When to Launch a New Blog
If you are anything like me – when you get an idea it is the only thing you think about until it is reality. I am possibly the most impatient person I know. When I get something in my head it has to happen now – and I won’t stop until it happens and I see results.
This can be both good and bad. Good in the way that I throw everything I have into it and work hard to archive the goal, and bad because I want to see results now.
Launching Explore With Me has taught me a lot about blogging, the Internet and patience. We had the idea about two months ago and once we decided on what we wanted to do, it has been non stop since. Every night for the past month I have worked on Explore With Me and there is still a lot of work to do before we launch it – although the site is already live. However in my mind the site is a work in progress and I think anyone who visits it can see that too.
I normally hide my sites away before they are 100% ready to go, however I gave full access to Explore With Me from day one so other people interested in blogging can see it take shape. However as a rule of thumb this probably isn’t the best thing to do.
Content is the biggest factor when launching a new blog. You have to keep it away from the public eye until it has enough content so you can engage the users early on and keep them coming back for more.
I try to have a good variety of content when launching a new blog, and as you can see with Explore With Me we already have some solid content that is performing well in the search engines – even though the site is not yet “officially” live.
Although your patience might get the better of you, try not to rush the development of a blog just so you can have it up and running. Your potential audience will be put off by broken links, pages that don’t have content and scripting errors and you may have lost them before you even begin.
Try to limit the number of revisions to the layout of the blog once it is live. You don’t want to be trying new things every day. Returning users won’t know what the hell is going on if there is a different layout, menu options or graphics every day.
If you have ideas about changing layouts and features of the blog try to hold off until there is enough of a change to make it a worthy site update. Small changes are fine, but constant major updates should be limited.
Make sure any changes you make are tested locally before going live with it. You don’t want to make a big update and test it once it goes live. All testing should be done on your local machine and only upload the changes once you are 100% happy with it.
When you “officially” launch the blog is should be ready to go and 100% complete. For a new site it is important to have some consistency. Users don’t like change, they rather know that when they visit your blog they know how to find their way around and not have to re-learn the layout every few weeks.
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There should be a few articles published before the launch of the blog so that you at least capture the visitors attention and retain them to read your next article. Thus, I agree with you that launching a blog at the right time is essential.
Wei Liang