Increasing Your Blogging About Your Application

As your launch date grows closer, you should blog more. The final stages of making an application are often quite interesting, and this would be a good time to start posting about all these final aspects. You should take time to post daily, possibly even twice daily, as your launch date approaches.

If you want to, you can write several blogs at once, and then set it up so that the blog posts go live exactly when you want them to. As someone who has made a living from blogging, this is a trick you can use so you don’t have to spend time writing blogs daily during the week. If you are using a WordPress template, it is quite easy to do, as you can schedule a date and time for your blog posts to go live (see Figure 8-3). To do this in WordPress, click Edit in the Publish Immediately section under the Publish column on the right.

Figure 8-3. If you are using WordPress to publish your blog on your application’s web site, then you can schedule blog posts ahead of time.

This leads to the question of what you are going to write about. You will need to need to think about your culture to answer that. Think about what your followers on Twitter and Facebook would be interested in hearing about. One a good idea is to talk about the features that you have been promising. Building an application is like making a movie, and I’m sure that you have seen many making-of-a-movie features on DVDs. I must admit that only a few of these are really interesting enough to watch a second time. If you can write about creating your application in a way that is interesting, it will draw readers in.

RSS Feeds and Followers

By now, you hopefully have a lot of subscribers to your blog’s RSS feed. Checking to see how many RSS followers you have is an excellent way of discovering your culture, as discussed in Chapter 3. In order to get more followers, you can post links on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook every time you do a blog post.

But that’s if you want to do it the hard way. Instead, I recommend setting up a web service like Posterous, Tumblr, TwitterFeed, or TypePad to automatically put your blog entries on social media sites. This is also possible to set up with blogs like the aforementioned WordPress, as well as Blogger, LiveJournal, and Movable Type.

This is also a time to start looking at the comments on your blog. On WordPress, this is very easy to do from the template, and it may be very useful to hear back from what will hopefully be your application’s following before the application is released. From their comments, you might get an idea of what features might be needed before the launch date, or what will need to be added after the application has hit the market. You should also look for concerns in the comments. For example, if you are seeing a lot of comments that the application might be too hard to use, it might be a good idea to take a look at your UI.

Sadly, a lot of your blog commentary may be spam. I have one blog that generates many comments per day, but half of the comments are not even closely related to the articles they are commenting about. For example, I might write an article about a certain gadget, and someone will add the comment, “Nice well written article, it reminds me of Toupees for Men,” along with a link to Toupees for Men, where a sale can hopefully be made. Some comments are even generated by machines. There are programs designed to sniff out sites and leave spam that’s posing as legitimate commentary. Fortunately, if you use a blog service with CAPTCHA web forms and spam filters, you can stop this spamming problem before the taint becomes an infection.