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Seems my own disorganization has led me to talk about stuff beyond what I had planned on talking about. I am returning to the basics on this post.

So you’ve got a blog plan, a blog name and your chosen hosting/domain. Now what? Work!

Content creation – this will be the focus for the first serveral months of blogging. Here I will give you a basic rundown on how to source content and turn it into your own articles.

• Find the main players in your vertical, and subscribe to their RSS feed. Everyday before blogging, read through all the new posts in your reader to see what everyone else is talking about. Make sure you have atleast 3-4 blogs. More is better.
• Find the source. Most bloggers repost articles from other sources, find the authority on the subject and link to it. It may be worthwhile to link to a smaller blog as it will get their attention though.
• Write your own take on the story, include your own opinions and further research on the topic. Make sure you add more information then the source article provides, this way your post will be going above and beyond what the rest are talking about. Do not copy the  post and paste it, duplicate content is bad for your website.

External Content creation – For everything beyond your blog

• Produce general articles for article marketing websites, this will create “building blocks” for SEO later on, try to do this a couple times a week
• Contribute to discussions on other blogs, write concise comments and use your own opinion
• While this falls moreso into promotion, write up a few descriptions for your website in advance to post while submitting to directories

Promotion - This is done once you have a few weeks of content on your website

• Use the blogs already in your RSS feed and begin contributing to the discussion
• Begin taking your articles and start submitting them to Article websites
• Sign up to many forums and maintain active accounts, contribute unique content.
• Submit your blog to directories, include your pre-written description and keywords for directories
• Communicate with other blog owners and webmasters, exchange links on your blog

As you can see I don’t actually mention SEO as any part of this. That is because I skip it entirely and build it right into the plan. Don’t think of this as SEO, think of this as website development. While I did previously mention things not to do when focusing on SEO, try to simply include it as a part of everything you are doing.