If you have completed all the steps before you should now have a nice domain name with a good looking blog with five or more interesting articles on it. The next step before you can launch is to add advertising into the mix.
If you haven’t done it already use the Google Adsense Plugin to create blocks with your Adsense Code in it and just add them to the articles you wrote. As mentioned before it is also handy to insert affiliate links and banners. Just grab the codes you want to use from the affiliate websites or Adsense and create a couple of blocks.
I would recommend that you are not too aggressive in the placement of your ads, especially just after you launched a site. You want to create a readership and not send them away for a couple of cents.
Place the Adsense blocks in the middle or at the end of your articles. Another very good idea is to write articles about your affiliates and then link to them within the articles. Try also to link from articles to other related information on your site to increase the stickyness (the time a user spends on your site).
Combining information with affiliate links or ads is one of the best tactics to generate leads or sales. But always keep in mind that you shouldn’t sell your soul. People recognize if you want to sell them bullshit and no matter how much an affiliate pays it is never worth linking to them if their products or services are not worth it. If you do, people won’t trust you anymore and you are very likely to lose readers and damage your reputation which will harm you in the long run.
At this point you should be all set up. The advertising is in place and you can think about officially going live.
Final to do list
- There is nothing wrong with writing a couple more posts. Other webmasters and visitors will see that your intention is genuine and you don’t just do this to make some quick bucks.
- Are your affiliate links working? Just click and make sure that your link works. (Never click your own Google ads though as it will result in you getting banned from the program)
- Did you somehow highlight your pillar articles? A great idea is to create links to them in the sidebar and title the area “Top Articles” or “Most Popular”.
- Do you have an about section that shows people who you are, why you are doing what you do and what this site is for?
- Provide users a way to contact you. Either put your email somewhere on the site or use another contact form plugin for wordpress.
- Get a list of email addresses of webmasters of other sites that might be interested in linking to you. You can send them a short email with a link to one of your pillar articles. Keep these emails short, polite and just tell them that you have an article that might be interesting. Don’t ask them directly for a link and keep it short because you will see later on as a webmaster you will get flooded by emails. So you will appreciate people who keep it short and to the point and don’t constantly beg for links.
Well if you completed the last step of the to do list you are already live and will have a couple of visitors. This is a good start and from now on you should have a regular schedule when you will add new content to your site. There are basically two ways of doing this.
Posting Frequency
1. Most people just try to post at least one short article (less than 500 words) a day. Stay on topic because the topic you picked is the reason people read your site. If they are interested in anything else they probably have another site they visit that specializes in this topic.
2. Write a longer article (1000 - 1500 words) every two or three days. Of course it’s also important that you stick to your topic. The reason you should not have long articles every day is because the majority of people dont have much time (unless you target retired people for example ). As a result they won’t be able to keep up with the huge amount of content that you put online every day and will eventually stop reading your site.
If you have a lot of ideas and a huge content output think about making two sites, each more specialized on one topic or build up satellite sites. Satellite sites are a great concept and another important aspect that will contribute to your long term success.
