Why Good Cloud Hosting is Just the Start of Making Your Blog Top Notch

Cloud hosting gives you exceptional reliability, allows your site to scale up or down in terms of the resources it needs, and gives you a pricing model where you pay for what you use, rather than needing to predict how much server space you’re going to want ahead of time or paying for more than you actually end up needing.

Cloud hosting is used for other reasons too, for instance the convenience of managing your site using something like a virtual private server.

There are lots of great companies out there that offer good cloud hosting solutions, and it pays to take the time to shop around and select the offering that best fits with your objectives for your site. Once you’ve done that, you have the technical back up to launch a great website – but of course, this is just the beginning!

Before you rest on your laurels knowing that your site is technically sound, you need to consider the other things that will make your site top notch – after all, it doesn’t matter how reliable it is if there’s nothing good on there to read!

Have a Good Team

There are three main components to running your site well once all the infrastructure is in place, like your cloud hosting and a good content management system. Firstly, there is the creation and management of your content. Then, there is your off site marketing – for instance any advertising you do to bring in traffic or your efforts on things like Twitter and Facebook. Then there is looking after what happens on your site – replying to comments, maintaining your community, that sort of thing.

You need these activities to work cohesively together, and that means you need a good team who can work together well and understand how different tasks contribute to the goals of the site. You can, of course, do everything yourself, at least in the beginning, but usually it can be beneficial to at least have some other content creators (even if just for some occasional guest posts to add some fresh perspective). You need to think about how you’ll work together (for instance, will they simply write content, or will they curate their own articles and promote them themselves?).

It may seem a bit on the side of overkill to have full business processes and roles and responsibilities for a new blog. However, at the very least you need to have an agreed form of communication, agree what admin rights each person will have, and understand who will do what in terms of marketing.

Content Is King

So, you have your technical infrastructure and your internal admin and management set up, you should now have no problems with the day to day running of your blog! What you need now is some exceptional content. This comes before any marketing activity, because there is no sense bringing in lots of traffic if there isn’t much good stuff on your website yet. Wait until you have a few very good posts, rather than just one, before properly investing in marketing with time or money – that way you can hope the people you bring in will look at more than one page and become very interested in your blog.

The phrase ‘content is king’ is one that is very often used when talking about blogging, particularly commercial blogging, but it is a concept a lot of people forget. It is your content that really makes your blog what it is. Everything else, like an intuitive design, stable uptime, and how you engage with your readers is very important too, but it is all meaningless unless you nail the content side of things.

Good content has several components. It needs to be written in a way that suits its audience with a high level of technical quality (click here for some mistakes even professional bloggers make to that end). It needs to be informative, entertaining, or preferably both. It also needs to be unique – both to give your site value and because simply posting content from other sources is often illegal (depending on whether you credit the sources), and always a bad idea for SEO.

You also need your content to be consistent, both in quality and tone, and also in frequency. At first you may have a whole load of ideas, and it can be OK to post a lot of things in the early days of your blog to build up a good base amount of content, but once you go towards a more ‘maintenance’ phase you should decide on a minimum frequency for new posts – even if it is only something like one every two weeks – and stick to it. This is important because it gives your readers an idea of how often to check back for more, and whether it is worth following you for updates on new posts.

Bringing It All Together

So, now you should have a sense of what kind of stuff you are going to create and post, how the whole thing will be managed, who will be working on your site and how, and of course, your technical setup in place.

With all of these elements properly thought through, you will not only have a great plan for starting up your site, but also running it long term. As traffic starts to grow and you begin to gain a regular following, you will find your blog is tons of fun to run.  Good luck.