Thousands of blogs are being created every week and many of them are making critical mistakes within the first week of starting. If you are thinking about starting a blog here are some things that you should think about and do within the first 7 days of starting your blog.
Using nature is a great way to market a product. By creating a soft and warm atmosphere you can make your product have the image of being soft, gentle and warm just like [Snuggle fabric softener](http://www.snuggle.com/home.asp). So if you want to brand your product as being soft and personal like Snuggle you may want to use nature in your marketing and advertising campaigns. …
For quite a long time I have been reading [Lee Odden's blog](http://www.toprankblog.com/) and have had the privilege to meet Lee in person at a few conferences. Lee has been in the industry for 9 years and he has a unique approach on PR and SEO. Because of this I asked him a few questions through an email interview. Here are the questions and his answers.
Have you ever wondered how popular your blog is compared to other blogs in your industry? You might be able to figure this out by doing a simple backward link check, but that only shows you a small part of the full picture. Why not compare traffic or even RSS subscribers to get a more complete picture? Today [Text Link Ads](http://www.text-link-ads.com) released a [tool](http://www.text-link-ads.com/blog_juice/) that compares the popularity of your blog to others by taking multiple variables into account.
Last week, Matt from 37signals wrote “[The casino experience](http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/the_casino_experience.php)” that analyzes a casino from a design perspective. Matt hits on points such as the fact that casinos have no windows, no clocks, and they are hard to navigate, which are all great ways to keep people gambling. From a marketing perspective you can actually take many of these principles that casinos use to help improve your conversion rate.
Sometimes in business you have competitors that love to mimic and copy all of your moves. The worst part about this is that it makes it hard to show your potential customers the benefits of your product compared to your competitor’s product. So what do you do when this happens to you? You can do something so drastic and unexpected that they have no choice but to stop copying you.
Many companies are starting to create company blogs because it is a great way to keep in touch with customers. There are some good company blogs out there, but many are ignoring their customers by blogging about things that do not really help their customers. One of these companies that I think is ignoring their customers is [FeedBurner](http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/).
Yesterday [SEO Black Hat](http://www.seoblackhat.com) wrote [10 Steps to Guarantee You Make the Digg Front Page](http://seoblackhat.com/2006/10/02/10-steps-to-guarantee-you-make-the-digg-front-page/), which discusses 10 tips to help you get on the digg front page. Here are the tips he recommended.
I was just reading [Search Engine Journal](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=3852) and I saw something quite interesting. A site called [User/Submitter](http://www.usersubmitter.com/) is providing a service that will help you get on the digg frontpage. If you are a user you can get paid 50 cents for each story you digg and as a submitter you are charged a base price of $20 and $1 for each digg you desire.
During the second week of September I wrote a post called [My 50 favorite design resources](http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/my-50-favorite-design-resources.html) that got traffic as a result of [StumbleUpon](http://www.stumbleupon.com), [digg](http://www.digg.com) and [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us). The article received 11350 visitors from StumbleUpon, 8879 from digg and 2715 from del.icio.us. As a result here are my observations regarding the visitors and overall traffic:
