Well I said that there would be two posts on blogging - the first on getting your blog up and running - did you do it yet? What? You didn’t? No desert for you! Get your blog going - it is easy. You know that tomorrow never comes when you speak of things you are going to do. Trust me, one of the few things that I have truly mastered in my life is procrastination and I know if you let it even creep in just a bit, you will keep talking about the things you are going to do. If you haven’t opened up a Wordpress blog, go here NOW!
Back to where I started off - I was thinking about it, and I am going to break this up into three parts instead. Promotion will be next time. I need to stress that this post is primarily focused on those who have their own hosting when I am talking about widgets and plugins. I am not trying to make you free blog people feel bad, there just isn’t that much available for you - but there are a few really useful things, so read on.
“Why I gotta tweak my blog?” you ask. Well, getting your blog on the internet is great, but you need to do things to make it more attractive to visitors and to the search engines.
For visitors, there has to be stuff (techie term I use a lot) on your page so that it looks attractive. Now this doesn’t mean that a blog without stuff can’t be successful, but I just think that making it look a little attractive can attract more eyeballs (you know, people looking at your blog). So what can you do to make it more attractive? I am going to break this down in two parts - free and self hosted.
FREE
How do you start off in making your free Wordpress blog more attractive? You start off with using the widgets found in the Design area of your Wordpress blog. There are several thing that you can add to make your blog look more “complete” for lack of a better word. Mess around with the widgets - see what you like.
Not fancy enough for you yet? Well, you can put pictures with the Flickr widget. Don’t know what Flickr is? Flickr is the largest photo-sharing website in the world where people post their pictures. Don’t have a Flickr account, and therefore no pictures to share - no problem, you just activate the widget and it will bring up Flickr interesting pictures of the day. Cool huh? Of course you can get your own pictures up too - I will let you tinker around to figure that out - it’s easy though.
Next thing you can do is use the text box to put in your own links attached to pictures like you see on my free Make Money Online Wordpress blog. You see my Twitter and Facebook icons (they are actually called badges if you are doing a search)? If you click on them, you will be sent to my pages on those respective sites. Another pretty cool thing huh?
“Wait a doggone minute,” you say, “I don’t know how to make a picture that will send me to some predetermined part of this interweb thingy. How am I supposed to do this?” Not too hard actually. First, sign up for Twitter and Facebook - you will use them latter anyway, so don’t delay, do it today - now actually.
Then you would search for badges for Twitter like you can find here. Download the picture. Open up a new post - you are going to write a dummy post (like you are going to post, but don’t actually post it). Then you use the first icon (as of this writing anyway) next to the Add Media function at the top of the area in which you write your post to insert the Twitter badge that you downloaded. You should then see the badge in the writing are of the post - just like I did below:
There is an option when inserting the picture to enter a link, just leave that blank, or erase whatever is in there. For those of you already familiar with the linking of a picture might wonder why I suggest this - personal preference, and ease of use for newbies - you’ll see in a moment. Once you see the picture in the post, you highlight the picture (you know, left click, then drag the pointer across the picture). When you do this, you will notice two little icons in the post menu (above the picture) to the right of the three icons with lines. The two icons are for creating links and there is one with three links of a chain, and the other is a broken link. You are going to use the three links icon. Click on that and a box will appear - input the link URL - in this case your Twitter page URL and where it says Target, scroll down and choose the option that says open in a new window. My reasoning for this is that you are going to be trying hard to get people to your page, you don’t want to send them away with links….this way, you send them to your link, but your blog page will remain open in the background. You can do this over and over with other pictures for links to your social networking sites, or for affiliate programs.
Enough for now. Putter around with you blog and start writing posts!
Self-Hosted
I think that you can use the tips I shared above as a starting off point too, but you have the option to use plugins, and you really need to do that. For now, because it is getting late, and I am getting tired of typing, I am just going to give you a linked list of plugins that I like. There are hundreds of plugins available, and it is likely that you will want something specifically targeted to your audience or uses, but the following is a list of plugins that I regularly use:
Platinum SEO Pack —OR—All in One SEO
Akismet (included with Wordpress)
Check these plugins out and read about them, download them if you like, then activate them. If you like the usability of the plugin, please donate to the author - they are making our life easier through their creations.
Alright, it is past my bedtime. I will cover some basic promotion techniques next time.
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November 5th, 2008 at 5:37 am
Very good information as well as reference points. Thanks for sharing the same.
sherin
http://investinternals.blogspot.com