Click here to view the embedded video.

Question 1: Why are you starting a blog?

It’s the most profound question you will ever ask yourself, but also the most important. Why are you doing this? What do you hope to accomplish? Do you want to make money? Do you want to help people? Do you want to make people laugh? Do you want to vent about something (society, politics, your love life)? There are no wrong answers here, but you do need to have one. You need to know why you are doing it, but more than anything you need to be passionate about doing it, whatever it is. If you love Spam and you want to sing the praises of Spam on your blog, then you will be successful. But if you’re a Vegan and you hate spam and someone offers you a ton of cash to blog about Spam, it’s just not going to work. It’s a job at that point, and you’ll hate doing it, and more importantly, you’ll hate yourself for doing it.

Question 2: What’s your niche?

Everyone needs an angle. Whether you’re a writer blogging about being a stripper, or a stripper blogging being a writer, you need a hook, pure and simple. You can’t be all things to all people and you shouldn’t try. You will fail. You can only succeed if you can identify a portion of the market that is being underserved (ideally, they won’t be getting served at all) and then speaking and marketing to them. This isn’t as hard a question to answer as it might seem. Once you answer the first question, the second question will largely answer itself.

Question 3: How will you set yourself (and your new blog) apart?

Here’s the really tricky question. You know why you’re blogging, you know what your niche is, now what? How do you stand out in a sea of endless bloggers? What’s your angle on your angle? Maybe you’re giving relationship and dating advice from the Born Again Christian perspective, for example. Or maybe you’re a divorced dad offer dating and parenting tips. The point is, whatever your niche, there is probably someone already there serving it as there are very few new ideas under the sun. What makes you worth listening to? Tricky question, to be sure, but an important one.

Once you have the answers to these three questions, you’re good to go. Just be aware that the answers, may change over time, and probably should. Your answers to these three questions represent a snapshot of where you are at the time you answer them. If you have a vision and a goal of say, getting ten people a day to visit your blog, and then that happens, then what? What happens is your answer to these three questions will probably change. You’ll need to re-answer them, and that will affect why you are doing this and how you go about doing it.

Don’t worry about this. Don’t wait to have the perfect answers. You won’t. You’ll not only never get it “right,” but you never even get started either. It’s all about progress, not perfection. You must repeat “Progress over perfection” in your head one million times. Okay, actually only three. But you get the point, hopefully. Perfection is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. It robs people. Of their hopes, of their dreams and of the chance of actually making those hopes and dreams a reality. If you don’t get in the game you’ll never get a chance to win it, but there are some that endlessly practice and attempt to perfect whatever it is they working on before they show it to the world. But it’s never perfect. Ever. I don’t even know if anyone knows what that means.

It’s vitally important that you have a plan, vision and something to shoot for. But don’t let the prep work consume you to the point where things are unhealthy. That’s as much a life lesson as it is a lesson about blogging, but it certainly applies here.

Don’t waste your time trying out each Wordpress plugin to find out which one you want. Here are the top 10 Wordpress plugins that you want your blog to have, hands down.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

W3 Total Cache

For top-notch website performance, you need the W3 Total Cache Wordpress plugin. Both your blog visitors and search engines care about how fast your website is. If your pages take forever to load, you’ll lose readers and search engine traffic. In fact Google just announced this week that they are not officially taking site response time into consideration for rankings. Of course they are: speed means quality of experience for their users.

W3 Total Cache can reduce your page load time by as much as 50% or even more – something you definitely want to do. AND it will help you keep your site running and available instead of crashing if you get a major rush of traffic all at once, such as getting a popular story on Digg or a “StumbleUpon attack”.  Other major caching plugins like WP Cache and WP Super Cache are OK, but in our opinion they are not as versatile or as powerful as W3 Total Cache (and we’ve used/tested them all).

Google XML Sitemaps

You want search engines to know when you post new content so you get more traffic. Google XML Sitemaps automatically generates an updated sitemap and submits it to top search engines without you lifting a finger. Don’t rely on search engines to crawl your site and find new posts – use this plugin to automatically tell them the instant you post – before someone else copies your post and pretends they wrote it – which happens. And “original content” (i.e. where Google “finds” a post first) gets much more credit than duplicate content (i.e. other places Google finds that post).

GravityForms or cForms

Your readers need an easy way to contact you, whether it’s to ask you a question or to advertise on your site. Contact form plugins like GravityForms or cForms allow you to easily create a great-looking contact form for your website. Instead of putting your email address out there for everyone (including spam bots) to email you thousands of times, use GravityForms or cForms to allow your readers users to contact you easily without cluttering your inbox with lots of spam.

Disqus Comments

Another interactive tool for your blog readers is the all-important comment box. Disqus Comments is an excellent Wordpress plugin that allows visitors to comment on your articles with a great looking social interface and great spam control. Use an advanced plugin like Disqus Comments instead of Wordpress’s integrated comment tool. It looks much, much better and gives you more control over comments. It’s also a hosted comment plugin that automatically syncs the comments with your Wordpress database, and provides great social interaction with your readers.

Two other very popular comment oriented Wordpress plugins are JS-Kit Echo and IntenseDebate. We’ve tried them both and feel Disqus is currently the better choice. The backend comment management of JS-Kit Echo leaves a lot to be desired, and we feel the Disqus comment layout just looks better than the IntenseDebate option. Frankly, this is a matter of preference, they’re all good options!

Akismet

This plugin automatically comes with Wordpress and does a great job catching comment and trackback spam. If you’re using a hosted comment service like Disqus, Akismet won’t apply to you. Actually you can still use the Akismet service through Disqus, just won’t need to enable the plugin.

FeedBurner Feedsmith

Redirect your RSS feed to FeedBurner and have your RSS subscribers poll Feedburner instead of your site. This Wordpress plugin makes your feed much more usable, since it provides far more optimized RSS feed than Wordpress alone does. It will also offload the feed reader traffic to Google (who now owns FeedBurner) so it’s much,  much faster than your web server, improving your blog’s performance even more. This will sound a little technical to a new blogger, but do it anyway, it’ll work better that way.

YARPP

This Wordpress plugin is an excellent tool to use if you want readers who are interested in your topics to stay on your website longer. YARPP automatically displays the most closely related articles from your blog to your readers at the end of the article, allowing them to easily browse through the content they’re interested in on your site instead of allowing to look for what they want elsewhere.

After The Deadline

This easy to use spell and grammar checker for Wordpress is available for free and is essential to use even if you feel like you’re spelling and grammar error-free. It doesn’t cost anything and will ensure each post is error free and looks as good as it is.

Sexy Bookmarks

A bookmarking tool is essential for your blog and Sexy Bookmarks is an excellent tool to use with great eye candy. It adds a nice visual appeal to your blog, while encouraging readers to share the article they’re reading with their friends on Twitter, Facebook and more. This means more linkbacks to your blog and more readers for you!

Viper’s Video Quicktags

To embed your YouTube video on your blog, you’ll need Viper’s Video Quicktags. Newer versions of Wordpress (2.9 and above) allow you to embed videos without special plugins, but Viper’s Video Quicktags allows you much better control over how the videos look in your posts. You can set the format for all of your videos in one place instead of coding it in each post – and having to edit ALL your posts to make a change.

After building very successful Wordpress blog and online magazine AskDanAndJennifer.com over the last four years, these Wordpress plugins are our personal favorites – and for the most part, the only ones we actually use.

Do you have favorite “must have” Wordpress plugins that aren’t in this list? Let us know! Leave a comment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Content Is Key

You may have the best SEO keywords on your website or blog, but without quality content, the search engines are going to start overlooking you. You may get an influx of site traffic for awhile, but it will quickly cease as the search engines realize that people aren’t staying on your website very long. If you’re not offering people anything of value on your website, you won’t be getting traffic for long, if you ever got it at all. The key to a successful blog or website is to produce quality content that people want to read on a regular basis. Search engines will pick up on regular publishing and start taking a better look at your website or blog. If there’s good stuff on there that people are interested in and searching for, the search engines will start sending them to you. It’s as simple as that.

Search Engine De-Crappers

Search engines, especially Google, spend millions of dollars every year on technology that allows them to filter through websites that publish what is known as Internet “crap.” Search engines don’t want to send traffic to websites that don’t offer people anything of value. You can only fool search engines with SEO tricks and keywords for so long, if at all these days. Search engines are continuously working on ways to weed out the bad and useless content, regardless of how many fancy keywords and SEO there is. If you don’t produce quality content on a regular basis, search engines are going to figure it out and fast. Without quality content, you’re not going to get the traffic you need for a successful blog or website.

Regular Publishing

To take this #1 tip on blog and website success a little further, you must continue publishing good content that people want to read on a regular basis. You may have a great article up on your site or blog, but if you’ve only published one or two articles, the search engines aren’t going to know to look in your direction. Search engines want to send people to websites and blogs that regularly publish good content, not a website or blog that published one or two good articles. Search engines such as Google love websites that stay relevant and stay in the game by continuously posting content.

Ask yourself this question: do you publish information to your blog for yourself (just so you can say something) or so that other people can get value from What you have to say, what you’ve discovered, etc?

Do you discriminate against half (or more) of your website visitors?

So you build a great looking blog (or website), start publishing some great content, and you even make sure the website looks good.

But here’s the catch: it looks good to YOU, with your web browser (Firefox 3.0 or Internet Explorer 8.0), running on your operating system (i.e. Vista).

Here’s a fun fact: different people end up using different web browsers. For example, our Ask Dan & Jennifer love and sex online magazine and advice column gets 52% visitors using Internet Explorer, 33% visitors using Firefox, 9% using Safari, and so on.

And those break down further by browser release verions (ex. IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, and so on).

How can you know what web browsers your visitors are using?

Well you do use web analytics, right? That just means a (often free) web software that keeps track of who visitors your website so know how many visitors you have every day, where they’re coming from, what articles/pages they like, and so on.

And the good analytics services will give you a detailed breakdown of what web browsers (and operating systems) your visitors are using. Our absolutely favorite web analytics tool is Google Analytics: in our opinion the bar none best analytics tool out there. Plus, here’s a bonus: it’s free.

Not all web browsers are created equal

OK, so people use different browsers… so what? Well, the problem is that each of those browsers shows your website a little differently.

But no big deal right? Wrong. Just a few little differences can result in your site lookign completely messed up to half your visitors. Worst yet, it looks fine to you, so how can you even know?

How you can quickly and easily see how your website looks in the most popular web browsers

So what’s the solution? Do you just call up your friends who you know run the different web browsers and see if they’ll keep testing your website every time you make a change? No way!

Do you install all the browser versions on your own computer at home? Nope, you can’t run them all… and seriously, who has time to mess with that!

Here’s the smart and easy way: you use an online service that actually shows you what your website looks like in all the major browsers.

The original solution: online screenshot and web validation services

There have been services online offering this functionality for some years now. Here’s a list of them. With most of these services, you just type in the web address, and it shows you a screen capture of how your website and how it looks in 20 different browser editions.

The down side with many of these services is that they’re very slow: it can take an hour to get your screenshots. and if you’re going to make tweaks or fixes, that just won’t work.

Today’s better solution: Adobe BrowserLab

Yesterday I was looking for a better solution… and found our favorite one ever, which happens to be from Adobe (we love their software anyway, so that was an added bonus). It’s called Adobe BrowserLab. And according to Adobe, “BrowserLab provides web designers exact renderings of their web pages in multiple browsers and operating systems, on demand.”

Here’s why BrowserLab is the best tool for this that we’ve seen: it brings up your website in the top web browsers immediately: so in under 5 minutes you can just know what your website looks like to the vast majority of your visitors! And that frankly is a must for any web designer – or anyone really who has a website that gets more than a few thousand visitors a month. Also check out this recent PC World article on BrowserLab.

As an added bonus, Adobe BrowserLab is currently offered free by Adobe… but I suspect web designers would also pay for this service if they had to.

The downside of BrowserLab is that it (as of now) only shows you what your website looks in the top 5 or so browsers. But honestly unless you have a dedicated web design team that’s doing this for you, that meeds the goal of today’s test: making sure your website isn’t “broken” for half your visitors.

And with Adobe BrowserLab that’s become a very easy thing to do. If you know of other great tools for doing this, be sure to let us know in the comments what they are and why you like them!

It’s seems that the Digg redesign has fubar’d everyone’s avatars. 

Here’s how we made ours look good – not fuzzy! 

The new size of your avatar should be 60 X 60 pixels. Most importantly, your image should be square.

Here’s a great, easy to use thumbnail tool. We use it to generate all of the images across our blogs. The stock photos that we use in our blog posts are around 200K downloaded. We run them through this tool and they are under 20K with no image degradation.

For example… check out the excellent (and really hot) image on this post. It’s only 11k – down from the 161k iStockPhoto original. Not bad, huh? 

The tool is called Extreme Thumbnail Generator and it rocks! (No this is not an affiliate link – just a great tool. )

It’s easy to use and just simply works. Whether you’re trying to create an avatar or upload pics to your website, we’ve found Extreme Thumbnail Generator to be a must have tool.

No, it’s not free but neither is beer. However, it comes with a free 19 day trial with no registration required, so get it and fix your Digg avatar!

I’m tired of looking at fuzzy pictures!

Wait a minute, what’s the difference here? 

Some people will only read blogs in RSS feed readers. They’ll visit some web sites directly, but every day they sit down and scan headlines from their favorite blogs in their feed reader.

When you set up and start your new blog, one of the most important configuration decisions you make is whether to give these readers full access to your text content directly in their feed readers, i.e. a full RSS feed.

Your other option is to show them only the headline and a teaser for each article, and to make them click through to your site to read the full article.

Why would you NOT offer a full RSS feed?

There are various reasons bloggers give for not offering a full feed…

Bloggers who focus on making money online usually prefer to have their readers come to the actual site, where they can click on ads, etc.

Readers who consume the content through RSS are not nearly as easy to monetize as are visitors who visit the website directly. Through an RSS feed, they can’t click on AdSense ads, etc.

There are definitely ways to monetize your RSS feed as well, but they’re not as elegant or as flexible as general website monetization options.

Providing a full feed makes it easy for scraper sites (a.k.a. AdSense scraper sites) to suck and republish their content.

The concern here is that if Google stumbled upon your hot new article on these sites FIRST (before finding it on your site), then this "SPAM" site would essentially trick Google into thinking they published it first. That would give them "first content rights", so that site would "rank" for your article content instead of you.

Theoretically, this could indeed be an issue for small blogs, since small blogs are not spidered by Google nearly as often as the most popular sites are. So, technically Google MAY discover that fresh content on another site that just sucked it down and republished it.

However, that’s only an issue for sites while they’re very small, and frankly it’s not really much of an issue at all.
The good people at Google are very good at sniffing out junk sites and sifting through all the crap to find the truly useful sites. If your site is actually good and useful, then people will be linking to you organically, and your blog value will rise. Not only will Google start indexing your content much faster, but they’ll immediately know that your site has much more value than some SPAM site that nobody has ever linked to without a reciprocal link.

The short version is: don’t worry about this! Stay the course and focus on making your blog the absolute best that it can be. There are also measures you can take to foil these scraper sites.

Deep linking – The secret to foiling AdSense scraper sites?

One simple solution to get around the issue of scraper sites republishing your content by RSS and taking credit for it is to place deep links to your own content within each post. Then when Google scans the articles on these sites, you’ll get free linkbacks from these very sites – very cool!

Note that deep linking is very valuable to begin with, whether you care about scraper sites or not. People naturally click on links, so if you link to your own articles from within articles you write every day, your readers will spend more time on your site and find articles they would not have found otherwise. Definitely a good thing. 

Also, Google will notice that you find your own content useful enough that you yourself link to it, so you’ll get SEO kudos for it as well. 

Are there any real advantages to offering a full RSS feed to your readers?

Absolutely! To us, it’s all about our readers and getting our content in front of as many readers as possible. Period!

Fact is, some people will only read blogs in feed readers. Not all, but some. That’s just a reality of the world we live in. Those people simply won’t come to your site, and won’t subscribe to your RSS feed unless it’s a full feed.

So we offer our content to our readers the way they want it, and this way we capture these people as readers.

Hogging the full RSS feed is essentially making decisions out of fear and a lack mentality. That’s a very bad place to be if you hope to grow and prosper. 

So set your full RSS feed free and watch your RSS readership surge!

This means you’re giving the search engines what they want, and they’ll reward you with more and more web site traffic over time.  Yet, many WordPress bloggers aren’t taking advantage of some of these hidden gems.

Of course, many people host their blogs on Blogger.com or TypePad, but that’s another story for another day. The short version is that while WordPress may look a little intimidating at first, it’s just as easy to manage as TypePad, and has immensely more flexibility than either Blogger or TypePad.

Oh, and if your free Blogger.com blog mysteriously disappears overnight (as we had happen once), you have nobody to call. So if your blog matters, get yourself a good web host and give it some WordPress lovin’.

These are the Top 10 Must-Have WordPress plugins that every serious blogger should be running. Yes, they are a handful at first, but it’ll be well worth it. Set aside an afternoon to give them a try, and watch your readership and your free search engine traffic go through the roof. 

Get lots of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) goodness with a Tagging Plugin

We’ve all been seeing tags show up all over the place, as a replacement for categories. They’re everywhere, from Amazon.com to all your favorite blogs. Their main purpose is to segment your information so your readers can easily find it – kind of like categories, just a little more flexible.

But tags are very important for SEO, since tag pages rank very well in natural search engine results. This means that a well configured tagging plugin can help you get more web site traffic for free.

We use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for tags, and recommend it highly. It’s a little complex to configure at first, but then it just works.

After you install and configure your new tagging plugin, remember to display the tags for each post under that particular post. The tagging plugin will create a "tag page" for each tag, so clicking on a tag will list all the posts on your blog pertaining to that tag.

One thing you may not realize at first is that for every tag you create, a new page is create on your blog. You can quickly go from 20 pages to 800 pages – tons of good quality content for Google and Yahoo to slurp… 

A bonus tip: when showing these tags, configure them to point to the particular tag page on your site, i.e. NOT to Technorati or elsewhere, which is often the default configuration. This way the search engines will also find and give importance to these pages.

Make it easy for readers to RSS subscribe to your blog, with Feedburner

Just a year or two ago, RSS was the domain of the hopelessly nerdy and geeky. Fact is, most modern desktop software, from operating systems to Internet browsers, is coming out with RSS support. And your readers want to access your content over RSS. So are you going to make it easy for them or not?

What’s the best way to configure and track RSS for your readers?

While WordPress comes with good built-in RSS support, FeedBurner provides some great "finishing services" that you won’t want to miss out on. They’ll transparently format your feed so that any RSS reader will be able to read it. Also when people click on your "sign up my RSS feed" button, they won’t get a jumbled confusing mess in their browser. FeedBurner detects a regular browser and shows them a pretty HTML subscribe page. 

More importantly for many bloggers, they’ll give you feed analytics. Yep, you’ll find out how many people are actually reading your RSS feed. Pretty cool.

To get set up with FeedBurner, download and install the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin. Then follow the directions to create a FeedBurner account and configure your new RSS plugin with the specifics of your new FeedBurner feed.

As an added bonus, your new FeedBurner plugin will automatically redirect all your current RSS subscribers who are on your blog’s original feed, and get them all pulling on that shiny new FeedBurner feed. So you’ll have real numbers on who’s reading your blog by RSS.

Should you provide a full or just a partial RSS feed?

This debate has been raging in blogger circles for years. Many bloggers are afraid to provide a full feed, because some spam blogs may pull their feed and get their original content scanned by Google first. This means the spam blog will get Google original content credit.

This is technically a fair concern, thought it’s a little short sited. A professional blog with a strong following will be Google cached MUCH more quickly and frequently than some fly-by-night AdSense spam blog. Those tend to have a short life expectancy to begin with.

On the other hand, there are people who will read your blog ONLY if they can get it as a full RSS feed. They like to use their feed reader, and that’s it. So it’s up to you to decide if you want those readers or not.

More often than not, your best bet is to listen to your audience and give them what they want, the way they want it. Don’t base your decisions on fear and a lack mentality.  

Keep your readers engaged and on your site longer by showing Related Posts

Visitors to a new site are amazingly flighty. They take a few glances around and decide quickly if it’s worth staying. The ones who stay are usually sucked in by the great content on your blog.

What’s the point of showing related posts? Does it really matter?

When a reader comes to the end of that very captivating article, what is it they want more than anything in the world?

Since they took the time to read your article, their brain is focused on that topic, and it’s feeding on that very yummy content. And by it’s very nature, it’s screaming for more! Showing a list of related posts at the end of an article is a brilliant strategy to keep readers engaged and ON YOUR SITE!

How and where should you display related posts on your blog? 

The best place to show related posts is a bulleted list right at the end of the article. Our stats show that links just below the post have the highest click through of any location on the page!

We went with the WASABI Related Posts plugin, since it’s the most popular related posts plugin, and it just works. Keep those readers hooked. Remember, the first taste is always free!

Add related posts to your feed as well

As an added benefit, you can display related posts  Just like showing related posts under a particular blog post on your site, this is a great way to engage RSS readers by giving them more options. This means more to choose from if they don’t like the particular item they’re reading, or they just want more!

Use this plugin which brings together UTW and WASABI Related Posts to add a list of related posts to your feed.

Dust off and feature some of your older posts by showing Random Posts

Over time, dozens and then hundreds of posts get buried and abandoned in the archives of most blogs. A great way to bring these out is by featuring Random Posts in a spot either in your sidebar or somewhere around the list of Related Posts.

There are many reasons to pull up these. First of all, the search engines are still sending visitors to those post, IF they know how to find them. Getting even more activity there means better rankings for those posts in the search engines, and thus more web site traffic. Yumm.

This is now easy to do since the good people who brought you the WASABI Related Posts plugin have also made available the excellent WASABI Random Posts plugin. 

Get your readers involved and keep their interest with Latest Comments

People love to talk and share their opinions on all kinds of topics. But most people don’t want to be the first to say something.

Get them talking and involved by highlighting the latest comments across all the posts on your blog. As your blog grows in size, you’ll find people landing on older posts from search engine or direct traffic, and leaving comments on those. Showing those comments in a "latest comments" list will prompt more discussion on those topics. And more content on those pages is a great way to get even more search engine traffic.

This is great to feature to add in your sidebar, thus getting yet more comments and visibility to those previous posts. We recommend Brian’s Latest Comments plugin. It’s simple, very customizable, and works great.

Show off your Most Popular Posts – new visitors love these

Capture the interest of your new visitors and regular readers by giving them easy access to your best and most popular articles.

The most popular articles are generally those that are the most interesting to your readers – unless you do very strong and focused social media or other promotion, but this is generally not the case.

Be aware that there IS a little increased overhead on your system with this, since the plugin will record EACH view of EACH post on your site by logging ALL these views in your MySQL database. This shouldn’t be an issue, but can add up if your site gets over 50,000 visitors a month.

We use the Top Posts by Category Plugin.

Give visitors and search engines an easy way to navigate your blog with a Site Map

New visitors often like to look around and get their bearings

A site map is very helpful to give your visitors an at-a-glance view of your site, how it’s organized, what information is available where, and so on.

Search engines depend on site maps to find all of your buried articles

Search engines can’t send you traffic if they don’t know what great content is hiding on your site. Let them quickly and easily find all our your articles with a dynamically generated site map.

For a quick example, see what we’re doing with site maps in the footer of our www.AskDanAndJennifer.com Dating & Relationship advice column.

First, create an automatically updating HTML site map page for your visitors

This is mainly for your visitors, but also for some search engines that happen to find it. This is not a plugin per-se, but rather a custom WordPress page that auto-generates your site map. Get it here. 

Then, create a Google XML site map for your favorite search engines 

Get the Google XML Sitemap Plugin, which auto-generates a site map in Google Site Map format. This plugin also updates the site map every time you make a blog post.

You absolutely do NOT want to be updating a site map by hand every time you post. Unless of course you would find that therapeutic.

Bonus tip: To get the most benefit, add your UTW tag pages to your dynamic site map with the Google Sitemaps – UTW Tag Addon plugin.

Help your visitors promote and spread the word about your awesome articles and get you more web site traffic

People love to share cool stuff they find with others. They also like to bookmark good articles and websites for later. Social media makes sites like del.icio.us and even Netscape.com and Digg make it possible to do BOTH of these at once.

Make it easy for your readers to spread the word about you, and they’ll do it. Use a social media plugin that automatically pre-fills the fields for these visitors to submit your article to these social media sites.

Many people use either Alex King’s Share This plugin or the newer but very popular AddThis.com plugin.

Place this widget in a prominent spot toward the end of your post, and watch others spread the good word for you.

Encourage bloggers to comment on your blog by linking back to their sites 

When people leave comments on your blog, it’s customary for them to enter their web site address. It’s only fair that people who leave insightful comments should get a linkback from your blog to their site, and get some search engine goodness from it.

Whether you think it’s fair or not, this is still a great motivator to get ambitious bloggers involved in the discussions on your blog. 

Disable the WordPress nofollow tag 

WordPress is configured to mark all these linkbacks with the "nofollow" attribute, so that they are ignored by Google and other search engines as far as SEO value to the commenters blog.

There’s a movement to encourage comments by disabling this "nofollow" tag for comments left on WordPress blog. Of course, there’s a DoFollow plugin that will do this for you.

Feature your top commentators on your sidebar, with a full link to their site

A similar and more powerful way to encourage serious commentators to become involved in the discussions on your blog is to feature the top 10 or so commentators in your blog sidebar. Only the true top contributors will show up in this list, and it’s well worth the sidebar real estate to encourage the conversation these readers will often facilitate.

This can easily be done with the WordPress Top Commentators plugin.

What plugins do you use? Which are your absolute must-haves?

There are many other plugins available for WordPress, to perform just about every imaginable blog task. Leave a comment below and let us know your favorites.

Yeah, the whole “make money with eBay” thing was and still is a great opportunity for some, but it’s become more of a fad. Starting a blog is a solid way to make long term income – just for doing some writing on stuff you actually like and care about. Imagine that!

Between Google AdSense, affiliate marketing, sponsored reviews, and the dozens of other site monetization options, you can make a lot of steady, passive income with a blog.

That means you’re making money while you sleep. Seriously, how would you like to make money 24/7, not just when you’re selling your time to an employer?

What’s even better, every blog post you make will be making you money for years to come. Search engines find and cache those posts, and over time each post is “worth more” to the search engines. That means they’ll be sending you’ll get more web site traffic with every passing month.

So what’s stopping you? We did it, and so can you. In just a few months, we went from making $200 per month to $2,000 per month from our blog.

And if you do this right, you too can walk away from that job and be free! Or just make a bunch of extra money.

Hang on tight and let’s do it together!

Here are 10 EASY steps we’ll take together to get your blog started, and make your blog Ultra Successful.

Decide to start today

TODAY. No, not tomorrow, not next week, and not next month. Tomorrow always feels “safe” because you’re not having to make a decision. The power of today is that you make that commitment to yourself. And that is the first step to success.

This step is the most critical one, and it’s where most people get stuck. Don’t dream about doing something. Just get up and do it.

“The best way to live the life of your dreams is to start living the life of your dreams Today, in every little way that you possibly can”. – Mike Dooley, www.Tut.com

Choose a niche for your blog – the niche that YOU will dominate

Choosing the right niche for your blog is perhaps the most important choice you can make BEFORE starting a blog. Choose the wrong niche, and it’s very unlikely you’ll ever succeed.

Some questions to help you choose the right niche

• The most important question you have to ask yourself is this: What are you passionate about?
  It’ll be very hard for you to write regularly and authoritatively and be a go-to industry expert on a topic you don’t really care about. Passion tends to make the difference between amazing success and quiet failure.
• Do you intend to make money with this blog? Would you like it to be your primary income source?
  This makes a big difference. If so, you’ll have to choose a nice that is not overly crowded. Regardless of the crowding, you’ll need to research your niche thoroughly and develop your own value proposition.

Research your niche and learn the landscape

Find the popular blogs and websites in your niche, study them closely, and visit them regularly.

Get to know the authors and regular contributors. Comment on these blogs regularly so they can get to know you too.

Find the right keywords to target with your blog

Once you choose your niche, it’s crucial to find just the right keywords to target. This is a delicate balance between finding keywords that get enough search traffic and keywords that don’t have too much competition.

Don’t wait until your blog starts getting popular to figure out which keywords to target, or you’ll waste a lot of time and effort and end up starting from scratch.

While you can do a lot of research the manual, old fashioned, and time consuming way, we recommend you get a proven keyword research tool to find your keywords quickly and accurately.

Get a web hosting account for your blog

Your blog host should be reliable, responsive if you have questions, and inexpensive. $7 per month is reasonable for a reliable host; less than that and the service tends to go down a lot.

Many people try to save those few dollars and instead start with a free blog platform like Blogger.com. But we strongly advise against it. It’s virtually impossible to get free search engine traffic to those free blogs, and support is completely nonexistent. If your blog disappears overnight (as we had happen once on Blogger.com), there’s nobody to call and ask for help. Your work is all lost. You’ll also have a hard time every moving away when your blog takes off. And you’ll lose all the search engine value that you’ve built up.

Take this seriously and go with a proper web host that actually has competent support people available to help you. Spending $7/month for a proper web host will also help you realize that you’re serious about your goal. Do it.

We highly recommend HostGator. The fact that their email support replies to most issues in literally minutes certainly doesn’t hurt. Find out why in our web hosting review of HostGator, and go set up your own account with them today.

HostGator is great because it JUST WORKS, they offer a lot of great features, and (unlike most other quality web hosts) you can just sign up for an inexpensive monthly plan, month by month.

Are there other good web hosts? Sure, but there are literally just two solid web hosts we use ourselves and actually recommend to our own friends and family. These are “the web hosts to choose from" that we recommend to our own friends and family when they ask…

• HostGator – Solid, reliable, and very inexpensive: as low as $5/month. And a unique feature that other low cost web hosts don’t have: you can sign up monthly, no commitments.
• ServInt – Great high end web host, starting at $49/month. Solid, reliable, and very knowledgeable support staff. This is the must-have web host if your website is getting over 100,000 page views/month.

We started with HostGator and stayed very happy customers with them until we passed 100,000 page views. After that it was time to move up from a $5/month hosting plan, so we upgraded to ServInt. If you’re looking to upgrade to a high end, mission critical web host, then ServInt is your best bet.

If you’re just starting out – or you’re looking to keep your costs as low as possible while working with a solid, reliable web host, do youself a favor and get started with HostGator.

In fact, HostGator is currently running a special promotion: less than $7/month – with no long term commitments, or $5/month for a longer term. You just can’t beat that for a solid, reliable web host when you’re stariting out.

Be sure to check out our web hosting review of HostGator, and give it a try yourself; we’re glad we did.

Install WordPress to run your blog

After you choose a reliable blog host , you’re ready to install your blog software. The most flexible choice available today is WordPress. It’s also free, and easy to setup and maintain.

Yes, this is a little more involved than setting up a free blog somewhere, but it’ll be well worth the effort when you get more web site traffic in a month then you would have gotten in a year on a Blogger.com blog.

Make a great first impression with a great theme for your blog

First impressions always matter. On the web, that’s even more important. A web visitor’s first impression about your site determines if he clicks away in the first 5 seconds, if he stays on to read what you have to say, and if he will ever come back again.

So it’s very important to put your best foot forward. Make your site interesting, distinctive, and engaging to your readers by using a great “theme”. WordPress themes are basically website designs that you can just download and enable for your WordPress blog.

Find the best theme for your blog, and when you have the resources, consider having a custom theme made for just your blog.

Configure WordPress and it’s plugins to get the most search engine traffic

What good is a blog if nobody is visiting? One of the great advantages of WordPress is the vast array of options to make your blog very yummy to the search engines. This is all about understanding what Google wants and giving it to them in the way they want it. Simple.

The most powerful SEO trick of all: “work with Google to give them what they want instead of trying to trick them”.

Make your blog welcoming and engaging to every reader

To make your visitors stick around and come back for more – day after day – use the power of WordPress and make your blog fun, engaging, and interactive.

Use polls to get readers involved and ask their opinion. Feature the latest posts and comments. Show off your most popular articles. Get readers truly involved by getting them to comment on your posts.

Write your first post

OK, at this point you’ve chosen THE best niche for you, you’ve become very familiar with that niche and it’s most popular sites, and you’re basically what could be considered an “authority” on your topic.

So now is the time for that all important first blog post

Off the top of your head, make a quick list of all the issues in your niche that people care about. What problems do they have, what questions do they have? What keeps them up at night?

Now pick ANY one of these and write a quick article on it. This “article” can be just a simple Top 10 list, with a supporting sentence of two for each bullet. That’s it!

Get feedback

Get this first article out there and see what people think. Email it to your family and friends, and ask them to help you make it better.

All the planning in the world is no substitute for Action. It’s time to go forth and do those good and powerful things.

Set up your RSS feed

Not long ago, RSS was the domain of the super-geeky. But today, millions of mainstream internet users are subscribing to RSS vibes every day.

Get your blog set up with full blown RSS support by setting up a free account with FeedBurner. They’ll pull a feed from your blog, make it pretty so everyone can actually read it, and they’ll even give you accurate stats on your readers. Yes, it is nice to know if anyone is actually subscribed to your feed.

WordPress also has a simple plugin that you can enable to support your shiny new FeedBurner RSS feed service.

Register your new blog with the top website and blog directories

Once you have a few posts on your blog, it’s time to start getting the word out. Search engines want to see links coming back to your site. Those links show that people other than just you consider your site to be important.

Well, at first you have no links. So you have to start somewhere. One of the best places to start is the endless list of web site directories and now blog directories which are just begging to give you a free link.

Here are a few to get you started: BlogCatalog, Blog Flux, and the Connected Internet Directory. DMOZ and the Yahoo Directory are also very important, but your submission to them is considered just a “suggestion”, and you may never hear back or get included.

Blog Catalog has turned into a social community of bloggers, which makes it significantly more valuable than a regular blog directory, largely because of the relationships you can forge there.

Promote! Social Media, Internet Press Releases, and more

If you don’t tell people about your new site, they’ll never know about it! Stop hoping someone will accidentally stumble upon your site. Take matters into your own hands and get the word out there!

It’s never been this easy to promote a brand new site, and to explosively grow your traffic and readership.

Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, and more

Did you just publish a great article on your site? Let people know! Social media provides a great way to share your stories with others who WANT to know about it.

Share your great article on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon. But tread with caution. Don’t “spam” these sites with everything you write.

To be truly successful, it’s VERY important to follow the rules and participate in these communities.

There are even some great tools like Web2Submitter to automate the process and submit your stories to tens of social media sites! This means you save countless hours AND actually get your story out to dozens of sites instead of just one.

Check out this video to see how to automate this process with Web2Submitter.

Article Marketing – Establish yourself as an expert by publishing your articles

Time to get more visibility for your hard work. Article directories take your articles and provide them to the countless webmasters and eZine publishers that need what you have: good, useful, and informative content.

You’ve already spent the time and written your excellent articles for your blog. Now publish those articles on the top 10 article directories and get lots more readers coming to your website.

What you say matters, but HOW you say it matters most. You can have the best story in the history of the world, but nobody will listen if you don’t first get their attention.

People will take one look at the headlines of your post and decided right there if they’ll give your post a chance. So that headline had better be awesome! 

Of course, you can sort of cheat and take a shortcut. A while back we got this great list of proven Headline Templates that you can just copy and easily adjust for your specific articles and blog posts. It’s been an excellent reusable resource. Download this Headline Template list and see what it does for your readership.

Blog Platform

WordPress, no contest. We’ve used TypePad and Blogger, but WordPress wins hands-down for it’s power and flexibility.

Website and Blog Hosting

First and foremost, you need a solid blog hosting provider. We use HostGator and have gotten over 30,000 hits to our WordPress blog in a single day. Not bad for a $9/mo hosting account.

Check out our Review of HostGator and see why we recommend HostGator to our friends.

Stay Top of Mind with Email Marketing

People don’t always have time to visit your website. So give them the option to subscribe to get your content. One option is RSS, but most non-techie people often prefer to subscribe by email. So make it easy for them!

Some people install newsletter software on their PCs to do this, but that doesn’t really work anymore. SPAM complaints have made most email providers automatically discard email that is coming direct from home PCs (yes, than can tell). The only way to get your emails delivered these days is to sign up with a service from a company that maintains a good relationship with the major hosting services – someone in that business who is well respected. They don’t allow spammers to user their systems, so the major email providers (like HotMail, MSN, Yahoo) allow their email to go through.

Constant Contact is a great option that we have successfully used for this, and which we recommend to our friends regularly – because it JUST WORKS.You just sign up, choose from their fancy HTML email templates, and start sending out emails and newsletters. You can even import your existing contacts, which is something most newsletter services WON’T let you do.

What’s cool is that you can try it for free for 30 days and see if you like it. They have some great HTML templates and the interface is simple to use. Try Constant Contact for Free 

Email Autoresponders

A step beyond email newsletters is an autoresponder, which allows you to schedule a sequence of messages to be sent to every new subscriber. Imagine this email robot sending each new subscriber an immediate welcome email, then a great email with valuable content 2 days later, then a special offer 2 days after that, and so on.

This is more complex to set up and manage than an email newsletter program like Constant Contact, but it CAN be done.

Our advice, try out Constant Contact free for 30 days to see how that works for you, and go from there.

Search Engine Optimization

Get your hands on this excellent SEO Book and find out how to tap into the amazing amount of free traffic the search engines are just itching to send your way. You just have to know how to talk to them, and you have to give them a good reason to look at you. Check out our review of this book here.

Make Money from Your Blog

Sell text ads with Text-Link-Ads

Do Sponsored Reviews with ReviewMe

Show Targeted eBay auctions on your site with AuctionAds 

And of course, Google AdSense

Web Analytics

You can’t reach your goals if you don’t know where you are and how much progress you’re making. The short version – you NEED to know what traffic you’re getting, where it’s coming from, how much it’s increasing or decreasing week to week, and so on. 

Here are two great analytics tools we use (yes, both) regularly.  

Google Analytics – this is awesome for aggregate stats and trends

StatCounter – this is great for day-to-day monitoring of referrers, etc

Choosing the right niche for your blog is perhaps the most important choice you can make BEFORE starting a blog. Choose the wrong niche, and it’s very unlikely you’ll ever succeed.

Some questions to help you choose the right niche

• The most important question you have to ask yourself is this: What are you passionate about?
  It’ll be very hard for you to write regularly and authoritatively and be a go-to industry expert on a topic you don’t really care about. Passion tends to make the difference between amazing success and quiet failure.
• Do you intend to make money with this blog? Would you like it to be your primary income source?
  This makes a big difference. If so, you’ll have to choose a nice that is not overly crowded. Regardless of the crowding, you’ll need to research your niche thoroughly and develop your own value proposition.

Research your niche and learn the landscape

Find the popular blogs and websites in your niche, study them closely, and visit them regularly.

Get to know the authors and regular contributors. Comment on these blogs regularly so they can get to know you too.

Find the right keywords to target with your blog

Once you choose your niche, it’s crucial to find just the right keywords to target. This is a delicate balance between finding keywords that get enough search traffic and keywords that don’t have too much competition.

Don’t wait until your blog starts getting popular to figure out which keywords to target, or you’ll waste a lot of time and effort and end up starting from scratch.

While you can do a lot of research the manual, old fashioned, and time consuming way, we recommend you get a proven keyword research tool to find your keywords quickly and accurately.

Our website AskDanAndJennifer.com is a very popular Love & Sex advice column, web show, and support community, now touching literally millions of lives every month.

When one of our advice articles recently hit the #1 spot on the Netscape.com homepage, the traffic to our site skyrocketed. We got over 30,000 visitors that day. Wow!

Amazingly, our $7/month HostGator web hosting account held its own and we had no downtime!

Downtime would have been very expensive, as we brought in about $500 in passive blog revenue that day.

A word of warning

While trying to improve conversions, better monetize a site, etc, it’s easy to go a little overboard adding new software, WordPress plugins, and so on to your site. In short, you can shoot yourself in the foot and break your own site – like we recently did. Oops. It was expensive too.

Not long after this first incident above, we had another article featured on Netscape.com, and our site went down HARD. That day would have brought us 40,000 visitors, and we missed out on most of it.

Why? Well, we installed a very system intensive software package called OpenAds to track all our ad clicks. What we didn’t realize at the time is that the way we had configured OpenAds basically added the equivalent of 20 visitors for EACH real visitor. So it was like having 800,000 visitors that day instead of 40,000. Yeah, point gun at own foot and shoot. Repeat.

To their credit, the HostGator staff did quickly move us to a semi-dedicated server so we could handle that load, but we missed out on that really great prime-time traffic spike that morning.

We have since decided to move our primary site to a more powerful virtual dedicated system to handle our the increasing traffic levels and our experimentation with bizarre and often unpredictable software packages and WordPress plugins.

Are there other good web hosting options?

Sure, there are web hosting companies that provide great good, solid service and reliable servers. But there’s a catch (read on, we’ll spill the beans below).

When we first started looking for a good web host a few years ago, we asked around and got a general shoulder shrug from most of our friends. Yeah, they all had one host or another that was “OK”, but nobody could tell us”the best one to go with”. So after a LOT of painstaking research, we ended up with a “short list” of possible contenders.

These are “the web hosts to choose from” that we actually recommend to our friends and family, but unless you’re starting out with a huge budget, we recommend you get started with the first one…

• HostGator – Best web host to start out with, and stay with until your traffic starts to REALLY grow. They reliable, have very quick support, and are very inexpensive: as low as $5/month. And they do something no other solid but low-cost web host offers: you can sign up today month by month, no commitments.
• ServInt – Great high-end web host, and priced accordingly: starting at $50/month. Solid, reliable, and very knowledgeable support staff. This is the must-have web host if your website is consistently getting over 200,000 page views/month.

We started with HostGator and stayed very happy customers with them until our traffic started to really grow, and we passed 200,000 page views/month. At that time we moved to ServInt, and while our web hosting bill is now over $200/month, it’s well worth it.

If you’re just starting out – or you’re looking to keep your costs as low as possible while working with a solid, reliable web host, do yourself a favor and get started with HostGator like we did.

HostGator is great because it JUST WORKS, they offer a lot of great features, and you can just sign up for an inexpensive monthly plan, month by month – no long term commitments.

In fact, HostGator is currently running a special promotion: less than $7/month – with no long-term commitments, or $5/month for a longer term. You just can’t beat that for a solid, reliable web host when you’re starting out.

Web and blog hosting decisions

Handling 30,000 visitors to our WordPress blog in a single day was not bad for a $7/month hosting account. We were pretty darn impressed. And that’s why we recommend HostGator to our friends and family regularly.

In short, if you want a hosting provider that is inexpensive and JUST WORKS, and you’re bringing in less than $1,000/month then we recommend you go with HostGator. That’s what we did, and that’s where we send our friends.

Can YOUR web host handle 30,000 visitors in a day? You can actually start your very own web hosting account with HostGator today for under $5/month.

Still not sure? Get this: another thing we like about HostGator is that you can actually try them out at no risk to you. They offer a 45-Day Money-Back Guarantee… so they really make it easy for you to try it out and see how it actually works for you. If you don’t like it, they’ll give you a full refund, no questions asked. We think that’s pretty cool.

So go ahead… Try HostGator for yourself. You’ll be glad you did. Then let us know what YOU think.