OK folks, I’m new at this, so please take it easy on me. Here is my first attempt at creating a video:
Let me know how I did. I think I need to work on the pauses and the “umms,” but other than that, I think it’s a good start! As a side note, I used the 30-day trial of Camtasia Studio, and I was impressed with how easy it was to use! More on that later.
Choosing a theme for your blog seems like a big decision. You’re basically branding yourself, so how professional your blog looks is directly dependent on the theme you choose. No pressure, right? Luckily, it’s not that hard to find great themes, and if you don’t like the results, you can always change to another theme later.
Let’s start with an explanation of what a theme is. In WordPress (the only blogging platform I actively use, but this should apply for Blogger and Typepad as well), a theme is a collection of settings, layouts, and graphics that make up the look and feel of your site. Things like the font size, type, and color, the header graphics, and the number of columns are all dependent on the theme. A theme makes it easier to customize the look of your site without having to write the code yourself (usually anyway), or hiring a website designer to do it for you.
Even with the theme taking care of most of the details for you, it still used to be a daunting process to actually install the theme on your blog. You used to have to download the theme, extract it to your hard drive, and upload the files via FTP to your blog’s themes directory. The good news is that with recent versions of WordPress, there is now the option to directly install your theme from within the WordPress admin panel. This only works for themes that are listed in the WordPress theme directory. For themes not listed there, the files still must be uploaded as mentioned earlier.
So let’s start with the theme directory. How do you find a good theme? In your admin panel, go to Appearance > Add New Themes. From there you are brought to a very helpful search page. If you know what the theme is called, you can type it into the search box. Otherwise, you can search for specific features you are looking for, including color, number of columns, width, and other features.
As you can see, it is very easy to narrow down the options to find exactly what you are looking for. Once you have a theme that you like, you can preview it on a demo site to see what the end result will look like, and you can install it on your site. With a few clicks, you now have a professional looking WordPress Blog! Not so hard, was it?
There are additional levels of customization you may want to do with your blog. Say you want a custom header, or graphic with a link to another site. There are a number of ways to do so, including adding a widget, or placing the code directly into the template files. But these are topics for another post. For now, know that you can “tweak” your template to make it look exactly the way you like.
Another note; there are also paid themes available. I have not used these so far, so I don’t know too much about them. The only ones I have seen in action are Thesis and Semiologic. Since I haven’t really played around with these enough to give an informed recommendation, I’m linking to them for informational purposes only; they are not affiliate links. The advantage to these paid themes is that they give you more control over tweaking the themes from within the admin panel, without having to resort to manual coding. As I said, I haven’t tried them yet, but if I do, I will certainly post a more detail review.
I’m writing this post to explain how much I love Google Analytics. I set it up on some of my sites a while ago, but never really had much use for it. Now that Alex Jeffreys has explained a little more about what the different metrics mean, and how they can be useful, I’m addicted to it! Every morning I check my stats to see how many visitors I had, what countries they are coming from, and what sites sent them to me. There really is a wealth of information here that can be very illuminating. Here is a screenshot of my traffic from the current month (click to see it full size):
Where to begin? The Visitors Overview is great, because I can see whether I’m moving in the right direction with growing my blog. I like the Map Overlay, because it’s useful to see where people who read my blog are coming from. But the most useful sections of Google Analytics are the Traffic Sources and the Content Overview.
In Traffic Sources, I can see what sites are sending the most traffic to my blog. I can also see whether anyone is getting to my blog by typing the URL directly into their browser’s address bar. It also shows whether I am getting traffic from Google through normal search engine queries. As you can see, currently just under 5% of my traffic is coming in through that method, but I’m only just getting started. If you do have search engine traffic reaching your site, you can also see what keywords had your site showing up in the search results.
The Content Overview is useful because you can see what pages on your site were viewed the greatest percentage of the time. In my case, the main page of my blog (depicted as “/”) is what most people see. Not surprising since I show the full text of each blog post on the main page, so no one really has to drill down to see the full post. Knowing which pages are popular can be useful because if you notice a trend in the types of posts people like, you might want to tailor your writing to meet those requirements.
The other thing I want to mention is the bounce rate. The bounce rate is basically the percentage of visitors who look at one page on your site and then leave. The lower the percentage, the better. My bounce rate is not particularly good, above 50%. This is probably also due to the fact that most of my content is available from my homepage. The only people who click through to other pages are probably people who leave comments, or people who start from one of my other pages and then click back to the homepage. I don’t think it’s a problem, but it is something to keep an eye on.
Squeeze pages are an essential part of list building. What is a squeeze page, you ask? In short, a squeeze page is a one-page website that offers something to the reader. The reader sees the offer, and then has only two options: to enter their information (usually their name and email address) to continue, or leave the website.
Here is an example of a very good squeeze page (click to see the live version):
Example Squeeze Page
Some of the key components of a good squeeze page are the following:
I’m still learning how to perfect this process, so if you have any advice on how to make a squeeze page better, please let me know in the comments.
Since I spent that entire post yesterday discussing hosting providers, I thought it might be a good idea to take a step back and discuss how to purchase your own domain name. There are dozens of domain registrars out there, if not more. Since owning your own domain is absolutely essential if you plan to get anywhere with internet marketing, this is worth a quick overview.
Network Solutions – NetworkSolutions is the great grandfather of domain registrars. At one time, they were the only game in town, basically because they were the only company (at least in the U.S.) authorized to register domain names. As such, they were able to charge an arm and a leg for domain names. Since the market has been opened to competing companies, their proces have come down quite a bit, but their prices are still usually higher than most.
GoDaddy – GoDaddy came onto the market with their outrageous SuperBowl commercials and very cheap prices. They are still one of the leading domain registrars for both of these reasons. While I have used GoDaddy in the past, I don’t any more. The main reason is that I have heard horror stories of GoDaddy suspending domains for a single spam complaint submitted to them. It’s supposedly very difficult to get them to reverse this suspension, and while it is in effect you are dead in the water – no website, no email, nothing. This hasn’t happened to me personally, but I’d rather not risk it with my business.
NameCheap – NameCheap is my current domain registrar. Their prices are pretty cheap, and invariably there is a coupon that reduces the price even further. Just Google for “NameCheap coupon code,” and you can usually get 10 or 15% off new domains. They also include a free WhoisGuard option, which allows you to hide your domain registration details. This way spammers and scammers can’t get ahold of your email or physical mailing address. Very useful feature.
One other thing I should mention is that most hosting providers, including the ones I discussed yesterday, also sell domains. It is highly recommended to keep your domain registrations and your hosting provider separate. If you ever choose to change hosting providers, you don’t want them to be able to hold your domain names hostage during the transfer process. Right now, if i change hosting providers, all I have to do is log into NameCheap, change my DNS settings, and wait for it to take effect. If you don’t know how to do that, stay tuned and I’ll put together a how-to in a few days.
Anyone have better registrars than these? Let me know in the comments.
If you are going to be involved with internet marketing, invariably you are going to need to get a domain name and some sort of website hosting. Today I’m going to talk about how to do that.
Free hosting:
Blogger - Blogger is a free blogging platform acquired by Google a number of years ago. It allows you to quickly get a blog up on the internet, typically with a website address of yourname.blogspot.com. You can also choose to purchase your own domain name and point it at Blogger. You can perform a great deal of customization to your blog, including the theme, the title, the graphics, and many other options. You can also put Google Adsense ads on your blog with only one or two clicks, which is an easy way to attempt to make money from your blog. Being a free service, you have to obey the terms and conditions of the site, which include not using other contextual ads besides Adsense, and other restrictions on things like adult content. Be sure to read up on this before setting up a Blogger blog.
WordPress.com – You may have heard of WordPress in another context, but WordPress.com is a free site for hosted WordPress blogs. You can actually download the WordPress software to a paid hosting account and set up your blog there, but this is another affordable option for those without a paid hosting provider. Similar to Blogger, there are restrictions to what you can do with the blog as far as content and advertising.
Squidoo – Squidoo is a more recent entry into the hosted blog arena. Squidoo refers to their sites as “Lenses,” and they consist of one landing page with a number of types of static or dynamic content. Everything in the page design is drag and drop, and you can customize it a great deal. Also, Squidoo is geared towards monetization, including advertising and affiliate commissions in the design of the site.
“Freemium” Hosting:
000Webhost.com – I am referring to this provider as “freemium” because they are a standard paid hosting provider, but they offer a free limited version of their service. I have only tried the free version, so I can’t really comment on their paid service. The free option is great if you have absolutely no money to get a site up, but be aware that you will not have as many of the useful tools and options as a paid product, and other things like bandwidth will be limited. In my experience, your site will load rather slowly as well, so I wouldn’t recommend it for anything but the most basic sites.
Paid Hosting:
HostGator – HostGator was my first “paid” hosting provider, and I really have no complaints about them. They offer cPanel access, which is a very “point and click” way to manage your websites. The also include Fantastico, which is a very easy way to deploy software like WordPress or a shopping cart. I never had an issue with my site being down while using them, and I found them to be a good value for the money. At the time I was using them, I don’t believe they offered unlimited bandwidth or disk space, but it appears they do now, for their “Baby” and their “Business” packages. Looking at their “Business” package now, I may switch back, because the included toll-free number and dedicated IP are pretty cool options.
BlueHost - My current provider is BlueHost. I find them very easy to use, even easier than HostGator. They also have cPanel and Fantastico, but they offer the additional configuration option of SimpleScripts. SimpleScripts can not only deploy software to your blog, but also keep track of it and upgrade it for you. I have not had any problems with reliability or downtime, and the pricing is comparable to HostGator.
ProHostManagement – I haven’t used this provider yet, but I will probably be switching to it soon. This is run by a former Alex Jeffreys student, Adam Spiel, and he offers a more full-featured hosting package than the above choices. What I mean by this is that he offers technical assistance in installing and setting up your site, which is great for someone just starting out. He also has training videos and other services that can help you get going with your site. As I said, I haven’t tried it yet, but I will be very soon. Once I have used Adam’s service for a while I will let you know what I think. But as he has been mentored by Alex Jeffreys, I’m sure he’s providing great value.
That’s about it. But I’m curious to hear about other hosting providers that you may have used. Any other great ones? Any we should avoid at all costs? Let me know in the comments.
I thought it might be useful to let you know what WordPress plugins I am using, and why. Maybe some of these would be useful on your WordPress blog.
Akismet
Akismet comes installed on every WordPress blog, but that doesn’t make it any less useful. It is very good at distinguishing spam from legitimate user comments, and I would set up any blog without turning it on.
All in One SEO Pack
This plugin provides some essential SEO configurations to your blog. I wouldn’t say you’ll get a ton of traffic from this, but it useful to put some of the basic SEO on your blog in an automated fashion.
Google Analytics for WordPress
This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.
Google XML Sitemaps
It is very important for indexing purposes to have a sitemap on any site you create. This plugin will create a sitemap that is compatible with all the major search engines.
Postie
This is what I use to do my posting by email when I am away from home. It is much more configurable than the standard post by email options in WordPress.
Cronless Postie
This comes with Postie, but allows me to have the posts automatically publish on my blog, instead of having to visit a webpage or configure a cron job in order to process it.
RSS Link Tagger for Google Analytics
Modifies RSS permalinks to include utm query parameters, used by Google Analytics to track non-adwords advertising campaigns.
Sociable
This is what adds all those neat icons to the bottom of my posts, giving readers the option to Digg or Twitter the post.
Twitter for Wordpress
This gives me a widget with my Twitter feed in it that I can put in my sidebar. I like it better than the Twitter “badge” that you can grab from Twitter’s site, because that doesn’t match my blog theme.
WP to Twitter
This allows me to automatically send to Twitter any post that I publish.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
This isn’t doing much for me yet, but as I continue to post, this should include links at the bottom of each post listing related posts.
That’s all I have so far. I’m sure I’ll add more as time goes on. Do you have any suggestions on useful plugins? I’d love to hear them in the comments or on Twitter.
By the way, the easiest way to install plugins is to go through your WordPress dashboard and search for them. That is much more convenient than downloading the plugin from the author’s website, uploading it to your web host, and then activating it in the dashboard. Just a suggestion.
