Build Sites Faster With A Predefined Blog Build

Systems. Processes. When it comes to business, I absolutely LOVE those two words. Why? Because they allow you to produce repeatable results with less time and effort.

In this post I am going to explain how I use blog builds. Before I do that, I guess I should explain what a blog build is, because not everyone will be familiar with that phrase.

What Is A Blog Build?

For my company, a blog build is a predefined package of information that simplifies the process of building a blog. This tells everyone on my team what part they need to play in the building of a site, which greatly reduces the time required to get a site online. Before I started using blog builds, I could easily spend 2 days building a blog. Now that I use them, we can fully build out a blog in as little as 4 hours.

What Is Included In A Blog Build?

Name of the theme that will be used - I like the Gazette theme by WooThemes -
Header graphic template (.psd)
Favicon graphic template (.psd)
The number of categories that will initially be used on the site - 4+
The number of initial featured articles - 1+
The number of initial non-featured articles - 5+
The author avatar/alias (if applicable)
The author image/gravatar setup (if applicable)
The author bio requirements
Google authorship setup
Page template requirements (which pages will be created)
Tweet package
Sidebar Ad/banner configuration - 300x250 + 125x125
Plugin list
WP settings

How Does Using A Blog Build Help Me Specifically?

My business is now totally built around a team concept. Using a blog build allows me to define the parameters for a site, finalize the "build" and then give that information to the members of my team and they can build the site to the correct specs. If I did not have a team and I was outsourcing the building of my sites/blogs, I would simply give the outsourcer the blog build info and then they would be able to complete the site setup without having to come back and ask me any questions.

When the site setup is complete, I have a fully setup blog, complete with content and a twitter account that has already had at least 20 tweets setup to post over the next few days. Even if you are building your sites yourself, you will find that being organized like this saves you a LOT of time which will allow you to get more work done.

Why Did I Decide To Use Blog Builds?

Over the past few years, I have become more and more data driven in terms of the management of my business. I realized that simply building a site was not profitable. In fact, building sites was a great expense of money when you aren't monetizing those sites. So I started tracking how much time/money was spent on building sites and soon realized that the primary goal should be to correctly get the site build and online in the least amount of time possible. I also realized that I needed to stop building them myself. Making those changes made a huge difference in my business, and it is my belief that standardizing your processes will do the same for you and your business.

Sheryl