WHAT I WISHED I KNEW BEFORE I STARTED BLOGGING

Hey Finessees.  It's day 6 of Joi's Mini Blog Challenge and she posed the question "What is that we wished we knew before blogging"?   Well I cannot answer that question without a mini story first.  

I  started MyFinessedLife on Feb 8th.  I was high strung full of momentum and ready to chat with the world.  No one told me that I will have to work really hard to generate traffic.  Search engines are pathetic at recognizing your content.  The traffic will not come easy and you need all the help you can get.  Here are a few things I wish someone told me:

• SET UP YOUR SEO EARLY- SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the non paid organic listings on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results.
• BE VERY ACTIVE SOCIAL MEDIA
• USE BACKLINKS Backlinks are links back to your site from an external website.  They are also a very important in SEO.
• SUBMIT YOUR BLOG TO DIRECTORIES   You can find a list of a few directories here
• PING  Pinging your blog is like saying look at me.  Do this with each new post.  Here are a few places you can do that  Ping My URL, Feed Shark, and Pingler. Be mindful not to over do it with the pinging, you will get called out for  PING SPAMing.
• CREATE A SITEMAP  You can visit www.sitemaps.org for more information and how to make your own sitemap.

I am by no means a blogging expert.  I have only a hand full of followers.  I am currently working on improving the above aspects of my blog. If anyone has some knowledge to share please do. All comments are welcome.