Date stamping the pillars & and other ?'s

First off I want to say that amidst the welter of hype, hyperbole, and turgid writing about commercial blogging on the internet I have found Blog Mastermind to be a clear,concise, pool of common sense, clear direction, and unbelievable value.

So, I feel confident that I will get serious answers to what I fear are rather simplistic, if not naïve, questions.

I have eight to ten pillar articles ready for each of two blogs I will be launching soon, one at my home business website and another at a specially bought domain.

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?

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.

I still have to settle on a Wordpress theme for these blogs. I want to make sure that I don't make things difficult for advertisers down the road when traffic increases by having themes that are inappropriate for adsense, or anyone else who wants to buy space.

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?


Thank you

Rick Grant
Calgary Alberta

[Alex]

Hi Rick!
First of all great job on writing all those articles, it must have been a lot of hard work :-)
I don't think you should make fictious dates, but instead publish them with a day or two inbetween. Works great.

About comments, you could just turn the option off for now, until you get about 50 RSS subscribers. Or just leave them open, it's a personal choice. Maybe get a friend or family to write a comment.

The thing you should look for is flexibilyty. CAN you change the template so you have your ads / adsense / whatever.

All from me, hope it helped a little.
Alexander

Hi Rick

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.

There are no such things as simplistic or naive questions in my book.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

[ProBlogDesign]

If you've taken the time to write 10 great articles, then I think it would be worth spreading them out a little in the future. It's not just comments that you won't have at the start; it's subscribers. Post your first one or two great articles, along with some normal ones, then do some publicity, and hopefully you'll have a couple of RSS readers. Now post another great article, and you're rewarding those readers as well as helping to get more.

They might even make the comments you want as well.