Guy Kawasaki recently wrote, in "The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog" -

If you want to evangelize your blog, then think "book" not "diary"...

While he was may have been speaking from the perspective of marketing your blog as a 'product', this line stuck with me for another reason; books have usually have better content than a diary - they're generally more interesting/exciting/adventurous.

If you want to pull people into your site, you have to write great content. We all know this; it's one of the first lessons a "pro" blogger (or any blogger) will be told. The thing is, what makes great content? Which is the content that pulls people in and gets them hooked.

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How many of you have purposefully arrived a little late to a party to avoid the awkwardness of being the only one there, apart from the host(s)? How many online forums have you arrived at from search engines where the only topics are those by the forum owner, so you've refrained from posting a response? Probably a few. Now, how many of you might have got involved with some of those forums if there had been evidence of a bigger community? Again, I'm going to assume quite a few of you.

The same mentality applies to new blogs. We all tend to want to be heard by as many others as possible, so why would we comment on a blog with no other participants?

This leaves the owner of a new blog with a conundrum. How do you get people to comment on your site if they won't do so until someone else does?

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I've been experimenting with two different approaches to launching a new blog recently: just going live with it, and in contrast, build it up quietly, then launch.

It's been interesting comparing the two methods and how they've affected my attitude towards the blog itself.

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