7 Things that you shouldn’t be doing when starting up a blog!

Recently I’ve been engaged in starting up many small niche blogs in very varying niches. And there had come been many things I wished I hadn’t done when starting up some of them. But it’s all part of the game and it’s a learning process. We all make mistakes and we should learn from them. So as an outcome of my own learning process, I’ll present this code to you – my code of the things that shouldn’t be done when starting up a blog.

I only hope that you find it useful.

Waiting till you complete the blog setup to register a domain.

This is an absolute no-no. If you’re concerned about your Return-on-Investment from the blog, the sooner you start earning money from it, the better. And Search Engine traffic being the best kind of free traffic that you can get, it’s extremely important that you start pumping up traffic from Search Engines as soon as possible. To do that, the sooner you register the domain and let Search Engines get familiarized with the domain, the better off you’ll be. So, once you come up with a domain name, register it and set up a temporary page till you get done with the set up.

Don’t order a gazillion links within the first few weeks.

Intelligent Search Engines like Google had developed advanced mechanisms to spot the trends a certain site might be developing over time. And this applies to the trends of Paid Links also. It might sound really weird, but sometime back, I had around 500 paid links pointing to one new blog. The traffic dropped drastically. And immediately after I removed the links, the traffic went back up. When 500 sites suddenly start pointing to a new website, Google gets cautious. So avoid ordering a ton of links till the blog gains osme solid ground.

Do not wait to monetize it

Some people may tell you that you should be waiting around 2-3 months to monetize a new blog, but so far from what I’ve heard, all I can say is – I don’t know why you should wait to do something that you’re eventually going to do anyway. I mean, if you’re eventually going to put up ads on your site, you might as well have them from Day 1 because

1. You’ll start earning some money from Day 1
2. The people that wouldn’t like to see ads on your site wouldn’t want to see them even 10 years later.

Do not start your blog on free domains having the thoughts of moving it to a paid domain once you get some money

I hear this in a lot of blogging forums from relatively new bloggers. They would always go like “Should I keep my blogspot/wordpress domain or should I move to a new one?”. Here’s the deal – if you move your domain, most of the things that are attributed to your domain including links and popularity is going to lessen drastically. So either you spend 10 bucks and keep a domain from the beginning, or you just have that free domain going. Don’t plan to move out down the line – it’s going to be really hard.

Do not wait to pump up your best pieces

Psychologically, new blogger tend to “hold on” to a great topic they find for a post till they have a little more subscribers, a little more traffic and so on. But the truth is that till you get some quality content on the front page of your blog, it’s going to be some time before “a little more traffic” becomes a possibility. If your blog is fairly new, take a chance on that great post. Promote it a bit on Social Media sites, and if it’s really going to make a difference, you’d experience that difference right then than later.

Don’t gear down your blog promotion

Many new bloggers tend to wait till they have around a good number of articles before they actually go ahead and do prominent blog promotion. My 2 cents? Don’t wait. Even if you have 2 blog posts of really good quality content, go ahead and do some blog marketing. Submit your feed to RSS directories, Submit you articles to Social Media sites (through others if possible) and do some article marketing in various article directories. Either you can wait for your blog to grow or you can do something now and accelerate that growth.

Do not sell links till you get a solid PR

The more you sell links on your site, more deprived your PR is going to be. People will come to you giving you a $7 per month deal on your 10 PR1 pages for 4 links in each. Don’t take it. If you do, probably in the next PR update, it’s going to go down to a big 0. Surely, you don’t want that to happen?