Setting up and Marketing a New Blog Part 1 – Introduction
I love to cook. I have a store of adapted recipes and am always looking for more recipes to try. I love the “kitchen porn” catalogs that are coming in the mail during the holiday season. Normally I just bookmark interesting recipes, add cool gadgets to my wishlist, store word docs with my recipe adaptations and occasionally “spam” my family with my favorites. Recently I realized that a better approach would be to set up a blog devoted to cooking and recipes. I could combine my passion for cooking, collecting recipes and gadgets while honing my writing and marketing skills. Fun!
I thought I’d document and share the experience with you – dear readers – in a series of posts devoted to the setting up and marketing of a new blog. Please comment if you need more detail on any of the steps. I can provide more information or write an expanded post on any particular step.
The first step is deciding what to call the new blog and where to host it. These go together because the URL is driven by blog name (or vice versa). I came up pretty quickly with For the Love of Cooking as the name of the blog. The next step was to decide whether to use wordpress.com, host it at its own URL or add it as a subdomain to sherilarsen.com. I did some research and found that http://www.loveofcooking.com was not available but also not being used (although info, biz, net and many others were available – .info for very cheap!).
I registered http://loveofcooking.wordpress.com with my WordPress account, but in the end decided it would be better for technical reasons to host it at my own domain rather than at WordPress.com. I also decided that I would prefer to host it at http://loveofcooking.sherilarsen.com and leverage any branding for myself as an social media and marketing expert rather than try to maintain two separate brands. Check it out – there are several posts with some great recipes!
Coming in Part 2 – WordPress Nitty Gritty
Another great way to promote any product or servive is submitting articles its very common these days for bloggers to use articles from article directorys to ad content to their blogs. With a little effort and time its easy to get your webpages and your blog on some top ten search engine rankings using this method.
Hey Sheri! I found your link to this blog on the classreport.org site…
Great to see what you’re up to! Wow! You’re busy! As for your cooking blog, did you see/read Julie and Julia? I enjoyed it although i haven’t taken the time to keep up with Julie’s blog…that’s the problem, betweeen keeping up with Facebook, email accounts, etc. it’s hard to find time to write for my blog and time to read other blogs…
I need to figure out what RSS is…guessing it’s a way to get updates without having to check all the different websites… gotta run. kids are asleep and i’m trying to watch True Blood Season 1…best, joanne
hey sheri,
just realized you may not know who I am if i just post with name Joanne!
Hi Joanne
Thanks for the comment…I would like to see Julie and Julia, but I think I missed it in the theaters. I’ll work on a post on RSS and make sure to send you the link.
Sheri
I know you!