Archive for posts
I Need Help With my Blog – Part 7
Posted by: | CommentsIn this series of articles on Blog Consulting we have been setting up an example blog called Alternative Energy so you can the the process in action. In our last article we installed a theme to help with the search engine results. All we really have left to do on our blog at this point is add some plugins to get the site as functional as we want it to be and then focus on writing articles. If you have reached this point you may be interested in reading our articles on driving traffic to your site. I think it is premature to start monetizing your site before you start getting a fair amount of traffic. If you put Adsense on your site and people come to your site and don’t click on your ads, it messes us up your percentage and can result in your clicks being discounted. Once your site is generating traffic you can start monetizing.
There are two plugins we recommend that you install at this point. One of them is called WordPress Upgrade. This plugin will make it easy to stay current with new WordPress releases. The other plugin is called WP Backup. You can setup this plugin to email a backup of your site to you every day or every week. You never know when you will need a backup!
You should check out the WordPress plugin repository for additional plugins that you would like to have on your blog. You need to settle in now and develop good writing habits. You should be posting 5 times a week if you can. The minimum would be 3 posts a week. Write original content that people will enjoy reading. Keep on blogging!
I Need Help With my Blog – Part 4
Posted by: | CommentsIn this article on Blog Consulting we are going to take another small step on our example blog “Alternative Energy Online”. We wrote our first article on the site yesterday. This morning I did a Google search for the keywords Alternative Energy Online to see if anything was happening with the site yet. The site has already been indexed by Google and showed up at the first position on page 1. Two things about that result:
- Sites don’t usually get indexed that quickly by Google. It can take days or even weeks for that to happen. Sometimes a site will get indexed right away, it’s up to Google.
- It won’t stay in the first position for long. It will start to drift backwards pretty quickly and then it might get sand boxed (the site will completely disappear from the search results for months and then suddenly reappear. This happens often but not always, again it’s up to Google.
Here is how the search result looked this morning:
Let’s do a couple of quick things to continue our blog set-up. Go to your blog and login with your Username and password. At the WordPress dashboard click on the Plugins tab. We are going to activate the Akismet plugin. This plugin comes with your initial WordPress installation but you need to activate it. (NOTE!! If this is your first WordPress blog you need to get an API key before you start this process. Getting an API key is pretty simple. Read my article called “Installing the Akismet Plugin” for detailed instructions on getting your API key and installing Akismet. One API key will work for all of your blogs) The Akismet plugin helps to keep spammers from ruining your blog. Now that we have our site indexed, the first people that start showing up are spammers. Akismet traps their spamminess and lets you delete it. This is a great WordPress feature.
I also want you to go and click on the Reading tab on the Dashboard. Change the posts to display on each page from 10 to 3.
OK. We are going to leave it there for now. We have a long way to go but we will keep taking it a little at a time so you don’t get overwhelmed. Blogging should be fun!
