I announced via On Blogging Australia that I’d be joining in on Maki’s Flagship Blog Project. This involves setting up a new blog every single month for a year - the idea is that at the end of the year participants will have a dozen growing blogs.
I mentioned that I might also use it as an opportunity to rehabilitate some of the many blog projects that started well and then went by the wayside as I’ve concentrated on this blog and On Blogging Australia.
In week one, Maki has asked us to do the following:
Week 1: Setting up the Blog
- Research your intended niche and check out the competition
- Choose a domain name that is easily brandable.
- Pay for a good web host and set up Wordpress
- Hire a skilled designer or customize a free Wordpress theme
- Install all the necessary Wordpress plugins or addons
- Develop consistent branding (tagline, usernames, logos etc.)
- Optimize the website for visitors and search engines
- Write your first blog post.
I’ve decided to start a blog on intrapreneuring. An intrapreneur is an entrepreneur who develops crazy useful stuff inside a large organisation - in other words, people like me.
I registered the intrapreneurblog.com domain name back in August and haven’t really used it yet - it’s been parked over at NameDrive awaiting an excuse to get started.
I’m in the middle of setting intrapreneurblog.com up - it is the subject of my most recent Get a Real Blog series post. By 7 December, I will need to have:
- finished the installation and setup,
- developed and implemented a branding strategy,
- finished optimising the blog, and
- written my first post.
No sweat 
I have a resource blog that I’ve been working up for ages, and another one for a charity in conjuction with other people but there is not a chance that I could get either done in a week. I’m not sure whether you are insane or not, but good luck with it. And kudos.
Intrapreneur is a good word. I hadn’t heard it before but I did a quick search and I see there’s already a wikipedia entry.
I’m doing a version of the flagship project as well although the blogs are only a part of it. It’s a series of affiliate marketing projects. I’d already started planning it when I read Maki’s post so I printed off his schedule and worked out how I could use it to add a bit more momentum to what I was doing.
One of the challenges is obviously the compounding effect. It starts off being no sweat as you say but halfway into it you have the same starting schedule plus 6 other blogs to maintain.
Maki deals with it by having these 3 tasks in weeks 2-4
“put up an ad looking for writers and monitor their applications”
“hire a few good writers and tell them your requirement”
“ensure that hired writers write a few posts. Give feedback”
Easy right?
I’ve kind of worked out how I might deal with the compounding effect but I think there will be some lessons along the way :))
I admire you for taking up the challenge alongside a full time job! There are two of us going to be working on it pretty much full time.
All the best with it - I’ll follow your progress.
Hi Christine,
thank you for your comment.
It is going to be quite a challenge
I guess for this particular month’s blog that I have a pool of other intrapreneurs within SMS to plead/bribe/shame into writing some articles for me - but there is that compounding effect
I’m thinking of advertising via the ProBlogger job board and my own mini blog network and seeing what happens for the other blogs - I think that the end result will be a blog network of sorts. If nothing else, it will certainly be interesting
Best regards, Andrew
Hi cerebralmum,
apologies once again for missing your comments going into the spam folder.
We’ll see how insane I am - chances are I have bitten off more than I can chew. That said, I’ve achieved the seemingly impossible before, so I’m going to keep giving it everything I can until it no longer works. Either way, it will be both an interesting journey and a source of further article content
Best regards, Andrew
Good luck with the schedule - it seems pretty heavy! I read that post too and it seems like a solid strategy if you can keep up with it.
Hi Ross,
thank you for your comment.
It remains to be seen if I can keep up with it
Best regards, Andrew