A Guide How To launch A New Design Blog

A collection of tips which I’ve implemented over the years when launching a new design blog, as well as being a good personal reference of things I should do in the future if I choose to launch a new blog.

Setting Up goals

Setting up goals and targets which you want your blog to achieve, this is great because it gives you motivation to work harder in order achieve a goal.

Five personal goals which I setup when creating Vector Patterns was to aim towards achieveing the following targets over a 5 month period.

1. Over 1000 RSS subscribers and over 1000 twitter followers

2. Created over 40 articles

3. Have a page rank of three

4. Sold 6 ad spots

5. Featured on some top design blog

6. Continue to enjoy blogging.

Planning out a month’s worth of content

Start by grabbing a pen and paper and deciding what posts you want to publish within the first few months within the launch of the blog. When launching the blog have 5 posts published so readers have content to read through, the more posts you have on the site the more readers you will attract to the site. It’s also a good idea to have posts to be ready to published, within the first month of the launch of your blog.

Offering a free giveaway

Everyone enjoys free giveaways this is a superb way to attract readers to your blog by running a contest such as a free design book to one lucky reader, who tweets about your website on twitter this a great way to start viral twitter campaign which potential could send a lot of traffic to your brand new website making a large audience aware of your website.

Promote your website

It’s awesome having great contents but if no one ever reads this awesome content there’s no real point producing good content. This is why it’s essential in order to promote your blog these are three great ways to promote your blog and content on your blog.

1. Social Media

Promote your website through social media website the top 3 which bring in the most visitors are digg, stumble upon, delicious, or even design related social media websites such as Design Float and Design Bump.

2. Making Readers aware of you new site on other blogs you own

If you have a large following of readers on other blogs you own it may also be worth creating a post informing your readers about the new website you have just launched, this is a great way to attract a large readership if you own other blogs.

3. Guest post on other design blogs

Most large design blogs design instruct, tutsplus etc are always in search of new writers. Writing content for other blogs is a great way to drive people who enjoyed the articles you may have produced for other blogs back to your blog.

Work on quality rather than quantity

It’s great to have a ton of design articles which will bring you in loads of traffic to your website but it’s even better to have quality articles, the better content the more chance readers will keep coming back to your blog in order to read the latest articles.

Be open to feedback

Strive to make your blog better and better take on any feedback which people offer you don’t be ignorant, weather its negative or positive feedback any feedback is good feedback and can help you to have a better blog.

Conclusion

Setting goals milestones which you can achieve will motivate you to keep blogging and producing good content. Planning prevents failure, having several posts ready to be published on your website. Promote your content you have spent a lot of time producing good content ensure the widest possible audience is reading it. Don’t worry about producing 7 article a week concentrate on producing 3 quality articles a week instead. Listen to feedback it can make your blog better don’t be ignorant.