Yesterday I got it all up and going: bought the domain name, found a host, installed the site builder, found a theme, installed a few plugins that I have found to be beneficial and wanted from the get go (discussion regarding the plugins to come in a few days) and published my first post to welcome everyone.  At least all of the easy work is out of the way.    I am a person who likes to see results quickly otherwise, I loose interest.  So today I chose to work on getting the name out there among some social sites and making sure the search engines knew I was here and open for business.  Here’s a quick review social sites and steps taken thus far:

• MyBlogLog-  Yahoo! owned community of bloggers looking to share their site among other bloggers.  I saw some quick vists from joining this site.  I’ll have to wait to see longterm impact to traffic.
• Twitter-  Everyone knows this site…I don’t think it needs explaining.  This can be a powerful resource to reach people on a regular basis.  Since Twitter only allows short status updates, if they want to read more, they will have to come to your site.
• Technorati-  Another community of bloggers.  After signing up with them, you need to claim ownership of your blog.  This appears to be a lengthy process, 6 hours and still no verification yet (I’m still wating for my other blog, Loquacious Magpies, to be verified).  There is alway the chance I’ve done something wrong.  I will have to wait before I can make any other judgements about this site but it definitely looks promising.
• Google Analytics- Fairly easy way to submit your sire to Google and get free tracking of visitors.
• Bing Webmaster Tools-  Mircosoft’s search engine and traffic reports site.  Again, like all of them, some knowledge regarding where to copy and paste the validation code is necessary, but there are help guides the take you throught he process.  (If you need some personal assisatance, I will try to help you out too)
• Yahoo! Site Explorer- You will need to get a Yahoo! login first and then you can go to the site explorer to submit your site to Yahoo! search engine.  Not nearly as robust as Google Analytics, there are some traffic reports.
• I know I said that I’d cover plugins later, but there is one that you should note and install ASAP-  Google XML-Sitemap Generator.  This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.  This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.  This was a huge help in getting the site to come up in the search engines.

I will tell you that just signing up for these will not lead to traffic overnight.  I have seen first time visitors on a consistant basis though.  If you can keep new people coming in, eventually you are going to find some that will become repeat visitors. 

Happy Blogging!

      Don