correlate

Hopefully you found part I helpful.  Here is the second five tips for launching your own Wordpress.org blog.

1. Tracking - If you are like most bloggers, you wants to know how much visits and subscriptions you have.  Even if you are blogging for fun or you just enjoy pontificating, you still want to know if you are shouting into the darkness.  Google Analytics and Feedburner are two top ways to do this giving you site metrics and feed metrics respectively.  Joe Tan at tan tan noodles has a great plug-in called Wordpress reports that also will tie all of your feeds together at Feedburner and that you can get some basic reports right in a reporting interface within your administrator view.
2. Plug-ins - The reporting plug-in is only one example of great plug-in tools that you have readily available for you to take advantage of.  Chris Messina at Factory City has a great post regarding the top plug-ins he will not launch any blog without.  Like widgets, there are a lot more to consider, quite easy to go into plug-in overload.  I have most of them installed into correlate already.  Aside from theme control, copious plug-ins is one of the biggest areas of upside for going self-hosted.
3. Beta site - I would recommend to all to have a beta site that you keep a different sub-directory and under password protection.  You can clone your entire blog at the start of the process by re-uploading the data into it and can even use the exact same MySQL database for both your production and beta blog.  In fact, it is the equivalent of running two blogs at the same site.  You are simply using one to test out any new template, theme or widget changes.  This should be fairly intuitive to those of you who work in a beta/integration environment at work.
4. Mobile - Many of your readers will consume your blog via RSS and that, in most cases, will take care of the giving your readers a mobile-consumable view of your blog.  However, it is always nice to provide a mobile-friendly format of your blog as well.  You may have come across Alex King’s Wordpress Mobile Edition plug-in for mobile format when researching plug-ins.  (Note: Alex King is also the creator of the ‘Share This’ component that you see at the end of my blog posts.)  This is one that I would like to point out because it will give your blog one additional step-up for your readers.
5. Promote New Location - This seems obvious but it may be something that is easy to overlook as you are eager to kick off your new site.  In addition to porting your content, you want to be sure that you move your readers to your new blog location.  The best way to do so is a final post on your original blog pointing users to your new location.  This will go out to your RSS readers as well.  In fact, you may want to post a couple of times to ensure your RSS viewer know to convert their feed links to the new location or in case they missed your first note about your move.

There are probably a number of other tips that I’m not thinking of but these are a few that helped me with my migration.  If you have any tips, please feel free to share, it may mean I missed something that I should do at correlate!