31 Mar

5 Steps to Beginning a Successful Blog

Posted under How to Make a Blog

The below posts recap my most recent guidelines in creating a successful blog. These posts focus on the basics of getting started in creating your new website.

  1. How to Start a Successful Blog
  2. What’s the Best Blog Platform and How to Choose
  3. How to Configure Wordpress for SEO
  4. Pick a Niche for your Blog and Stick with it
  5. Using Feedburner RSS with Wordpress

Now that the basics of setting up a blog have been covered, we will begin to focus a little more on strategy.


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31 Mar

Using Feedburner RSS with Wordpress

Posted under How to Make a Blog

If you are going to be running a blog, one of the main metrics you should be concerned about is your RSS subscriber count.  The best way to manage and monitor your RSS subscriptions is to use the free service from Feedburner; owned by Google.  Feedburner provides you with daily updates to the number of people subscribing to your blog, as well as some interesting insight into what people are reading on your site.

feedburner analytics graph

Feedburner allows you to display subscriber counts directly on your blog if you’d like.  However, if your just starting out and dont have many subscribers, I recommend not using these buttons.  Displaying the fact that you have zero or little subscribers may send the wrong message to your readers that what you have to say is unimportant.  On the other hand, if you have a few hundred or even thousand subscribers, I highly recommend using the button as it can send the message that many people find the content on your site valuable and is worthy of being subscribed to.

feedburner-subscription-conters-2.jpg

To begin setting up your Feedburner feed, visit http://www.feedburner.com and sign up for a free account.  Once you have created an account your RSS feed URL will appear as http://feeds.feedburner.com/domain.  Now that you have the new RSS feed URL, you’ll want to go in and redirect your old RSS feed URL that comes as the default with Wordpress to the new location.  The advantage of the redirect is that any current subscribers will be counted by Feedburner.  There is a plugin available for Wordpress that can handle this redirect automatically for you called Feedburner Feedsmith.


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15 Mar

Pick a Niche for Your Blog and Stick with it

Posted under How to Make a Blog

focusing your blog nicheOne of the major downfalls of many blogs is not focusing on a specific niche or topic. Depending on your definiton of a successful blog, choosing a niche can be the determining factor. If you are looking to start a personal blog about yourself, friends, family, or random interesting things you find on the internet, then you will need to set some expectations that you wont receive massive amounts of traffic. If your goal is to reach a large audience or make money with your blog, then writing about a topic that is interesting to a large group of people is imperative.

By choosing a niche and sticking with it, you will give your visitors information on a consistent topic. This is the single most important idea that will keep people coming back to your site and begin to form a tight community. The most successful blog writers are those that pick a niche they are genuinely interested in. When I first started creating blogs, I made all of these mistakes. At first I wrote a personal blog, but was disspointed when I was getting only minimal amounts of traffic, no comments, and certainly no money being made. After wising up a bit, I decided I would do some research on niche areas that were likely to have high paying ads. Trust me, this is not the way to go. The high paying ads are high paying for a reason. The competition is so vast that it is nearly impossible to do well. Additionally, the high paying ads are in areas that are a complete bore to try and write about. Usually topics like Mesothelioma show up at the top of the list. I challenge anyone to start a successful blog about this disease and actually enjoy writing about it.

In addition to picking a niche that will be interesting to a wide audience, a second tip that I can give you is to choose one that is not time-sensitive. By time-sensitive, I mean dont write about things that are only interesting for a short period of time like news, stocks, lottery numbers etc. The idea behind choosing a niche that will be interesting to people no matter whether its read the day its posted, or 3 years down the line is not limiting yourself. By writing on these topics you will be able to gain new visitors to your site on all of your posts no matter when they were written. This will give you a huge advantage in obtaining visits from the search engines and continuing to make money with absolutely no effort on your part. Believe me, theres nothing better than getting checks in the mail for doing absolutely nothing.

The bottom line here is pick a niche that you are genuinely interested in and one that you know others will be interested in as well. Choose a niche that is timeless and will allow you to continue reaching new people and new sources of revenue from ads. Don’t be discouraged if there are some big name websites in your niche that you choose though. You can still compete against them relatively easily as long as you offer quality content.


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13 Mar

How to Configure Wordpress for SEO

Posted under How to Make a Blog

essentials wordpress pluginsNow that you have learned how to Purchase a Domain Name and Install Wordpress in previous 2 posts, its time to look at configuring Wordpress to be a little more SEO friendly.  For those of you who may not know what SEO is, it stands for Search Engine Optimization which is the method of tweaking the site to perform better in the search engine’s results pages.  I’m not going to give you a few tips on configuring Wordpress, but am not going to go into detail on the reasoning behind the tips.  There are plenty of other sites out there that go into more detail about strategies of SEO.

A few quick tips for configuring Wordpress:

Update the permalink structures
Permalinks refer to the URLs of each individual post on your blog.  Wordpress is database driven, and is by default set up to use variables in the URL.  To change the permalink structures in the Wordpress Admin go to Options>permalinks and select the option that you like best.  I recommend using a custom with the following settings /%category%/%postname%/.  Placing this in the custom field will make your URLs appear as http://www.domain.com/category/post-title/.

Install Plugins
Plugins are peices of code to further extend the functionality of Wordpress.  Because Wordpress is open source, anyone is able to create plugins and make them available for download to the public.  Because of the popularity of Wordpress there are literally thousands of plugins you can use to add new functionality to your blog.  You can browse a wide range of available plugins at http://wp-plugins.net/beta/.  To install a plugin just access your account via FTP and drop them in the wp-content/plugins/ folder.  Below are a list of great plugins that no Wordpress user should be without.  These should get you started, but you should certainly browse through the available plugins and see if you find any others you would like to add.

  1.  Akismet - This is a comment spam blocker.  You will start to recieve tons of comment spam on your posts, and this plugin all but eliminates them.  This plugin is installed by default so you just need to grab an activation key (free) and turn it on.
  2. Enforce www preference - This plugin will automatically add the www. infront of your URL.  For example if someone accesses your website by going to http://domain.com.  They will automatically be redirected to http://www.domain.com.  This plugin eliminates the possibility of duplicate content.
    Download Enforce WWW Preference
  3. FeedBurner Feedsmith - This plugin redirects the default RSS feed in Wordpress to a FeedBurner URL.  FeedBurner is an RSS management tool that provides stats such as how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed.  You can check out FeedBurner at FeedBurner.com.
    Download FeedBurner Feedsmith
  4. OneClick Installer - This is a plugin that makes installing new plugins and themes super easy.  It removes the necessity of loging into your FTP client to place files on the server and will automatically place themes and plugins in the correct place from within your Wordpress Admin panel.
    Download OneClick Installer

These are just 4 great plugins that I recommend installing right off the bat on a new Wordpress install.  There are a ton more for you to choose from, and depending on your blog topic there is an unlimited number of combinations you may want to use.  Explore the plugin database linked above and start adding new functionality to your soon to be successful blog.


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12 Mar

Whats the Best Blog Platform and How to Choose

Posted under How to Make a Blog

Which Blog Platform is the best?As a continuation of my post “How to Start a Successful Blog, we will now dive into the different platforms available to run your blog from.

There are plenty of options to choose from, some are free and some require you to pay. There is absolutely no reason to pay for one because Wordpress does everything and more than any of what the others have to offer. If you purchased and host your domain with BlueHost.com like I advised, then installing Wordpress is about a 2 minute process.

To install Wordpress from a BlueHost, simply log in to your dashboard and click on the Fantastico icon. This section offers quite a few different types of software that you can install on your domain, and I encourage you to check a few of them out. Once your in the Fantastico section just click on Wordpress and install it in the root directory of your domain by leaving the subdirectory box blank. This will place the homepage of our blog at the highest level possible (http://www.yourdomain.com). Fill in the remaining questions to set up the Admin account and finish up the installation. All of your databases and account creation will be done automatically.

Once the install has finished, your new blog should be up and running on your domain with a very basic template and default post. Go ahead and check out your blog at http://www.yourdomain.com. You can also log into the Admin area by accessing http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ and entering the account info you entered during the install process.

Have a look around in the admin area and start to familiarize yourself with it. In the 3rd post of this series, we will look at how to configure Wordpress to make it more search engine friendly.


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12 Mar

How to Start a Successful Blog

Posted under How to Make a Blog

how to start a blogThe first step in creating a successful blog is purchasing a domain name. There are options available that allow you to host your blog for free on a domain that you do not own such as Blogger.com. However, we are not looking for the shortcuts. Our goal is to create a blog that is as successful as it possibly can be. Purchasing your own domain name allows you to have complete control over the keywords used in the domain name which plays a huge role in terms of doing well in organic search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Personally, I recommend using BLUEHOST.COM as your domain registrar. They have fair prices, amazing customer support, and offer some great benefits such as personalized email addresses, 1500 GB of Hosting Space and more. I’ve used them for a few years and never had a single problem.

When selecting your domain name be sure to follow these techniques as they will come into play down the road once you’re blog is up and running.

  • Choose a domain name that is easy to remember
  • Stick with using a .com instead of .net, .us, etc.
  • Use keywords as the domain that are very specific to the topic your blog will be about.
  • Use a keyword research tool such as Wordtracker or Keyword Descovery to find out which keywords in your niche are most popular
  • If you have trouble coming up with a domain that isn’t already taken, try the free tool available at http://www.bustaname.com for some suggestions

In my next post, we will examine what to do next in starting up your successful blog once you have purchased your very own domain name.


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