Even for a seasoned blogger, launching a new WordPress blog can be a big stress. For a new blogger, it can be absolutely frightening. There’s a lot of room for creativity, but also a lot of room for doubt.
What will people think? Will anyone even care? What do you have to say that’s so important anyway?
If questions like this are swirling around your head, you should take a deep breath and let them go. You’ll never know their answers until you launch your blog, so you might as well enjoy the creative process now while doing everything you can to make your blog launch a success. To help you do just that, we’ve put together this list of 4 stupid mistakes you don’t want to make before launching a WordPress blog.
Stupid Mistake #1: Betting The Farm On SEO
If you’re a beginner at SEO, then working hard to rank your blog on Google may actually be a waste of your time. No matter how well you optimize your WordPress site before launching your blog, it’s never going to rank well for competitive keywords if it’s not receiving a flood of incoming links from authoritative websites.
SEO is undoubtedly an important factor that contributes to driving traffic to a new blog. However, as you already know, or are about to discover, the buck does not stop there. Getting readers, especially loyal ones, is a complicated and fickle process that is not entirely dependent on any one factor.
There’s no clear path to success in winning over an audience, so don’t panic if you’re not an SEO ace. Simply put the majority of your effort into another traffic building avenue such as social networking for now. The links and search engine rankings will come to you in time if you focus on improving your blog over time.
Stupid Mistake #2: Believing That Content Is King
Bloggers love to write about how “content is king,” and the idea can be tempting to believe. The truth is that a WordPress blog needs a lot more than good content in order to attract an audience. If you deliver value, people will appreciate it. The catch is that you have to deliver it and deliver it well; you can’t just wait for the world to stumble across it.
For starters, your blog needs to be attractive. Before you launch your WordPress blog, be sure that you spend some time customizing it and making it appear appealing. Browse through many premium WordPress templates before choosing one that is right for you.
Once you launch, be proactive about promoting your blog and sharing your content. Create accounts for your blog on all the major social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, before you even launch. This way, you’ll be ready to start sharing your stuff from day one.
Stupid Mistake #3: Blogging Too Much About Yourself Too Soon
If you find your life interesting, then it only stands to reason that others should as well, right? Unfortunately, this idea is very, very wrong. After all, how much time do you spend online reading about the lives of other bloggers? Odds are you spend little to none, so why would you expect anyone else to?
Of course, you probably do have a few remarkable stories that are worth sharing. Try a story out on a few strangers before posting it online. If you can make someone’s jaw drop or their eyes light up with a story, then you probably have a winner.
You don’t want to share too many personal stories with your audience until you have gained their trust, however. You want them to view your site as a new, valuable source of information that relates to their interests and lives, not as a glorified journal for your escapades. This might sound a bit harsh, but it’s true.
Stupid Mistake #4: Spend Too Much Time Redesigning Your Blog
Most people want their WordPress blogs to be absolutely perfect before they launch them. For many, however, this becomes a trap that makes launching their blogs nearly impossible. In fact, some people spend months delaying the launch of their WordPress blogs just because they can’t decide on the right font or sidebar widgets.
In order to ensure the timely launch of your blog, set yourself a hard deadline and stick to it. You can always play with the design elements of your site once it is live, so there’s no reason to chase perfection at any time. Doing so will just stress you out and stifle your creativity.
The best part about leaving the design of your blog open to changes after launch is that you can get feedback from your audience on what they do and don’t like. Perhaps a passionate reader will even volunteer to design a custom logo or font for you. You never know what will happen once a blog goes live, so don’t get stuck in countdown mode.
