I’m a newbie at all this blog stuff. My friend and fellow author Ken McConnell http://www.ken-mcconnell.com/ is the one that kicked me in the butt in November to get my blog up and running, and he had some great tips on getting started. One of my other writer friends, Christina Mercer http://www.christinasbuzz.blogspot.com/ has a beautiful blog, which I found inspiring. Since I’m such a reader, I also picked up a couple of For Dummies books on blogging. Finally, I looked around at other published authors in my genre (Neil Gaiman has a great blog) to see what was normal for the industry.
I stewed on the decision for several weeksbefore I finally settled on Blogger as the hosting platform for my blog, although WordPress was also in the running. In the end, I liked the look of Christina’s blog the most, so that’s why I went with Blogger. Of course, it took me weeks to decide the look I wanted and choose a template. In fact, I’m still tweaking.
Now that I’m up and running, I’ve realized that getting the blog set up was just the first phase. I wanted to be found by search engines, but I can’t seem to find myself yet. I’m using tags and tagging on every post, but still nada. I signed up with Statcounter, Twitter, Flickr, and Google Analytics, but I still can’t seem to find myself, so that’s my next quest. If you have any ideas, please drop me a note and fill me in. I’ll pass along what I learn.
I’ve also added a signature line to me emails with a link to my blog. I’m pretty active in the writing communities where I’m a member, so that helps build my name and platform as well. I’m not published (yet), so I don’t want to be too pushy. I’m learning the protocol as I go. So far, the response from you all has been positive and encouraging. Every day is like Christmas! Thank you so much!
Congratultions on your new blog. Getting started is one hurdle, growing your readership another. But since you finished NaNoWriMo, you have persistence. Visiting other blogs and posting comments is one basic way of getting new visitors to your blog. It takes a while to be found by Google, but hang in there!
Best wishes from another Sista and Partner in Crime!