Writing about marketing can be a full-time job, and there comes a point when you risk losing touch with the day-to-day challenges of actually being a marketer. A while back, I had an idea – what if I started over? What if I launched a new blog completely from scratch and told that story? No best practices, no wisdom from on high, but a blow-by-blow account of having to be a content marketer all over again.
Everyone agreed that this was a perfectly interesting idea, except for the part about building and maintaining an entire site just to write a few posts about the experience. So, I kept putting the idea on the back burner, until there was something that I wanted to write about enough to make the project worthwhile.
This is a story of beginning again. This will not be a polished, Photoshopped portrait of best practices – it’s going to be an honest account of my choices and mistakes. I’m not going to tell you what you should do, but why I made the choices I did and what happened when I made those choices. Welcome to part 1: pre-launch.
Table of Contents
(0) Concepts & Choices
(1) Domains & Branding
(2) Hosting & Platforms
(3) Social & Plug-ins
(4) Analytics & Tools
(0) Concept & Choices
TL;DR – It all starts with a choice, so choose something. You can spend a year making up your mind (I did), or you can start building and see what happens. If the risk is low, then get moving.
Before you actually build anything, you have to make the choice to build something. It’s sound obvious, but that choice may be the hardest part of starting any new venture, whether it’s a blog or a business. I can’t tell you what to build or even how to make that choice, but I can tell you how I made this particular choice.
Honestly, this project sat on the shelf for too long, a victim of perfectionism. I wanted the perfect idea, that I was passionate about, that would make great content, that would tell an amazing story, and that would all somehow magically be easy to do. No pressure. Simply deciding to move forward probably took over a year.
The core problem is that the idea was just too vague – I wanted to start a new blog so that I could blog about that blog. Even that sentence bored me. I needed to connect to the project. I’m not going to throw out a bunch of clichés about passion, but the simple reality is that I couldn’t just write a blog for the sake of blogging, or I’d hate this project in record time.
For a while, I’ve wanted to dig deeper into minimalist design, but design isn’t something I have a lot of time for and I’ve worked with enough great designers to know that I’m not one. Finally it occurred to me – why not just embrace that and write a blog about being a lousy designer? I may not be a great designer, but I am good at making fun of myself.
I finally landed on the idea of a parody blog about branding. I would redesign big company logos in the minimalist style, even though they never asked me to, and I’d suck at with style. It was concrete, it had a repeatable theme, and it would be fun.
(1) Domains & Branding
TL;DR – Don’t get hung up on a domain. Find something that clearly reflects your concept, make sure it’s available (of course), and then do a little background research to not step into anything embarrassing. Once you’ve registered something, lock down how you’ll represent your brand and URL.
1A. Register a domain
Most marketers could spend a lifetime picking the right domain, only to find that the domain was registered 75 years ago and the internet was now accessed by drinking a series of pulsating purple tubes. Throw in trying to optimizing your domain for SEO, and your great, great moon-children may be able to enjoy your perfect domain as a grape-flavored cocktail.
This was a personal blog, so I decided to keep it simple and riff off of the initial concept. The basic idea was that I would do unsolicited, minimalist redesigns of big brands, exploring (and mocking) corporate branding along the way. Ultimately, I tossed around dozens of domain names, but I’m going to narrow it down to five that represent the journey pretty well. I started with the overly literal…
(1) MininimalLogos.com
(2) MinimalistLogos.com
If possible, I was shooting for a .com. I came up with option #2 because I was concerned about two l’s in a row in #1 – I still remember having to spell unruly domains over the phone, and so I try to limit confusion. Ultimately, both options felt too literal, a bit restrictive, and like they wouldn’t be much fun. So, I came up with…
(3) HeresYourNewLogo.com
The idea was simple. Each post would be titled something like “Here’s Your New Logo, Yahoo!”, and it would be a sort of running joke. While the overall concept might have worked for a while, the domain itself seemed too generic and hard to brand. Plus, I’d be tied into that one, very narrow concept forever. Up next was…
(4) MinimalEffort.com
It had a shout-out to minimalism, it wasn’t too restrictive, and it was in the self-mocking style that comes naturally to me. Only one problem – yep, it was already taken. I should say that I like to brainstorm first, before I look up availability. It just feels more natural. I liked this direction, though, so I kept working at it until I found one:
(5) MinimalTalent.com
It had minimalism, it made fun of my abilities (and set expectations low about my design skills, which I considered to be critically important), and it was unique enough to brand. Don’t spend weeks sending your domain to friends and getting all of your third cousin’s opinions, especially for small projects – it’ll drive you crazy and just delays getting your project off the ground.
1B. Double-check your name
My choice was more about branding than keyword research, buy I don’t want to give the impression that I think keyword research is unimportant.. If you want to see an in-depth keyword research process in action, I highly recommend
Laura Lippay’s 8-part series – yes, all 8 parts. I’d also recommend Todd Malicoat’s comprehensive post on choosing an exact-match domain.
Bare minimum, you need to make sure that your new name doesn’t have unexpected connotations or an embarrassing history. A quick Google search revealed that most references to “minimal talent” were about a musician named Matt Minimal, and his track called “Talent”:
Just as a sanity check, I also fed the brand through Moz’s
Keyword Difficulty Tool, and got back the following (note: this is a paid tool, and I’m only showing partial data):
So, the search volume was hardly exciting, but the difficulty level (39%) was promising. The bottom graph shows that, after a few average pages on high-authority domains (like YouTube), the competition fell off pretty quickly. I should be able to rank for my brand phrase.
I probably should’ve thought a bit more about trying to displace an artist with an actual album, but, hey, mistakes and all, right? The important thing is that I made a choice and the closet seemed skeleton-free. My domain was new, so I didn’t have to worry about domain history. If you’re buying a domain, I highly recommend checking the
Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and digging into the domain’s link profile.
1C. Pin down your brand
As I was finishing graduate school, my advisor gave me a good piece of advice – decide how you want your name to read and use it consistently. Part of that was just practical, a result of early academic search engines and their poor matching abilities. Ultimately, though, this piece of advice made me choose to use Dr. Peter J. Meyers consistently for years, and that serendipitously led to being called “Dr. Pete”, one of my better accidental branding decisions.
There are many way to represent a brand online – spaces, no spaces, all caps, all lower case, etc. I decided to go old school and just use “Minimal Talent”. Make this decision early, because it’s going to impact your design templates, your copy, your social profiles, your anchor text, and on and on. If you start changing it around 6 months later, you’ll make a mess.
1D. Pick a canonical URL
This is also a good time to decide on a canonical version of your URL. I opted to drop the “www” and just go with “minimaltalent.com”. I don’t have strong opinions about whether or not to use “www”, but consistency is absolutely essential. Make a conscious decision, set up canonicalization and redirects early (“www” to non-www or vise-versa), and use one format every time you link, display, tweet, email, print, or in any way share your URL.
(2) Hosting & Platforms
TL;DR – If you ask 12 people what the best hosting and CMS are, you’ll get 13 opinions. Try to narrow down to a few choices quickly and then go with what fits your project requirements and budget. The same goes for themes. If it’s a personal project, make the final choice yourself.
2A. Decide on a platform
It was time to actually start building something. I’m not going to dive deep into my choice of platforms – I decided early on to go with WordPress. Put simply, I was overdue to dive into WordPress and I knew many of our customers still use it, so that choice just fit the project.
2B. Pick a hosting company
I went to Twitter for advice on hosting companies, which is always an adventure, but managed to narrow the choice down to a few candidates. I’m not endorsing these companies or making a list of best choices – again, I’m just walking you through my own decision process:
(1) Web Faction (https://www.webfaction.com/)
Web faction is focused on hosting for developers, and their pricing seemed pretty good for what you get. I wanted this story to be accessible, though, and so the technical focus was actually a downside for me this time around. Web Faction was a good fit for me on a normal day, but just not a match for this project.
(2) Web Synthesis (http://websynthesis.com/)
Web Synthesis is about as close as I’ve seen to an enterprise WordPress hosting company. They seem to have serious firepower, but they also have the price-tag to match. Their suggested (“Professional”) plan was $97/month (to be fair, they have a “Starter” plan for $27/month), and that just didn’t fit the scope of Minimal Talent.
(3) DreamPress (http://www.dreamhost.com/dreampress/)
DreamHost is a large, discount host, and I’ve used them for a couple of projects with relatively decent results. Like any big host, they have good and bad reviews. They were a known quantity, though, and I was intrigued by their DreamPress offering.
So, ultimately, I went with the company I knew and tried DreamPress. I opted to spend $19.95/month and go with a packaged WordPress solution, even though basic hosting can be had for cheaper rates. I tend to believe that you get what you pay for, and if a project is worth doing, it’s worth some investment. You have to do what’s right for you.
2C. Choose a theme
Next up was theme-shopping. One of the things I like about using a themed platform (like WordPress) is that you can narrow down what you like and use that to inform your design decisions. Personally, I find that a lot less intimidating than staring at an empty page waiting for inspiration. I’m not a designer by trade, so I need a starting-off point. Put simply, I don’t always know what I like until I see it.
I hit Twitter and Google, looking for minimalist themes. Theme shopping is a bit like choosing a toothpaste, and it’s easy to get overloaded. Do you want cavity preventing, tartar control, extra whitening, or cavity reducing, tartar fighting, extreme whitening? Sometimes, you lose track of the difference.
The best I can say is cast a wide net, find a few themes you like, bookmark them, and come back later with a clear head. After a couple of days, I narrowed down my choices to three:
1. Hipster (hat-tip to @brandondud)
I was looking for something clean, but ultimately decided that
Hipster was probably a bit too minimalist for my tastes. Here’s a screenshot, just to give you an idea of what I was looking for:
2. Centita (hat-tip to @Charles_SEO)
The
Centita theme gave me a bit more options, but I ultimately felt that it was more geared toward a company site. I was really aiming for something more blogging-focused.
3. Sixteen Nine (hat-top to @meinck)
I was familiar with StudioPress and had actually wandered across the
Minimum theme first, but then dug around a bit more until I discovered Sixteen Nine. This had just the right amount of flexibility for me, while still being clearly focused on blogging:
This led to another decision, though. The Sixteen Nine theme was part of the Genesis framework. The price tag ($99.95) wasn’t a big stumbling block for me, but it would mean committing to that framework.
Luckily, I was familiar with some of the folks at StudioPress (the makers of Genesis) and had heard a lot of good things from the SEO community. Since this was my first WordPress effort, I felt that a framework would help me overcome some of the early pains of customizing WordPress. Of course, it would also mean learning the ins and outs of the platform.
2D. Tweak your design
Once again, perfectionism reared its ugly head. While I’ve had good experiences with Genesis so far, there’s a learning curve even to WordPress. I wanted to tweak things that first-timers probably shouldn’t tweak, and sometimes even just finding the right page of code or style sheet took hours. The first couple of weeks were a frustrating experience.
I decided not to go too crazy (70% of the way toward going crazy) – I left the layout and dark color scheme alone, and made fairly small changes to font choices. I wanted to replace the author photo with my logo, which meant some resizing – this turned out to be much more of a challenge than I expected and actually took a few days of part-time messing around. It took me about a day just to figure out how to flush the built-in Varnish cache, but I’ll leave out the gory details.
My launch design ended up looking like this (
yes, the site is live) – not earth shattering, but it got the job done:
I’m not going to dig deep into logo design. Branding is a personal and sometimes perilous journey, and there are many options. I’ll just say this – don’t let logo design keep you from launching forever. Yes, a professional brand image is important, but a logo isn’t imbued with magical powers. Ultimately, you have to build a brand, and the sooner you start the sooner you’ll get established.
I decided that having someone else design a logo for a blog about designing logos seemed like cheating, so I tackled that project myself. The theme gave me guidance, and I stuck with a mostly gray scheme. I ended up with this:
It’s designed for a dark background, but it fares reasonably well on white (make sure your logo works on a variety of backgrounds and at a variety of sizes). The left of the lower-case “m” forms a pencil. The only stroke of color is the red eraser, which I meant as a subtle way of saying that my design efforts require frequent editing and occasional creative destruction.
(3) Social & Plug-ins
TL;DR – Register and protect your social accounts ASAP and set up authorship via Google+. Pin down your social links and SEO plug-ins prior to launch.
3A. Register social accounts
One of the dangers of platforms like WordPress, in my opinion, is that you can get plug-in fever, launching with every possible function imaginable. This includes social networks – it only takes minutes to enable sharing on hundreds of networks.
The reality is that you’ll quickly dilute your efforts and you’ll never be able to spend time building those networks. So, I decided to focus on just three: Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest. Choosing the right networks is well beyond the scope of this post, but I’m already active on Twitter, I feel that Google+ has some SEO advantages (even if they’re indirect), and the design focus of Minimal Talent made Pinterest a natural choice. I’d also been meaning to dig into Pinterest for a long time.
I chose to use my personal accounts, but I also decided to claim the Twitter account @MinimalTalent. I don’t think you have to register everything under the sun, but protecting assets you might use later is often a good idea. While I chose to do this manually, I recommend
KnowEm for checking and claiming a large number of social accounts.
I also connected my Google+ and Pinterest accounts to the site. Connecting your Google+ account to establish authorship varies with the platform, but here’s a good guide to
setting up authorship with WordPress.
3B. Set up an RSS feed
Next, I connected my RSS feed (for WordPress, it conveniently exists at
http://example.com/feed) to Feedburner. I know RSS is probably dying, and Feedburner is a hot mess, but the reality is that nothing viable has really replaced either one. So, for now, I decided to include an RSS feed.
3C. Pick your plug-ins
Finally, I set up social and RSS icons on the site itself. I used
Simple Social Icons for the logos on the left column and used JetPack’s built-in tools to display social icons on my individual posts. There are a mountain of social plug-ins, and I barely scaled the foothills.
Since I was using the Genesis framework, a lot of my core SEO needs were already integrated. If you’re going with straight WordPress, though, I’d recommend
Joost de Valk’s WordPress plug-in. Many CMS systems have a bad tendency to create duplicate content and spin out ugly URLs and META data (or generic data, including titles). Solve this problem before you launch, or it could bite you later.
(4) Analytics & Tools
TL;DR – Set up your analytics and monitoring tools before you launch. You can’t recreate lost historical data. Use Google Webmaster Tools to help get crawled and indexed quickly.
4A. Set up Google Analytics
Since my needs were basic and my budget was tight, I went ahead and stuck to
Google Analytics. Whatever complaints I have about Google, it’s hard to beat GA’s feature set for absolutely free. Don’t put this off – if you luck out and your blog takes off, you can’t back-fill the data. I’m not going to dive deep into GA, but I’d recommend opting for the new, universal analytics. It’s going to give you more options going forward.
4B. Set up Google Webmaster Tools
I’d also set up Google Webmaster Tools right away, since one thing it does very well is help with discovery and getting your initial site indexed. I’ll get into that topic a bit more in the next post (which will be focused on the launch itself).
4C. Create an XML sitemap
Create and link up your XML sitemap. I used a plug-in called
Google XML Sitemaps, and it seems to be working well enough. In Google Webmaster Tools, go to “Crawl > Sitemaps”, and you can submit your sitemap URL. If you’re working on a large site, I’m a big fan of tiered sitemaps. For this project, I really only needed the basics.
4D. Set up Moz Analytics
Part of the point of this project is to get back in the trenches with our customers and do a better job understanding our product as a marketer. So, I set up a new campaign in Moz Analytics, and I connected my Google Analytics account right away (which is an option during campaign creation):
You’ll also want to set up at least a few initial keywords, especially branded keywords, so that you can quickly see if and when you’re getting established. I decided to set up a small list that covered a range, from essential to aspirational:
- site:minimaltalent.com
- minimal talent
- misadventures in minimalism
- minimalism 101
- minimalist logos
- yahoo logo
- minimalism
I decided to set up a “site:” operator as a keyword, just to tracking that the site site is being indexed. After that, I went with the brand name and my tagline. My tagline is pretty specific, so if I’m not ranking for that fairly soon, something may be wrong. After that, I cast a wider net, just to have something to shoot for over time.
Next Time: Launch
I’m going to be telling this story over a series of posts, as the blog itself unfolds. Up next, I’ll be talking about the mechanics of actually launching, promoting your launch, and initially getting indexed and (hopefully) ranking. If there’s anything in particular you’d like to hear about this process along the way, please let me know in the comments.
Special thanks to Abe Schmidt for putting together the pre-launch graphic, and thanks to everyone who’s supported the Minimal Talent blog so far. It’s been a lot of fun.
Read the full series
Use the links below to explore the entire “Starting Over” series:
