Day 2 - Adding Your Design and Plugins
Hello Visitors,
Hopefully by now you have bought your domain, hosted it and installed Wordpress! Today I will share with you how I made IncomeDiary look so good and user friendly!
Finding a Premium Design For Your Blog
When you saw IncomeDiary.com you probably smiled and thought, WOW and then thought to yourself, just if I could create a blog like that! Well I have to be honest with you, I paid $80 for my Wordpress Theme and it's not just that theme, they have dozens with lots of great features to personalize it yourself! The huge benefit of buying a premium theme is that you don't have to spend 100's of hours and thousands of dollars to get the same results as the professionals!
So where did I get my Wordpress Theme? Woothemes of course!
Once you have purchased your theme, uploading is simple. Upload the file to your FTP folder marked Themes which is in the Wp-Content folder. There are two ways to upload a theme, I personally use a FTP client called FlashFXP which you can get a FREE trial from Download.com
The other way is to upload via your hosting control panel. Login to your cpanel and click File Manager and go to the folder Themes which is in Public HTML and then WP-Content. Next, click upload which is in the top navigation and upload the zip file of your theme, once it is uploaded, unzip it.
Once you have done this, login to your Wordpress Admin and click Appearance and you will see your theme, click it and a preview will open up and then in the top right corner is a button saying Activate, click it and your theme will now work!
If you bought your theme from Woothemes, then you can play around with all their really cool settings by logging in to your Wordpress Admin and scrolling down to the bottom of the sidebar and click the name of your theme. We recently interviewed the founder of Woothemes about the importance of great blog design, check it out by clicking here.
Wordpress Changes
One major thing I see a lot of new blogger's do is not make their website URL's search engine friendly which is the easiest source of traffic. If you look at your first blog post URL, it will be Domain.com/?p=1 when you really want it to say Domain.com/how-to-make-your-links-seo-friendly. You want your URL's and blog post titles to be what you expect people to be searching in Google, not something that always sounds good, a mix of both usually goes down well!
To make your links search engine friendly like I just said, go to your Wordpress Admin and click Settings and then Permalinks on the left side. Change the settings to Custom Structure and use the code /%postname%/ - This will now make your blog post link's SEO friendly.
Another important SEO change is your page title and description, I personally use a FREE plugin to do this called All in One SEO Pack but as you guys are just starting, you may just want to edit these details from your Wordpress Admin by clicking General under Settings. It is really important to choose the right page title, if you look at Retireat21.com you will see the title is "Young Entrepreneurs Making Money Online" - it says what the website is about and it has my 5 more important keywords and you should do the same. If your domain is 55street.com and is about Street Dancing, then you don't want your title to be 55street but instead Learn to Street Dance.
You also have a Blogroll on your blog, this is a great way to start building links and traffic to your website. Find 5 to 10 blogs just like yours and ask them to link to your site and you will do the same for them. You can add or edit your blogroll by clicking Links in the sidebar of your Wordpress Admin. It is also important to have a SEO friendly link, so instead of getting them to have the link as "55street" ask them to put the text as "Learn to Street Dance".
If you are interested in learning more about Search Engine Optimization, then check out this interview that we did with a leading SEO expert!
RSS Feeds and Building Your List
A RSS Feed is basically a reminder for regular readers to alert them when you have a new blog post, this is one of the most important parts of a blog. I use Feedburner to manage all our feed updates, sign up and create a code and update your RSS link to the feedburner one. Feedburner also has an email update script that you can use, when you are logged in at Feedburner.com click Publicize and then Email Subscriptions, they will give you some code and then you can add it as a widget on your blog. To edit your RSS widget is really simple, login to your Wordpress Admin again and click Appearance and then Widgets, then click on RSS and paste your email code in and then save the changes. Your readers will now be able to subscribe for updates, when you add a new post and they will get an email or RSS message alerting them to check your blog out.
Ask any Problogger what their biggest blogging mistake, they will tell you they wish they started building a list sooner! Creating a list is so powerful and a great way to make money online. Say you had 100 people visit your site a day, you want to get around 10 of them to sign up for your list, that means you can promote your website and products to them in future. What I do is create an auto responder series which automatically sends them an email every day to encourage them to work harder and make more money online - then I will promote them a product or two. Don't be scared to promote products to them from day one, after all you only want people who are willing to spend money on your list.
I have built my lists to over xx,xxx now and my number one tip for getting readers to opt-in is to offer them something, for example "7 Ways Your Can Use Outsourcing To Save Your Company a Lot Of Money" - anyone on an outsourcing website will want to read that and would happily give you their email address to get it. My friend has built a list for his blog and every time he needs money he will find a product he likes and send his list an email about it and he will earn thousands of dollars! For those of you who will be using your blog to earn money I recommend you look at getting yourself an auto responder to do this. I personally recommend Aweber and iContact which both have a great service! If this is something that interests you, then set up your Aweber today and I will show you in the following emails how I make thousands of dollars from my mailing list.
Tomorrow will be a big day, so make sure you have everything ready and I will share my secrets with you ;-)
To our success in 2010,
Michael Dunlop
PS. If any of this has gone straight over your head, then feel free to hit the reply button and ask me a question!
PPS. Look out for tomorrow's email for how I monetize my blogs which will earn me $xxx,xxx this year!
PPPS. I am not saying you should buy everything I recommend, I am just showing you what tools I use to earn 6 figures a year online.
Midascode Ltd, 5 and 6 Azure Suites, Churchill Court, 112 The Street, Rustington, W Sussex BN16 3DA, UNITED KINGDOM
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