Holy bananas, writing two blogs is hard. That’s all.

Also? Lots to dish. I promised updates on the little experiment that is my new site, This New Town, and I’m here to deliver. They’ll be broken into a few parts and in this first post we’re going to talk about In this first getting the blog up and running, random readers and resting on my laurels.

From The Very Beginning…

In terms of building a blog from scratch (with little coding knowledge), this was the easiest part. If you want specifics or tutorials though, Google it. This is just the bare bones of what I did so you can have a general idea of the process.

First things first: I chose a name.

I played around with Kiwi Traveler, words that invoke New Zealand (like bungee, fern, flat white, etc.), but these all really sucked. This New Town came to me in the middle of the night and I fell completely in love. Because not only is Auckland a new town for me – a town I can explore and blog about – but it’s a new town for the world. New Zealand is one of the youngest countries on earth and Auckland is still coming into it’s own. Hence, if the blog ends up taking less of a personal direction and starts heading into city-guide territory, I can keep the name without losing the community.

Next, I signed up with a site host.

I chose BlueHost because that’s what I use for this site so it’s what I’m familiar with. Plus, it’s cheap. I’ve bitched about BlueHost in the past as it tends to crash a lot, but the moment, This New Town isn’t overrun with readers so it’s not a huge deal.

Once I installed WordPress and did all those fun things I couldn’t possibly explain because I do not even remotely understand, I had to choose a theme.

I didn’t feel like spending the time or money designing a site from scratch, but I knew I wanted a “magazine-style” layout. After only a few minutes of digging I found The Morning After, a free Woo theme that worked like a charm.

Beyond the Tech Stuff

Once the technical garbage was out of the way and the site was created, I had to do some strategy recon.

Here was my plan:

1. Write a week’s worth of content.
2. Back post said content so even though I was posting everything on the same day, it didn’t look like the site was brand spanking new.
3. Write headlines for two week’s worth of content so I wouldn’t be tearing my hair out for the first month on topics to post.
4. Come up with 7-10 categories to help people navigate the site and keep my topics in check.

The Content Itself

As I mentioned in my last post, This New Town is part city-guide, part personal blog on exploring Auckland and making a life for myself here. I had A LOT of post ideas rattling around in my head on everything from places I’d been to the ridiculous bandwidth limits in this country.

That said, as most of you (should) know, successful blogging is more than just writing content. There was a lot of choosing images, linking to the right people and tagging each post so it could easily be found once it’s no longer featured on the main page.

I didn’t want ANYONE checking out the blog until it was perfection though. Because I was blogging about places/business/tourist attractions, I knew most companies would have Google alerts set up. Meaning the posts got written first, then just before launch I did all the relevant linking. I realize there are easier ways to do this, but ‘ll explain a little later why I’m glad I did it this way…

Resting On My Laurels

A few have you have appropriately mentioned, “Hey! What kind of experiment is this if you already have this blog community to build you up? Better to do the second blog anonymously.”

This is definitely something I considered before launching This New Town. As a proper testament to the fact that my blogging/social media tips work, wouldn’t it be better to start a new site completely from scratch by disengaging myself from my name?

Yeah, I could have. There are two reasons why I ultimately didn’t do it this way:

1. Part of many blog’s successes revolve around a familiarity with the blogger. Especially with personal blog. I want to model TNT after some of the enormously popular food blogs, with talk about activities and especially photographic documentation of the things I do here. You can’t run a good personal blog under a pseudonym and it would be silly to do “photographic documentation” without actually being in any of the photographs.

2. Secondly, yes, I’m aware some of TNT’s traffic will come from Marian Librarian. But honestly? The majority of my readers come here for social media advice. The topics are so drastically different that barely any of you actually clicked over to TNT from this site. In the spirit of transparency, here’s a peek into yesterday’s Google Analytics:

As you can see, only 69 of you cared enough to actually check out TNT this past week. And let’s add that extra 47 from Twitter and assume they’re coming from MarianSchembari and not ThisNewTown. So out of my 12,000 monthly visitors, 116 give a crap.

I’m not saying this site has no influence on the other site, my point is that I don’t think it has enough influence to convince me to Go Anonymous.

PLUS – and this is my last point, I promise – a blog’s success is 99% of the time (I just made up that statistic, btw) based on the support of another, more popular, blogger.

The evidence of this is everywhere – you want to get retweeted, listed on blogrolls, featured on major websites and you need to guest post. At the end of the day, your content needs to be good, but to truly get traction you need the support of others.

As you can see from my analytics, the most read post on TNT is a review of a local cupcake shop, Delish. The post got 207 views – waaaay above and beyond the views of my other articles. Why? This is why:

This is an example of why I didn’t want TNT linking out until I was good and ready for people to share my stuff. Now, I DMed them on Twitter because we became buddies in the shop, but the point is the same: TNT has reviews, features and posts on other businesses. If the review is good, it’s press for them. Meaning they’ll probably share that info.

Delish has a grand Facebook page with almost 2,000 fans. That is why my post on them is my most read. That is why a blog’s traffic really depends on who links to them. And that is why it doesn’t matter that I’m blogging under my name. At the end of the day, a bigger blog is linking to a smaller blog in the hopes the smaller blog will get bigger. Phew! Who cares if that blogger is me?

Tagged as: analytics, blogging, experiment, This New Town, tips