The Million Dollar Domain

Begginer Intro: Blogging Tips

Written by tmdd on August 12, 2008

So to finish up our blogging related beginner posts we’ll discuss a little about the wordpress platform, themes, our recommended plugins and some tips.

If you have just started blogging, there are a few steps you should take.

1. Activate the akismet plugin. This plugin comes preinstalled with wordpress but you have to activate it and get a wordpress key (which takes 2 minutes). Akismet blocks spam comments on your blog, so if you choose to enable comments on your posts (which you should) then this plugin is a must, and best of all it’s a set and forget.
2. Choose a theme. You could use the default theme, but it’s way overused. The ideal is to choose a theme that is very user friendly, with good link visibility, nice color contrast, and a nice and attractive layout. If you know how to design a theme or can change a free theme to your liking, then you should do so, unique content and layout designs are always a better choice than free themes that are probably used by hundreds or more. A good place to get themes is the Wordpress Theme Directory. Another one is searching google for “free wordpress themes”
3. Decide on a permalink structure, permalinks are the actual links to your blog posts, and wordpress gives you a lot of flexibility here. For maximum SEO performance, you should simply choose “yourdomain.com/blog-post-title” but this really comes down to personal preference as I personally don’t think it makes that much of a difference, so you might prefer “yourdomain.com/year/month/blog-post-title” that is also search engine (and user) friendly. Whatever you choose, do activate the permalink feature because otherwise you’ll have those ugly query strings all over your urls.
4. Download and install the Google XML Sitemaps Generator Plugin. This plugin takes care of updating and submitting your sitemap to Google and other search engines. This allows search engine to know more about the structure of your website.
5. Dowload and install the All In One SEO Pack Plugin. This plugin optimizes your blogs output for search engine optimization. Optimizes keywords, page titles and more.
6. Install the ShareThis plugin or a similar social bookmarking plugin. This should go right after your posts along with a reminder letting visitors know they can subscribe to your feed. This way visitors have some options when they finish reading your posts. If they like your post, they will be able to quickly submit it to whatever social bookmarking sites they use or e-mail to a friend.
7. Create an About page. You should use this page to introduce yourself to the visitors, your background, your work, what you do and like and what people should expect from your blog. This gives your blog a personal touch that helps visitors to identify you as an actual human behind the blog. Also consider placing one or several pictures of yourself on the about page (or on a photos page if you prefer) as this also greatly increases the human awareness of the visitor.
8. Create a Contact page. You can simply put up a page with e-mail instructions or use a contact me plugin like Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form. This gives confidence to the visitor that he can reach you if he so chooses and, like the about page, gives the human touch.
9. Create an account on FeedBurner for your blog and give your visitors a visible option to subscribe to your blog by RSS and by e-mail (FeedBurner takes good care of all this). This allows users to use an rss reader or just get your posts by e-mail. Most visitors never return so you should make it easy and worthwhile for them to subscribe to your blog and receive future updates.

Well, those are 9 of the things that Read the rest of this entry »

Beginner Intro: What blogging platform to choose?

Written by tmdd on July 21, 2008

So on our last post we hopefully gave you some encouragement and you’ve decided to start a blog. Now which blogging platform should you choose?

You have some options here:

You can choose one of the free ones, and here you have a whole range of offers like Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog.com and you can search google for more if you want. Any of those sites allow you to quickly register and have a blog going in less than 5 minutes, all sites also have extensive help and support and overall it’s really very simple.

The other option is to go for a blog hosted on your own webspace and with your own domain. This will set you back about $5 or $10 per month for hosting and another $10 per year for a domain name. But once you have your own hosting account you can install from a whole plethora of blogging platforms, content management systems, forums, wikis, simple HTML sites, anything you want. Most of the times you can install those applications on your webspace just by clicking a couple of menu options on the hosts administration panel. Read the rest of this entry »