Thanks for stopping by Rachel and taking the time to leave such a thoughtful comment.

Best of luck to you and your blog. Believe me, it can be a little frustrating when you put your effort into a blog, but you don’t receive the number of visitors you expect and nobody is leaving a comment (been there). My best advice is to follow a strategy. Whether you use some of the things that I’ve laid out, or follow another strategy, the key thing is to follow one.

Be sure to shoot me an email when you get your blog up and running. I’d love to check it out, and stay in touch with you as we move into the new year.

Thanks for stopping by and commenting Tim, very much appreciated.

Haven’t taken any courses, just trying to find my own way as you stated, and follow the advice (free) from some of the more experienced bloggers out there. It’s amazing how much everyone is willing to sharing. I’m somewhat annoyed at myself for taking so long to figure this networking thing out.

I agree with everyone. This is sound advice and really useful to anyone who’s just starting out with their blog.

When I set up my blog, I was told to use a particular free theme which was also great for customisation – Flexibility 3. I used that for quite some time before graduating to Pagelines and then finally to Genesis.

It was tricky to know what to do when I set up my blog originally. It was part of an online course I was taking and the advice was – write 5 blog posts to get started. Great. About what? I gradually found my way. That’s not an advisable way to do things though.

I’ve never purchased backlinks and don’t intend to. It took me a few months to get PR2 and increase my traffic. So I don’t want to hurt that in any way! Great that you’re sharing your own personal experience here Craig.

Thanks for the comment Sue!

I won’t say I waisted a lot of money on backlinks, but i did fall into the trap of pursuing them for all the wrong reasons. I learned my lesson.

Thank you for the kind words Adrienne!

My hope is that this will help someone that is just starting off, I know these things tripped me up when I first started, and it takes time when you have to go back and recover from them.

Boy, I wish I had known about not paying for backlinks when I had my first blog. I wasted a lot of money.

Thanks for the informative post!
Sue

I agree with Richard, sounds advice. Now if I’d only had this when I created my blog back in 2009.

The domain was easy, I was taught to brand me so to use my name. I already had hosting because I had a static website back in the beginning days. So those two things were in place but I didn’t have a clue what I was doing accept I know setting it up was the easy part. I bet I continued to search for themes for months. I’d find one, start using it and not like it and then spend an entire day looking for another one until I bought Thesis which I still have today.

I do remember though being taught about permalinks early on and thank goodness for that. The rest of the stuff I stumbled over but I’ve never purchased links or done anything of that nature. I took the s-l-o-w route but I’m glad I did.

I think there is just much more information out there today than when I got mine going but it’s still not complete in my view. There are so many behind the scenes things people need to know about that they aren’t being told until later down the road and then fixing all those problems can be a nightmare. I ought to know, it’s happened to me more than I care to recall. LOL!!!

Great share and thanks for these tips. New bloggers will thank you.

~Adrienne

Thanks Ron – I did some testing on the Fiverr backlink gig’s in the past, and while they didn’t hurt my rankings they didn’t help either. My $5 would have been better spent elsewhere. Live and learn…

Appreciate you taking the time to comment!

I’m going to echo much of what Richard already said. Been there, done that.

I also made the mistake of buying links from places like Fiverr. Obviously I couldn’t prove it, but they sure seemed to do more bad than good. It’s not surprising because most gigs are just forum profile links, which have been bad for some time. How else could they do 100’s of links for $5?

Some time back I bought a big back link package from a guy on the WF. It killed my site in just a couple days and it never did recover. Costly mistake. Before the links is was starting to grow and make sales, then dead in the water.

Don’t get me started on themes.. lol I think we find a theme we like and use it. But then we see another theme that we think “looks better”. It’s like a vicious circle. But I am staying with what I have and besides little tweaks, it’s going to stay, No more changing! 🙂