get the perfect look for your site.
  5. Be constantly checking the status of your site. This is also very common among new bloggers, during the first months you’re always checking for updates, comment and new rankings.

  6. Read JohnChow.com . Let’s face it, who hasn`t?!
  7. Dream with the tons of bucks you’ll make with your blog! 🙂 Again,… Who hasn`t?!
  8. Add Adsense or any other kind of PPC advertisement. And also read all the information you can about this subject.
  9. Deal with the tons of spam comments you get every day, You log into your account very excited with all those comments just to see that most of them are trash! 🙂 thankfully there are solutions to this.
  10. Read Problogger.net, mainly during the first months, “to get knowledge and ideas”.
  11. Thinking about selling your blog! Hehe, this may sound a little extreme, but many bloggers I know claim that they thought of that at leat once.
  12. Participate in a link train, or in a link exchange thing. This can be good to build a good link structure for your blog.
  13. Reach a decent PageRank. Ok , it is good to reach a PR2 or even a PR3 during your first year , but it is better to get a PR5!
  14. Get dissapointed with some results. Maybe from a contest or with a campaign you made, hey! it happens to all of us.
  15. Know all the “Bloggy” terms and players . Like RSS, FeedBurner, WordPress, Technorati, Alexa, , StumbleUpon, Css, PageRank, BTW, WTF . . . Linkbait , SEO . . . Etc. Because, come on! if you don’t know at least what this things are, why the H$#@ are you blogging!
  16. Spend hours trying to get visitors. Leaving comments in other blogs, submitting to directories and all that stuff, nothing a good cup of coffee can’t solve.
  17. Get excited with the first clicks and the first bucks in your Adsense or YPN account! The feeling is great.
  18. Feel the lack of ideas and get frustrated sometimes. But this kind of situations give you the strength to go on.
  19. Make really good friends. and some not very good ones.
  20. Have Fun!

This are “Must Do’s” because eventhough some of them are not a 100% positive you must do them to be a real blogger!

null Spread the love! Share this post with your readers and link back to it and in exchange I’ll include a link back to your blog in a post on this PR5 site!

Written by Unlisted · Filed Under The Lounge 

Comments

12 Responses to “20 Must Do’s Before You Reach Your First Year As a Blogger!”

  1. Santosh P on August 13th, 2007 8:12 am

    Awesome!!! SO your blog is Adult now 😛

    I agree I am not a regular blogger, but i got ideas stacked on my mind and jotted down in volumes… trust me I have been so active on offline publcity and advertising and 80+ RSS feeds I manage to read daily put me on deep thinking about my niche.

    Now I proudly boast that I have a well define plan of action, and lots of dreams… Let see how well those are put in real action 😀

    Good luck…

  2. Prasanga on August 13th, 2007 4:59 pm

    Great post. I am certainly going to reach this during my first year, if not hey… there is always a next year.

  3. George C on August 13th, 2007 7:05 pm

    Thanks for the comments!

    Santosh : : I’m glad that you already know what to do, and that you have a plan and of course a lot of dreams, that’s always a good thing. Good luck to you too Santosh.

    Prasanga : : Thanks! You’re right, there is always a next year!

  4. Josh Mullineaux on August 15th, 2007 7:32 am

    Great list there! John Chow and Pro Blogger are must reads. I don’t necessarily think that putting adwords/adsense are necessities on your primary blog. I guess it depends on what you are going for. Why not create some other sites on the side to try the adwords/adsense on? Sweet post, get ’em talkin!

  5. Maria Palma on August 16th, 2007 8:48 am

    I would add getting your own domain to the list! It looks more professional when you have your own domain.

  6. George C on August 16th, 2007 4:23 pm

    Thanks Josh! Thanks to you too Maria!

  7. Ben on August 27th, 2007 8:22 am

    The thing I have most trouble in is converting visitors (no problem with visitor numbers) to subscribers.

    Mind you, I have both my feedburner and raw XML available, and maybe people just use the raw XML feed instead, so that I get no stats.

    I should just write my own system for it 🙂

    But do you have any good tips on the visitor > feed subscriber part of things?
    Cheers,
    Ben

  8. George C on August 27th, 2007 4:08 pm

    Hi Ben! Welcome to The Lounge, and Thanks for your comment. I know, sometimes it’s very diffucult to understand why your visitors are not subscribing, there are many factors, one of the main ones is that the subscription options might not be available, take a look a t my posts, I’ve added “If you enjoyed this post you might want to subscribe to our RSS Feed!” This has certainly increased my number of subscribers, also check the glossy RSS button I have that also works fine ,) Play a little bit with your blog.

  9. phlizzow on September 1st, 2007 4:27 am

    Next February my blog will celebrate it’s first ever birthday, with about five months to go, i’m still far from the 300UV a day, well to be honest, i don’t think i would reach that number for some reason, but still i will not give up. Anyway, this post had certainly help me to set my target clearly. Great post! keep it up!

  10. mjda on September 7th, 2007 9:24 pm

    These are some excellent tips. I’ve been trying to read quite a bit lately on how to be successful in blogging, and web development in general, and this is one of the top articles I’ve read. Definitely going to get bookmarked! Keep up the good work!

  11. Startup Signal - Today’s Top Blog Posts on Entrepreneurship - Powered by SocialRank on October 1st, 2007 10:18 am

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  12. Ben on October 5th, 2007 3:59 pm

    Thanks George – I had a little RSS button tucked away, but I never thought of giving a textual suggestion 🙂

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