Hi Rick
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Originally Posted by Brevoort
So, I feel confident that I will get serious answers to what I fear are rather simplistic, if not naïve, questions.
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There are no such things as simplistic or naive questions in my book.
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What should I do about dating these articles? Should I have them all with the same date, or should they be staggered out over several fictitious days?
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In my humble opinion, you should stagger them out once every 3 days or so, from today (or whenever you started). You can actually set Wordpress to automatically publish your content in the future, just by setting the timestamp to a future date.
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What about comments? I have no desire to write fake comments yet things will look a little odd for a while if there are no comments at all.
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I absolutely agree... it's great to have real, genuine comments... makes your blog look "busy". This is another reason I wouldn't release the articles all at the same time, nor backdate the articles.
I admit I was tempted to consider writing fake comments when I first started blogging, but fortunately I found a much more effective way to get real comments
Simply go to some related blogs that have content that would complement yours, pick an article of theirs that you really enjoyed, and make a comment on their blog. Make sure it actually contributes to their discussion, and isn't just a "great article" type comment.
Sign off the comment, and add a little P.S. underneath your name:
"P.S: If you could spare a moment, perhaps you could pop over to my blog and post a comment, because I'd really appreciate it!"
I've been doing this for a while now, and it works a treat! At least for me I've found that 30-50% of fellow bloggers
do check out your blog and leave a comment! (Even if it is just a "great blog" type comment - that's all you really need, for now.)
I talk about why this works so well in my
reciprocation post on my blog.
Just make sure your comments on your fellow bloggers blogs add to their discussion. Also, go for the smaller blogs, since the so-called "A list" bloggers probably won't have the time to visit their commentator's sites.
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Are there features of themes that I should be looking for when I trawl the free theme libraries? What is the most ad friendly yet readable sort of layout?
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I spent an absolute age searching through themes, and I'm still not completely happy. My advice here would be to find a theme that supports widgets. Unfortunately, a lot of the time you won't know it supports widgets until you actually install it.
My one over at
Internet Influence Magic doesn't support widgets, and it's a real hassle. My newest blog over at
The Smart Web Letter does - I made sure of it
By the way Rick, if you post a comment on my blog, I'll return the favour
Hope that helps!