Blogger And WordPress

Most people do not start out with a paid host and a paid domain. Blogger and WordPress have given even the most un-savvy Internet users a way to put their content on the web. The problem with Blogger and WordPress is actually universal to all free plans. You do not get a domain. You get a sub-domain. For instance, let’s say that you do have a Blogger account. Your domain is going to be “domain.blogger.com.” The domain is a sub-domain of Blogger. This is the same with WordPress, Yola or any other free site. Can you still rank in the search engines? Yes. Will it hurt your ranking? Yes. When you pay for a domain, you own the domain and your can have keywords attached. This is more recognizable to the search engines and will help you rank faster.

Monitoring

When you go with free hosting, you might not have all of the features of a paid host. Let’s take WordPress as an example. WordPress is one of the biggest platforms on the Internet. It’s used for sales pages, landing pages and one sheets for millions of products online. But when you are using a sub-domain of WordPress you do not have the ability to install plug-ins. Blogger doesn’t allow you to use WordPress if your blog is adult oriented. These are the consequences of using a free domain and free hosting. When you pay for a host and pay for a domain, you own the domain and you pay for the features of your package. Again, if you’re just starting out, features might not be what you’re looking for. You might want to gain a following before you opt in for a hosting package.

Ads

Free hosting is notorious for putting their own ads on your website. If you’re going for a free package, you should be aware of this. Your web page’s ad space should be utilized for products, RSS feeds or Adsense. Not an ad for your package. When you pay for a package, you don’t have to put an ad on your page. Placing an ad on a free package is the host’s way of making up for the fact that you aren’t paying for their service. The fact of the matter is that hosting doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg. You can easily find an affordable host like HostGator for very little money. Consider this when you are determining your packages.

Customer Perspective

The customer or reader on your blog is why you have a blog or website in the first place. When you are trying to establish yourself to the reader, it’s important to realize how they will see you. Will they see you as a professional who is paying for premium web hosting and a great domain? Or will they see you as an amateur who is using free services? Your domain is key. When they see that your site is a sub-domain, they could instantly be turned off. The same goes for free web-hosting advertisements. These are a dead give away that you’re not serious about your website.

Bandwidth Caps

The bandwidth on your website is essential for handling traffic. Free web hosting is going to have a bandwidth cap on your site. This means that even if your site takes off, you will not be able to handle the amount of users who want to visit your site. Upgrading to a hosting package increases the amount of users you can have visit your site in a given day or month. Upgrades can be implemented when needed and you probably won’t notice bandwidth caps when you first start out. Consider a hosting package if you’re getting a lot of traffic.

1) Add This

Add This is a plug-in that allows you to share your content to over 330 of the most popular social networking sites on the Internet. Add this shows up on your site as a widget on the sidebar with one master button. When your visitors come to your blog, they will be able to share your content with all of their friends on a social networking site through the Add This button on your site. Add This also allows people to sign up for a free account so they can get stats on the content that is visited the most and what sites their articles and blog posts are being sent to.

2) All In One SEO Pack

Search Engine Optimization is the number one way to get traffic to your blog. If you don’t know anything about SEO then you might want to invest in the All In One SEO Pack. This WordPress plug-in is one of the best for configuring your site for the search engines. The All In One SEO Pack comes with Google Analytics support, integration with WordPress ecommerce sites, and support for other CMS-style WordPress installations. You can tune up your pages and the navigational links as well as construct canonical URLs. If you’re a beginner you don’t have to worry. Once installed, this plug-in has an excellent interface that is very user friendly.

3) Simple Tags

Do you spend hours looking at the Google Adwords tool to help you find tags for your blog posts? If so, you need Simple Tags. Simple Tags gives you a very easy way to find the best tags for your posts. Search engines use your tags to determine the relevancy of your posts and articles. If you don’t have the best tags on your posts then you will be passed up for your competition. If you have highly competitive tags you will also find it hard to compete. Use Simple Tags to find the best tags for your posts.

4) Automatic SEO Links

Automatic SEO Links is a great plug-in that allows you to choose a phrase or a word for automatic linking on your website. You can set this up for the internal and the external links for your blog so you don’t have to go through hours of linking again. You can also set up the anchor texts for your links and choose “nofollow” if you want to. Other plug-ins run the risk of text spamming, but Automatic SEO Links will allow you to set this up for first word in your post. This means that you won’t overload your post with links.

5) Redirection

How many times have you had to move a page on your blog to another place? If you have ever done this you know how much traffic you lose after the move. Redirection allows you to easily set up your 301 redirects without losing any web traffic. If you have archived pages that you want to move around you can install this plug-in and keep your traffic. You can even set up RSS feeds for errors so you know when something isn’t working. Redirection also allows you to capture a log for your 404s.

Plug-ins not only make your life a little easier, they can save you from the hassle of losing traffic. If you aren’t using plug-ins for your WordPress blog, you are missing out on thousands of unique visitors per month. These 5 plug-ins are some of the best for capturing traffic, maintaining your rank in the search engines and giving you back precious time that would have been spent editing links or researching tags. Download these plug-ins now and watch as your traffic soars. Remember that you need a hosting siteto install plug-ins for WordPress. If you don’t have a hosting site, head over to HostGator for a great rate.

Customize The Site’s Sidebar

The sidebar is one of the most important aspects of your WordPress site. When you first sign up for WordPress or install it on your hosting plan, you will get default sidebar options installed on the site. These default options usually include the “Categories,” “Blogroll” and the “Archives” listings. When you haven’t changed out the sidebar options your blog is going to look like every other blog on the Internet. Change it up with different widgets for a customized feel. Implement social bookmarking widgets or differentiate the standard “Blogroll” and “Archives” options with “Articles” or “Reviews. This will help you establish your online authority.

Ghostwriting Made Simple

One of the best ways to get your WordPress blog some more traffic is to offer your readers a chance to submit their original content to your blog. There are a plugins that will give you a form to implement on your blog so users can submit their content directly or you can set up an email account to accept blog posts. Either way, you will get users who submit their content and then tell their friends about it. Not only will you be offering people a way to backlink to their website, you will be creating a traffic tree where friends tell their friends about the post who then tell other friends about it. This is a great way to build traffic, subscribers and original content.

Browser Compatibility

There are a lot of different browsers on the market. If you’re not sure if your WordPress blog is going to work with different browsers, you can check through on an online website called Browsershots.org. This will test your WordPress blog for compatibility over different browsers such as Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. If your blog isn’t compatible with different browsers, you’re going to see a decline in traffic and sales. The Internet is moving into the mobile phase and you need to make sure that your WordPress blog is also compatible with mobile browsers. Check your blog to make sure that your readers have the ability to access it while mobile or while working with Linux, Windows and Mac systems.

Use RSS

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great way to get your readers to subscribe to your blog and keep coming back. The best thing about RSS is the fact that it actually is really simple. You can use this by installing a subscribe button to your “Plugins” directory. Log into your WordPress blog and go to the “Plugins” option. Click on the “Install” button and then install the plugin so your readers can subscribe to your posts. Once you have built enough authority to your site, you should see regular traffic coming in as you post new content. You can also submit your RSS feeds to different RSS directories so they know when you have uploaded new content to your blog.

Organize Categories

The categories on your WordPress blog are going to be the first line of communication with your readers. He comes to your blog or website they’re looking for information based on your niche. When you fully implement categories into the sidebar of your blog or website your readers will have an easy way of navigating through different blog posts and articles. The categories that you choose for your blog or website are going to depend on your niche. Try to make the categories as narrow as possible. You might want to divide the categories into reviews, articles and product information or something similar depending on what your website is dealing with. Make the categories personable for added effect to the readers.

WordPress can be a powerful blogging platform when implemented properly. You want to establish yourself as a credible blogger so using the same methods as every other blogger on the Internet isn’t going to cut it. Differentiate yourself and create a blog that is pleasing to the eye while still giving your readers the information they are looking for. Follow these tips and you should see an increase in traffic in no time at all.

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1. Hostgator

The first one is Hostgator. It’s one that we recommend, and they have a sweet deal for our viewers where you can start a blog for a penny. If you get a 3 year package, you can get one as low as $3.96/month. Unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, so you don’t run into shortage issues. They also use wind power which is really cool, green, and environmentally friendly.

They have a phone number for international users as well, and 24/7 phone support and live chat. They are pretty good about solving any minor issues that you have so you don’t have to worry about it. Basically their support is really awesome. You can’t say that about all web hosting.

A big difference for Hostgator is that you can sign up month to month and get a good deal vs other web hosts where you can to have a long term contract to do so.

2. Bluehost

The next one is BlueHost. Like Hostgator, you get unlimited disk space and bandwidth. If you sign up a 2-3 year deal, you can get for about $3 to $4 / month. They have 24/7 phone support and email support. They also offer a script setup that can be a little easier than Fantastico. While we love Hostgator, this is a good alternative.

3. 2MHost

Now going down a step and lowering the price is 2MHost. It start at $2.75 / month for a 1 year package. 5 gigs of disk space, so you’re getting some limitations here. Although you get 24/7 tech support, it’s a step down from previous 2 web host companies. If you only sign up for 1 year, then it can be cheaper, but you may get what you pay for…

4. 000webhost

Ok the next one is 000webhost. This is great if you’re really not sure that you want to be in the web business, and you just want to tip your toe in the water and see if you like it. It’s free, but you only get 5 domains and 5 emails addresses, and a very limited disk space of 1.5 Gig. There’s no support, phone or chat, though there is email. You only get 1 ftp account, but you do receive Fantastico.

5. iPage

For a couple of dollars you get what the site claims “over $450 of extras” – and this site definitely is worth your time. With this cheap service, you get:

- A free domain name
- Free security suite (SiteLock)
- Free online store
- Free site-building tools
- Unlimited disk space
- Unlimited email
- Unlimited bandwidth
The site also boasts that it is 100% green, being powered by wind energy, and they also have an anytime money-back guarantee. It includes some neat marketing bonuses that will help you get started, like a credit for Google Adwords, for Facebook Advertising, and for Yahoo! and Bing sponsored searches. If you live in the United States, they’ll also hook you up with a free tool-free phone number. Building your website is also a cinch with their drag and drop site builder, and there’s also a blog and photo gallery set up wizard to help your page look as professional as possible.

6. Fat Cow

Apart from having a cute name, this web hosting service is not only cheap, it offers you a whole lot. The longer that you sign on with this hosting company, the greater the discount you receive too.

This is another web hosting that is powered by wind energy, and they also have oodles of extra goodies like a Google Adwords credit, a Yahoo! and Bing credit, a Facebook advertisement credit, and you get a free Yellow Pages listing. Nextiva also offers a free toll free phone number with the service, and it’s a great Word Press publishing platform.

So let’s go over some of the specs:

- Unlimited Disk space
- Unlimited bandwidth and email
- Unlimited domains hosted
- Unlimited MySQL databases
- Free domain name
- Free shopping card
- SSL secure server
- Free script bar (which includes WordPress, Joomla, and more)
They also have some pretty solid partnership programs, including an affiliate program with a $100.00 payout and a referral program that will get you $10 in credits. Customer support can be reached 24 hours a day, every day of the week through phone, email and live chat, so if you ever encounter a problem you know you have back up.

7. Just Host

The final hosting service to make it onto our list is the justhost.com web hosting service. As with the other hosting services they offer the 24/7 customer service and technical support, and they also boast an anytime money back guarantee – so you know that you won’t get stuck in some service that you hate!

This hosting service offers the same sort of features that other cheap hosting services do, like:

- Free shopping carts
- Free domain name
- Free site builder (including templates)
- Google and Yahoo! Ad credits
- Instant setup
- Unlimited domains, including parked domains
- Free script library (through SimpleScripts)
- Free installation of WordPress and Joomla

What made them stand out is that they use cPanel as a control panel (which some other cheap hosting services do not) and their homepage mentions that they will be able to help you do a website transfer. Whether you’re a veteran when it comes to web hosts or if you’re new at it, Just Host makes it rather simple to navigate and manage any number of domains that you may create through their cPanel.

So in summary, we recommend Hostgator, but if you just don’t like it for some reason, then move down the list to others.

It’s kind of funny because many cases the web host support is the real value especially when your blog is down and you need help. Anyway what web host do you use and why?

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Check Out the New Provider

Before you do it, you have to inspect carefully to make sure you know what you’re getting into. Go to the new web host, create an account (you would have to pay for it, but you’ll get a refund within the first month or so if you decide to cancel), check out their user interface, contact their support team to find out how helpful and responsive they are. You really want to test it out before you make the decision to take the leap.

A good tip is to sign up for the new web host within about two weeks of your current web hosting contract expiring. This way, if anything goes awry, you have immediate backup right there and can correct any errors far more easily than if you jumped to the new host after your previous contract had expired. Not only that, but you have time to renew your current contract if you decide that the web host you have actually isn’t so bad compared to most of the others out there.

Backup All of Your Data

Before you do the transfer, make sure you have backup properly. The last thing you want is to have misplaced certain files that put your blog to a grinding halt. Download everything to your hard drive so that you can restore everything just in case.

It may also be a good idea to backup everything to CD and/or USB. Backup all of your images, files, databases and directory structures, and then store the CD or USB in a safe location.

Your current web host should have a backup option in their Cpanel. Ask customer service to walk you through the steps if you’re still uncertain. You can also do the backup within WordPress where you can go to Tools and then Export to download all of your content, but this doesn’t include any images, audios or videos. Ideally, those files should be on a separate cloud storage company such as Dropbox, Microsoft Live Skydrive, Amazon S3, or even Google Docs. Of course you should make copies of them too. Basically you should get a copy of everything that makes up your website.

Tell People you’re Moving

Visitors hate being inconvenienced by laggy, slow pages, or web pages that no longer exist. Make sure that you give your visitors a fair warning about the transition and that you will be coming back soon. If you can give them warning weeks in advance through a blog entry, or an email for email subscribers, that would be best. Add a note on the homepage of your website advising of the date that the website will be moved, and for how long they can expect to be inconvenienced. Things on the Internet come and go at a fast pace, so if they for just one day cannot locate your website and receive some “404 error” code, they may assume that you’ve packed up and shipped off, and are never to return again.

Making the Big Move

Ok now here’s the big move. It can be scary. There are a lot of things that you might be thinking about such as transferring data to the new web host, notifying the domain registrar if it’s not your old web host provider. Update your DNS. These are things that might make your head explode. This is complicated. You could really screw up your blog if not done correctly. This is why we like Hostgator so much. They will actually bring all of your stuff over for you.

Now once you have everything migrate over, or you have the new web hosting company do it for you, test, test, and test! One thing that you need to take advantage of is the “preview” function that most of the hosting services offer these days. You can see how your website looks on whatever browser or browsers of your choosing, ensure that the functionality is still working as they should, and that everything is all intact. If anything looks wrong, check the coding, and don’t be afraid to contact the hosting’s customer service for help (they can almost always troubleshoot any problem that you may be experiencing).

Only close your old account after you’ve thoroughly checked to make sure that you website works on the new web host. As mentioned above, “don’t burn that bridge” until you’re sure.

Additional Tips on Changing Web Hosting Services

Once everything looks good and is working right, it’s time to configure your email accounts (you really shouldn’t, but just in case you do) on the new web server. Take note of the new SMTP and POP3 account that you will be using once the transition is complete. Once the website has completely transitioned over to the new web hosting service, you will then be able to update your email client so that it does match the new SMTP and POP3 settings on your account.

While you’re in the process of moving, it’s also a good idea to put some sort of a mark on any page on your new web server, just so that you can differentiate the page on your new webserver from the old one. This will make it incredibly easy for you to tell when ever any DNS information of yours is updated.

It may take the DNS information 72 hours or so to propagate across all of the DNS servers, to make sure that you tell your visitors that you may be gone for that long. Though your entire website may be all (or mostly) switched over in as little as two, it’s always a good idea to give your devoted visitors a fair warning.

WordPress has amazing features that hadn’t existed on any platform prior to their introduction through the WordPress system. While it can be quite technical to get it installed, this has also become easier than imagined, because many hosting companies now install it with the single click of a button.

Simple Installation

As stated above, you can usually install WordPress with little more than the click of a button. You generally log into your hosting control panel and find the fantastico or simple scripts link. From there you can choose WordPress, enter a couple of settings (like user name and password) and be done with it.

If it were any simple than that, you wouldn’t even need to do anything. Where’s the fun in that? We have got to keep some sort of barrier to entry.

Easily Change the Appearance

So many people want a blog, and they want it to look just how they want. With WordPress, there are tens of thousands of freely available themes for you to choose from. You can get the blog to look exactly how you want it if you are willing to spend a few hours scouring through all of the themes available to you.

And if you don’t like what you are seeing in the free section, you can always look for “premium” WordPress themes. These are themes professionally designed with the professional blogger in mind. You can often find designs that are as good or better than anything that you have seen on other websites.

And if none of those suit you, the WordPress community is huge, and there are thousands of designers ready to build a custom design for your site.

Simple Content Creation

It’s easy to create new content with WordPress. Whether you are looking to create a single post or an entire page, it’s easy. You just click a button and start writing.

With the WYSIWYG editor, you can edit your content as simply as if you were writing a document in a word processor. You can easily bold or italicize your content. You can add links with a couple of quick clicks.

You can easily tag and categorize your post and pages all from the same layout. This will help to keep your content organized for you and your readers. And you can always update all of this later on if you decide that you want to make some changes.

Simple Site Wide Changes

In the past, when you were creating your web pages by hand in HTML, if you created a change to the layout of your site, you would have to migrate all of the content from the old version to the new version. It didn’t even have to be a complex change.

If you changed a punctuation mark in the footer, you would have to do that all over again. And as your site grew, that became more and more of a chore. Of course, there were advanced ways to do it using nerdy programming techniques, but if you could do all of that, you wouldn’t be worried about wordpress, would you?

So when wordpress came on the scene and introduced its simple site-wide changes through themes and designated sections of the layout, it was a real blessing to anyone responsible for managing a website. That same flexibility is now available to you.

If you want to change some links or items in the side bar, you can do that with a couple of quick clicks. It really won’t take you that long to get it all sorted out and get the new things installed. And once you do it, it’s done.

An Amazing Community

There are literally millions of members in the WordPress community. Whether you use their hosted solution or install it on your own hosting, you are going to find that there are plenty of people available to help you with your site if you have questions.

And since there are so many people participating in the project, you are going to find that there are tons of add-ons for you to improve the functionality of your site. You can also be sure that the code has been scrutinized by thousands of pairs of eyes for security, since it’s open source.

Great SEO benefits

If you aren’t aware of some of the basics of SEO, then you wouldn’t realize how amazing some of the basic features built into WordPress are. The search engines love to see keywords in the URL of content. And with WordPress, you can make this happen easily.

You don’t have to worry about building proper link webs throughout your site, either. With the tags and categories, your site is going to create a huge web of internal links for the search engine to crawl through. If you have named all of your pages appropriately, then the search engine will quickly figure out what your site is all about.

Comments Encourage Repeat Visitors

WordPress automatically includes the ability for visitors to comment on your posts. This is great if you already have a batch of visitors coming to visit you on a regular basis. You want to make sure that you are able to allow them to participate in the conversation.

When people are able to comment on your site it does two very good things for you. The first is that it gives the readers a sense of community. They are more likely to come back if they are participating in the creation of the site and have a voice that is being heard. The second is that it helps to create truly unique content, pushing your SEO through the roof.

If you have never considered WordPress before, then it’s about time you start to take it seriously. Many people have found that installing WordPress changes their entire approach to working on their blog.

Whether you’re learning how to start a blog or you’re a seasoned blogging veteran, having all the possible information about your blog, its traffic, visitors, and search engine results, is very important. Google Webmaster Tools for bloggers is the perfect complement to decide whether you have a design and content that is attracting the kind of attention you want, not only from the search engines, but also from your visitors. These free tools offer a wealth of information that any blogger can use.

The Power Of Search Engine Optimization

More than 90% of websites are found through the use of search engines. At the moment, Google accounts for more than 65% of all web searches, with Yahoo and Bing following at a distant second and third, respectively. Other less traditional search engines are cropping up every day, such as Facebook and even YouTube, which means more people will likely use the power of these search engines to indirectly find your blog.

When you are competing with other blogs for traffic, it’s important to be able to get on the first or second page of these search engine listings. If you don’t know how Google views your website or how often it is crawled (viewed by Google), then you could be missing out on valuable insight and the potential to move up in the search results. If you’re not sure about how important getting a first or second page ranking is, then just think about the last time you went beyond the second page to find what you were looking for.

Most people will tend to give up after two pages and move onto a different search if they don’t find what they want. With Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll be able to get the most out of your potential visitors’ searches by understanding what search terms people are using to find your website and the search terms that Google thinks are relevant for your site.

Performance Counts

Google will not send traffic to blogs that are slow, unresponsive, or that have broken links. But how can you possibly know if you’re site is slow or if certain posts are not displaying correctly? Again, this is where Google Webmaster Tools can help. You can see how fast Google thinks your blog is as well as get a detailed listing of any broken pages or links.

Understanding Flash And Videos

Google ‘spiders’ constantly ‘crawl’ websites, reading all the content, logging information about the content, and analyzing the data. Google then uses this data to determine the importance of your website. Here’s the thing… These spiders only look for text. They can’t see images, Flash (all that fancy animated stuff), or videos.

If you plan on using images, Flash, or videos on your home page, then you may earn a lower search ranking if you don’t compensate and enter a specific description of the content of those videos, images, or Flash compositions. These are topics that many bloggers don’t fully understand and their beautifully designed websites end up ranking much lower in the search engines than those totally ugly all-text websites.

Google Webmaster Tools can help you identify where you’re design falls short so that you can avoid this pitfall.

Set Up Your Google Webmaster Account

In order to use Google Webmaster Tools , you need to have a Google account. It’s free and so is the tool. Once you have an account, you’re ready to find out what your site is lacking and how you can improve it.

Verify Your Site

The first thing that you’ll be asked to do is enter your website’s URL. You will want to be sure that you also add the ‘www’ to the address. To verify your site, simply follow the instructions on the page and you will be able to have access to all the aspects of this powerful tool.

Information

Once you’re in, you will be able to see a host of information about your website, including whether it is included in Google’s indexing pages and when the last time a spider crawled it. It’s important to know when the last crawl took place because if you update your content every day or every few days and the spider last visited two months ago, that generally means that at the time there weren’t any significant changes to the content and the search engine deemed to site a low priority. If you’re not getting crawled, it will mean that all of those new blog posts you’ve added, along with those important keywords, are not being indexed when you need it to be.

Next, you’ll find a diagnostics page that will entail all the problems that Google’s spider encountered while accessing your page. If there are certain pages on your site that are not available to the public, then they will show up in this report. The goal of any website is to not have anything show up in this report, but most often it does.

Using The Statistics

The statistics part of this webmaster tool is great because you can see what searches return your website the most, what words are being used when linking back to your site, and how many subscribers you have. For bloggers, this information is like gold. The statistics are not crucial, but they are always a benefit to have and use.

Links

Links are important to boosting search engine ranking, but there’s a difference between quality links and just a large number of links. The goal should always be high quality links pointing to your website, as well as those links that your website points to. This information provided by the webmaster tool will give you important aspects to focus on.

When you get these results, go through the pages that are linking to yours and see which ones have any real value. While you certainly don’t need to have them removed, you can focus on more important sites that might be willing to link back to your blog. The more quality links that lead back to your site, the higher you will rank on the search engines.

Professionalism To The Core

The Google Webmaster tools for blogging is about creating a professional presence on the web. When you have access to important information about your website and how search engine spiders ‘view’ it, then you will gain insight into how to improve not only your search engine ranking, but also your visitors’ experience. By using this free tool, you will increase your chances for success on the World Wide Web.

Proper SEO

A solid SEO, or search engine optimization, strategy can significantly increase the traffic to your site. Search engine optimization is essentially the process of setting up your site in such a way that the search engines can understand exactly what your site is about and display your site in the rankings accordingly.

There are many simple things you can do when blogging to make sure you have your site properly search engine optimized. First, do a little research to see what keywords people search that are related to your niche. You can do this by using several free keyword tools out there on the Internet. Just do a quick search and you will find them. The keyword tool designed by Google AdWords is a great one to use.

After you find a few terms that are relevant, then you can make some changes to your site to incorporate those terms. Try to add it to the title of your site, and then include it in the text a few times as well. Do not overdo it, though, as too many mentions of a keyword can lead to the search engines to penalize you for that particular term.

Also, make sure that you have a sitemap built into your site that the search engines can find and take a look to ensure you do not have the search engines blocked from coming to your site.

You can also write articles, guest posts on other sites, and build other links that point back to your site to help grow its presence in the search engines. As a general rule, the more links you have back to your site, the more important your site seems to the search engines and the more likely you are to rank for the terms that they see as relevant to your site.

Clean Up The Design

Is your site pleasing to the eye? If not, users are less likely to stick around as a customer long term. You may want to have a web designer take a look at your site to see what could be cleaned up and updated for proper website performance. Ask a few folks to give their opinion of your site, as you may have spent too much time looking at it to see it through the eyes of a customer.

Often, it does not take much to take a site from hard to look at to pleasing to the eye. For the most part, users want a simple navigation on your site so they can get where they want to go, and they want a clean, simple design that flows for them and has clear divisions between sections. When blogging, your site should also look updated. If your site looks like it has not been redone since 1995, you may have a problem! In addition, try to avoid music or videos that load on their own without the user clicking a play button. People would rather have the option to play these types of media.

Write Solid Copy For Your Site

The best blogging tips include writing solid copy for your blog. Poor copy can seriously kill your website performance. You can bet that people probably will move on without making a purchase or contacting your business. First, make sure it is free from grammatical, spelling, and capitalization errors. Second, make sure that the information is easy to read and that the message is clear.

Give enough information for users to make a decision, but do not overdo it, either. If users come to your page and see an article of 5000 words, you can bet they will not read it. Keep it under 1000 words max on any particular page or article. Do not go to short, though. Anything above 250 words is probably good as a general rule.

In addition, good copywriting should explain the benefits to the potential customer. What does your site or business offer that others do not? This is known as a unique selling proposition, and including it can seriously improve your website performance.

You should also include a solid call to action for the user. What is it that you want them to do? Should they buy something right on your site? Should they call you or e-mail you? Make that as clear and concise as possible.

Use Media Properly

Blogging with video, pictures and audio content can really enhance the user’s experience on your site and keep them on your site longer. In fact, these days, having good media on your site can be absolutely crucial to your website performance. Proper use of pictures and video can keep your reader’s interest much longer than simple text alone.

If you can have a video created about your site or business, this can be a great selling point for users. Pictures can break up the monotony of text and can further illustrate the point you are trying to get across to your readers. As mentioned above, however, make sure that you do not have any videos or audio set to play automatically for users, as many users want to start these when they are ready.

Stay Connected With Visitors

Make sure that you have a way to stay connected with visitors and invite them to come back. There are several ways to make this connection and keep your site or business in front of them.

First, you can include a link back to your Twitter or Facebook page, so that users can “follow” or “like” you. This way, you can have your message in front of them and get them more likely to come back. You can also include an email opt-in form so that users and potential customers could get updates from you or an email newsletter.

If you follow these simple blogging tips, you will likely see a boost in your website performance, no matter what your site is about!

When you operate a blog, there are often many factors about your marketing efforts that you should know in order to be effective. Some of these factors can be measured through some basic tools offered by web hosting companies, but Google Analytics offers the best free options.

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When you have access to the right information, then you can fine tune your internet marketing, as well as your blog design, to gain the highest number of visitors to your site.

When you create a blog, whether it is for your own personal business or you are maintaining one for a major corporation, having access to the details about the layout, design, and search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to success. There are literally millions of blogs already floating around in cyberspace. In fact, there are billions of web pages that are competing for attention from the major search engines. You need to know how your blog, as well as the individual web pages, are performing if you want to maximize the return on your investment.

And your blog is an investment. Make no mistake about this simple fact. If you have taken the time, made the investment in resources to build a solid blog, then you want to make sure that people can: A) Find it, and B) Be compelled to stay with your blog.

The World of Blogging

Blogging used to be about sharing your random thoughts with anyone who might feel the same way as you did. Today, blogging is about business. Many of the world’s most popular blog sites, such as Blogger and WordPress are often used to build businesses.

Blogging is no longer about simply sharing your opinions about a sports team or movie that was released. Today it is about offering potential customers information that they can use. When they find information, they develop a bond of trust with the business or blog that offered it to them.

When you are experienced at it or still need to know how to start a blog, it is imperative that you incorporate Google Analytics for blogging into your site. This way you can track a host of data, such as how your visitors found your site, their geographic location, and how they enter your site (what pages) and which pages are the most popular.

How Keywords can Be Effective

Keywords are one of the most important fundamental aspects of blogs and design. When you target very specific keywords, you will have more success converting the average visitor into regular customers. Using this tool will help you determine how people found your blog and what keywords were driving traffic.

When you know which keywords are working and which ones aren’t, you can fine tune your marketing approach. For example, if you sell car parts for Ford automobiles, for example, and you discover that the keyword phrase ‘Ford muffler parts’ was driving considerably more traffic to your site than, say, ‘Ford parts,’ then you know how to market more effectively. This sample would tell you that the more precise you are with your keywords, the more effective your internet marketing plan will be.

Using Google Analytics

What makes this tool impressive is that it is free to use. You simply need to set up an account with Google. Once you’ve completed that step, build a profile for your blog.

If you have built your blog from the ground up, you will likely have to enter the code that you are given to each page that you want information about. If you are using one of the blogging platforms, such as Blogger or WordPress, for example, you will only need to add this code to your theme. Simply copy the JavaScript code that is created based on your blog profile and paste is above the </head> tag in your page, or the template that you’re using.

Please note that this code does not operate visible. In other words, it will not affect the layout or design of your blog in any way, shape, or form. Some analytical tools do, in fact, alter the appearance of your blog and this is what makes this tool more efficient.

Once you have added this code to your site, you can begin learning a great deal about your visitors as well as your blog’s effectiveness in grabbing visitors. Simply click on ‘View Report’ on the initial screen that you see. This will show you a main dashboard with a host of analytical options.

From there you can view information about your Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content, Goals, and if you sell items on your site, E-commerce. The Content section can give you some good insight about the content that you’ve placed on your site. Search engines love high quality content and so do readers.

Competition On The Internet

When it comes to the Internet, there is an enormous amount of competition. Every year there are tens of thousands of new blogs being launched. As the World Wide Web becomes more crowded, search engines become more particular about how they rank these sites.

When you create compelling content, then your blog will attract more attention. Also, with so many different internet marketing venues to choose from, it is practically impossible for the single businessman or businesswoman to tackle them all by himself or herself. This tool created by Google allows you to determine which methods generate the best success.

Design Matters

While it can be easy to focus strictly on the content and internet marketing strategies that you use when building and promoting your blog, the layout and design is equally important. People will give your blog 5 seconds of their time before they decide to either move on or stay. 5 seconds is not a lot of time.

Using Google Analytics, you can find out just what aspects of your blog design and layout attract users. Is your call to action in the right place? What about the images and navigation bar?

When you give every detail the attention it deserves, you will maximize your users’ experience which will bring them back again and again.

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Forum Marketing

Promoting your site can take on many different features. There are all different kinds of avenues where you can promote your site effectively. A lot of it depends on the type of niche that you’re in to begin with. For example, many people advocate the use of something called forum marketing. This is where you join forums that are relative to your niche so that you can become a valid and valuable contributor to the forum. Then, you can gain the trust and respect of the other members of the site so that they will want to visit your blog about the same topic.

For instance, let’s say that your blog is about rose gardening. You might want to find forums about flower gardening, roses or even organic gardening. You can become a member and usually you are allowed to have a forum signature. Some website owners may only allow you to have a link to your website in your profile. Either way, you can find stealth ways of advertising your blog to the members of the forum. Remember, though, that you are there to provide value on the topic at hand so don’t go blatantly spamming someone else’s forum. That is only going to make you look bad and won’t help you to drive traffic to your own site.

Social Media

Another way to promote your site is by using social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. These sites are growing in popularity as more and more people utilize them on a daily basis. By promoting your site or business on social media networks, you can develop huge lists of followers who will hang on your every word when you post. Again, this is about relationship marketing so it’s not going to be an overnight success. People need to know that you care about them and what they need, so make sure that most of your posts are not promotional in nature. You can do things like create a group on Facebook about your niche topic and provide valuable information to your followers.  Or learn how.

Another way to use social media is by putting buttons on your blog so that people can share your content with their list of friends. If you can gain the loyalty and respect of the readers of your blog, they will share your information and help you gain even more traffic to the site. Again, this is all about relationships so you must provide such valuable content that people are constantly amazed that you’re giving away this information for free. That way, when you come up with a paid product or suggest another service to them they will trust that it must be good because your free content is so super valuable.

Paid & Free Press Releases

One often overlooked way of marketing your blog is by using press releases. Some people think the press releases are simply for people who are trying to get an article in the newspaper or on television, but they are actually one of the best ways to get extra link juice online. There are several high-powered press release websites on the Internet like PRWeb and PRNewswire where you can submit your release and generate more traffic to your site. Of course, there’s also the possibility that your blog will be picked up in the mainstream media and featured in a publication outside of the Internet. This is just icing on the cake for your marketing efforts.

When writing a press release, it’s very important to remember that you don’t want to be overly promotional. Press releases are meant to express the fact that you have something newsworthy to say. For example, if your blog is about working from home then you might want to write a press release from the angle of the high unemployment rate and how more people are taking on jobs from home. That way, the press release is newsworthy in the eyes of anyone who reads it.

Free press releases are also an option, and several sits offer this service. But while it sounds good on paper, we’ve yet to ever see any significant results from a free press release service. So when we want to do a key press release and get some real visibility, we always turn back to one of the major players like PRWeb.

Article Marketing

By far, article marketing is probably one of the most common ways of getting traffic to your website and creating links back to your blog. There are many facets to article marketing that you want to learn, but the main idea is to write short, informative articles with anchor text leading back to your website.

These articles can be posted in many places online including article directories and Web 2.0 properties such as eHow, Hubpages and Squidoo. However one of the most well-known article directories is Ezine Articles, so be sure to publish your articles there as well. Unlike many others, their submission guidelines are fairly strict, but that keeps quality on the site high, so you’ll be in good company. For example, Ezine Articles will only allow you to include links in your “author bio”, not in the article itself. But that’s true of most high quality article directories…

Remember that when you are doing article marketing, that there are two reasons that you are working on this task. For one thing, you want to create high-quality links back to your site using specific anchor text that you want your site to rank for. On the other hand, you also want to create quality information that will help you to attract more visitors back to your blog. Hopefully, people will see the quality of your information and want to click through to read more on your blog. Keep in mind that you shouldn’t give all of your information away in your articles. Otherwise, there is really no reason for anyone to come and visit your blog since you’ve already given them all of the pertinent information that they want.

There are many different ways to market your blog online through social media, press releases, article marketing and more. It’s important that you focus on several different ways of promoting your blog rather than just one. A variety of different kinds of links from different sources can only serve to help your blog rise up in the search engine rankings and maintain its stability over time. In other words, don’t simply rely on article marketing for all of your promotion as you will also want to use a variety of other avenues to invite new readers to your blog daily.

Be sure to read about our favorite web hosting provider and find out how to start a blog in 10 easy steps!

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Promote Your Blog

Let’s face it: you can never have too much publicity for your blog or business. Some people make the fatal mistake of creating a blog and publishing content but never doing any promotion whatsoever. While that can work over the long term if enough of your content gets into the search engines, it certainly isn’t the quickest or most efficient route to getting your information into the right hands. You need to take some proactive steps in order to get your blog noticed in the right places.

It’s very simple to register your new blog with the top website and blog directories. We’re simply talking about filling out forms on certain websites so that you can start to get noticed. This is not one of the more active ways of marketing that we will talk about later, but it is very important in the overall marketing plan of your website.

Technorati Blog Directory

Probably the most popular blog directory that you can register with is called Technorati. This site actually tracks and lists the top 100 most influential bloggers. This would certainly be a list that you would like to be on in the long run, so the first step is getting your blog registered there.

BlogCatalog Blog Directory

Another influential blog directory site is called BlogCatalog. Again, it is very easy for you to go ahead and list your site here as just one more way of drawing in more visitors and attention. If you go to Google and put in the term “blog directories”, you will find hundreds of different sites where you can fill out a form and have your site listed. Again, don’t expect a huge influx of traffic as soon as you do this, but it is still a great way to get more publicity of your site over time.

So what is the big deal about getting submitted to these blog directories? One of the biggest reasons is because the search engines often crawl these directories. These directories are structured such that the search engines like to regularly check for new content. Therefore, if you list your blog on a site then you’re more likely to get continual attention from the search engines.

Another reason to get listed on blog directories is that some of these directories actually do see quite a bit of traffic. Many of them rank very high in the search engine results, so this can create a lot more clicks and exposure that you would not otherwise have access to.

You can’t bank on the fact that you’re going to get thousands of new visitors the next day just because you listed your site on a few blog directories, but any traffic that you do get is like icing on the cake because you wouldn’t have otherwise had it.

A lot of these blog directories have a huge number of incoming links. Some of the directories will give you the opportunity to provide a reciprocal link. This means that a number of links are being generated on a regular basis which helps for popularity and placement in the search engines. These blog directories also make a lot of use of the RSS feed updates which can allow for more individuals to subscribe to your specific blog feed.

You can submit to these directories individually on your own or sometimes you can outsource the task to someone else. There many outsourcers that you can find on different freelancing websites who would be glad to set up your blog directory listings for you. There are also certain software programs that will allow you to submit many at one time.

However, you have to make sure that the programs are not spamming any systems because you wouldn’t want to get blocked.

DMOZ Website & Blog Directory

Another major blog directory that many bloggers make sure to submit to is DMOZ.org. This is a directory of websites which is extensively utilized by search engines. This is actually the largest human edited directory on the Internet.

It is an important site because it’s trusted by the search engines and regularly reviewed by a human. Google and other search engines know that the information can be trusted as being legitimate, so getting in this directory is of utmost importance.

When trying to get yourself listed on the site, make sure that your site category is correct. You’ll submit your site to the most relevant category because the human editors are not going to allow you to submit your site to the wrong category.

You also should be patient with the process because it can take several months before you get accepted to the site. You also want to carefully write your description text to make sure that you follow the DMOZ guidelines.

Getting listed in the major website and blog directories is an important part of doing the initial promotion on your new blog. It certainly is not the last thing that you will do to market your new website. However, it never hurts to have this extra bit of traffic producing juice behind your site.

As a new blog owner, you will do everything within your power to get as much of your content sent out to your new potential readers. This might mean through RSS feeds, blog directories and other avenues which will generate interest and traffic to your site. Once they are on your site, remember that it is your responsibility to provide quality content in a welcoming format in order to keep people on your site and make them want to come back again and again.

Be sure to read about our favorite web hosting provider and find out how to start a blog in 10 easy steps!

These feeds will allow people to subscribe to get regular updates delivered to them when you add new content to your site. Some people read their feeds online while others use news readers or get e-mails.

Having an RSS feed also makes it possible for the content of the site to be packaged up into different kinds of widgets and gadgets that can be displayed in other places. If you’ve ever been on a website and noticed the little orange icon that is usually located somewhere beside the URL, that is the RSS feed button.

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What’s the Big Deal with RSS?

So what is the big deal about having an RSS feed? Thinking about how busy people are these days, it is no surprise that readers want to get information quickly and efficiently. With more and more people using mobile devices such as cell phones and tablet computers, having your content accessible by RSS feed is going to be vitally important.

Not everyone has time to go back to their web browser and read over your blog each day. Some people prefer to have only updated information sent to them by way of an RSS feed.

Thinking of it from the consumer’s perspective, subscribing to feeds allows them to look at a huge amount of online content in a very quick amount of time. For you as the publisher of the content, RSS feeds allow you to instantly distribute your content to a huge number of people who might want to subscribe.

These kinds of feeds make it possible for people to read lots of information without having to constantly remember to check their e-mail or your site manually. In short, it streamlines the user experience while still allowing people to get the information that they want and need.

Huge news outlets also publish content feeds throughout the day. Even Google itself publishes its own feeds. Hundreds of thousands of podcasters, video bloggers and traditional bloggers publish feeds every single day in order to continue making connections with their own followers. As a new blogger, you certainly don’t want to be left behind as technology moves forward. RSS feeds are not going anywhere anytime soon, so you must learn how to set one up for your site so that you can take advantage of the huge opportunity to gain more readership.

RSS Aggregators

Before you set up your own feed, you should first understand how consumers are able to read these RSS feeds. There are many choices because there are over 2000 different feed reading applications available to consumers these days. These are also called news aggregators. Some readers also work specifically on mobile devices since more people get their news on their cell phones now more than ever. Some people also use online, web based services to manage their feeds.

So how can you publish your own feed for your website? Since you are using WordPress, it’s likely that your feed is being published automatically. This means that anyone can click on the little orange box up next to your URL and download your feed. However, you want to publish your feed in other places in order to get it distributed to as many locations online as possible.

One place that’s very popular for submitting your feed is a website called FeedBurner.

In order to create the feed for FeedBurner and submitted, the steps are very simple. Once you sign up at the site, you simply input your WordPress blog URL and click next. After you go through the steps at the website, you will have a special RSS feed that you can now put into the sidebar of your WordPress blog.

This will let people know that they can easily subscribe using FeedBurner. Thankfully, you can use widgets in your sidebar in order to display the RSS symbol so that readers know they can get all of your content in a feed reader.

WordPress RSS

WordPress automatically creates several different kinds of feeds for your site. In order to find out your feed URL so that you can submit it to search engines and directories, WordPress says that there are four different feed addresses that you can use:

http://example.com/?feed=rss

http://example.com/?feed=rss2

http://example.com/?feed=rdf

http://example.com/?feed=atom

If you have set up custom permalinks in your blog, then the proper feed addresses would be:

http://example.com/feed/

http://example.com/feed/rss/

http://example.com/feed/rss2/

http://example.com/feed/rdf/

http://example.com/feed/atom/

Why Setup a RSS?

Understanding the reasoning to set up an RSS feed is very important. Remember that your main goal as a blogger is to get your content out to as many people as possible who might be interested in what you have to say. This is sort of like your own version of online publicity. Getting people to subscribe to your RSS feed will allow them to constantly see the updated information that you post.

Instead of having to wait for someone to come back who might have forgotten that your blog even exists, you will be able to keep them updated by way of their subscription to your feed.

Many people may decide not to sign up for an e-mail list because they don’t want their inbox bombarded with possible spam e-mails all the time. However, they might still be very interested in your information so make sure that you always share things on your blog that you have shared in private e-mails to your list.

That way you’re really hitting people in both ways so that they get the information whether they subscribe to your e-mail list or only subscribe to your feed. In the end, building a successful blog is about trying to reach people in any way that you can without detracting from the relationship you’re trying to build with them. RSS feeds are one way that you can do that easily and effectively.

Be sure to read about our favorite web hosting provider and find out how to start a blog in 10 easy steps!

For one thing, you have to think about exactly what you have to say. Again, you want to make sure that you have a unique perspective on your topic so that you’re not simply rehashing the same information that has been written about over and over again.

Readers want to get new and insightful information rather than reading the same repetitive opinions on various sites.  Your goal is to become that expert who will provide authoritative information on the topic.

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Write it Outside of WordPress

Before you start to write your blog posts, it’s best to do it in another document rather than doing it directly into your WordPress dashboard. To add a post, you simply click on posts, add new.

However, you need to write the document in MS Word or Notepad first and then transfer it over to your WordPress document later. That way, you can save that and make sure that you have the content before you try pasting it in. Remember that anything can happen when you’re working online, so it’s best to always backup your work.

Plan Your Topic

Assuming that you’ve already picked your niche, you should plan out what you want your post to say before you even start writing.  You might even want to jot down some notes or bullet points that you want to use in your post. Then, you need to come up with an effective and creative title.

Remember that you’re also writing for the search engines, so you may want to include some keywords in your post title. Here’s an example: let’s say that your blog is about homeschooling. If you’re writing your first blog post about how to socialize your children when you’re homeschooling them, you don’t want your title to be something like “Helping Susie Find New Friends”.

Be Interesting

First of all, that’s not a very entertaining title and doesn’t draw the reader’s attention into your blog. More importantly, it contains no keywords to let readers or search engines know what the topic of the blog is. Instead, you might want to go with a title such as “Socialization for Homeschoolers: Is It Really A Big Problem?”

As you can see, this is an interesting title which is also making use of specific keyword phrase “socialization for homeschoolers”. Hopefully, visitors will find the blog title intriguing enough to click on while search engines will be able to make use of the keyword in the title.

Use Chunks

Another important point that you should remember while writing a blog post is that people like to scan instead of read. You want to make sure that you leave plenty of white space and use bullet points or short paragraphs if possible when writing a blog post.

That way, people are not overwhelmed with a huge chunk of content that they may click away from instead of reading. Once they start scanning your content, hopefully they will see something interesting enough that makes them want to go back and read all of it.

Add Value

Any blog postings should also add value to the reader and help them to solve a problem, learn new things or even become more productive. Focus on writing blog posts that give people practical tips or even tutorials on how to do something. In other words, you want to overwhelm your readers with so much quality, free information that they trust you and become loyal followers of your blog.

Have Good Grammar & Spelling

It’s also important to make sure that your writing is free of grammatical and spelling errors. While no one is going to come along behind you and grade your paper with a red pen, it is important to make yourself look like a professional by making sure that your writing is free of these kinds of mistakes.

Believe it or not, there are many people in the world who will discount anything you have to say based upon your ability to write. They figure if you can’t sound intelligent in your writing then maybe your ideas are not worthwhile to read.

Use Targeted Keywords

As you are writing your blog posts, you might want to make sure to include the keyword or keyword phrase you are targeting in your first and last paragraphs at least. That being said, you don’t want to overload your content with keywords because the search engines can look at that as being keyword spamming or stuffing. This can actually hurt your rankings instead of helping them.

Paste into WordPress

Once you have written your content, you are ready to paste it into the WordPress editor. This is very simple because all you have to do is click on posts and then click new. You’ll paste in your headline and then paste in your content. If you need to put any links in your content, that is also very easy to do.

Simply highlight the text that you want as your anchor text and click on the little chain-link just above the box where you paste your copy. Here, you will input the link in the pop-up box. By putting a couple of links in your copy, you are giving readers a place to click off and get more information or purchase the product or service you want to sell.

Tag Your Post

You’ll also notice there’s a place in WordPress to add what are called tags. These are basically keywords that will also help the search engines classify your blog post so that readers can find it. Make sure to add at least three or four tags but no more than about eight.

Again, you don’t want it to appear that you’re only trying to rank in the search engines. Google and other search engines like quality websites with good content for their readers.

You should also note that you can schedule your posts in WordPress in case you want to write a few that will be released in the future. For instance, if you want to go ahead and write a post about something that’s happening the next week, you can do that and just schedule it to be released at that time.

Check out our video on how to write your first blog post.

Be sure to read about our favorite web hosting provider and find out how to start a blog in 10 easy steps!

Don’t worry about monetizing your blog right away.  Blogging is about an ongoing dialogue with your readers. Because of this, you want to make sure that your website is both engaging and welcoming to new readers.

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Make it Welcoming

There are many ways to make sure that your blog is welcoming to people when they first come onto the site. First of all, you want to talk to them in a conversational tone. You don’t want everything to seem very technical or overly academic so that people don’t feel welcome.

Remember that you don’t know if the person coming to your site is brand-new to the topic or very experienced, so you need to make sure that your content and layout is welcoming to them no matter what level of experience or knowledge they have about the subject matter.

Is it Easy to Read?

The first thing you need to make sure of is that your theme and layout are designed in such a way as to make people feel at home. For instance, it has been proven that having a light background with dark text is much more readable for people than having a dark background with light text.

You don’t want people to have to squint to read your site, so make sure to look at it from an objective standpoint after you build it. If it is too difficult for people to read because the text is too small or the coloring is not right, take the time to make sure that all of that is resolved before launching your blog for the first time.

Occasionally you might also see weird characters on your WordPress site. Don’t panic. It’s easily fixable and just requires that you pay attention to details.

Have A Nice Website Header

Another way that you can make your blog more welcoming is by having a nice header designed for the top of the site. Show your personality here and make the blog more individualized. Remember that you’re trying to build a relationship, and part of that is branding yourself as an expert on the topic that your blog is about.

By creating a header, you can brand yourself in such a way as to make people believe that you are the expert in your particular topic. You wanted to look professional, yet engaging. Headers can be outsourced for less than $25, so invest in branding yourself.

This goes back to creating a logo that’s representative of your brand, of who you are.

What Would Seth Godin Do Plugin

There is also a free WordPress plugin called “What would Seth Godin do”. You can search for this plug-in in your WordPress dashboard. Simply put, it creates a text box at the top of your screen with prewritten information to welcome the visitor. You can set it up to say whatever you want, and you can even program it to give a special message to new visitors and a different message to returning visitors. You might invite the person to join your mailing list, subscribe to your RSS feed or just tell them that your glad they have visited your site.

Allow Comments

One way to make it more engaging to readers is to allow comments. When people read your blog posts, you don’t want them to simply read it and move on with their day. You want to engage them by making the content entertaining, informative and maybe even a bit controversial.

That’s not to say that you should go out of your way to irritate your readers or try to create controversy. But you don’t want to blog about boring or mediocre topics where you have no original slant. Let’s face it: if you don’t have anything original to say then maybe you shouldn’t have a blog on the topic.

By allowing comments, even moderated ones, this will not only help your readers to interact with you more effectively but it will also give the search engines more content to help you rank. You can set up the comments so that you have to approve them before they’re posted which will give you the right to delete any comments which are inappropriate or simple spam.

Blog commenting is very popular right now, so closing your comments completely really doesn’t help you to achieve a loyal following. Not only should you allow comments, but you should respond to the comments professionally so that people know that there is a person behind the blog. This helps to develop trust and loyalty between you and your readers.

You should check out the DISQUS plugin.  It allows real-time commenting, notification of response, full integration with media services such as Youtube, Flickr, and compatibility with mobile websites for commenting while on the go.

Do Your Research

Another way to be more welcoming and engaging to every reader is by doing your research. You want to make sure that not only do you provide a unique perspective on what you’re discussing, but you also have the most up-to-date information about your niche. If news stories have been released relating to the topic, you want to include that information so that you’re also informing your readers. If you could become their “go to” person for the topic, you can develop quite a huge list of readers.

You may also want to entertain the idea of setting up a mailing list so that people can subscribe to your monthly newsletter and updates. Again, this is another way for you to stay in direct contact with those people who are following what you have to say on your blog.

Have Easy Layouts

As far as the layout, you want to make certain that it’s easy for people to navigate and find information that they want to read. Have a search box so that people can go back and look for particular keywords to find more information on blog posts you may have written in the past. You may also want to have a list of your pages and categories in the sidebar so that people can refer back to topics that interest them. You could also have a list of your most recent blog posts so that people can see what you’ve been writing about lately.

Finally remember to test how your blog looks in different browsers and see our review on WordPress themes.

Be sure to read about our favorite web hosting provider and find out how to start a blog in 10 easy steps!

You can find WordPress plugins for a whole variety of different tasks, and new ones seem to be coming out at a rapid pace. Most plugins that you find are free of charge, although there are some paid plugins that you can purchase directly from developers online.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google Sitemap Generator

Having a sitemap plugin (such as Google XML Sitemaps) is also very critical to the overall success of your site and bringing in more traffic. This is a simple plugin that generates a sitemap you can then submit to Google Webmaster tools.

By submitting the sitemap, you’re letting Google know about your new website and inviting them to come and crawl the information on a regular basis. Obviously, you want Google to come to your site as often as possible.

Best of all, once configured it will automatically notify Google of new posts you publish and updates to existing posts, so it’s a “set and forget” type of thing.

SEO

So why would you use plugins? Some plugins are specifically designed to help you generate more traffic from the search engines. One very popular plugin is called All In One SEO. This plugin has several fields that you fill in with your keywords, site name and description among other things.

Then, this information is automatically coded into your webpages so that it makes your website more attractive to the search engines. In the old days, you would’ve had to program this into your website yourself, but thankfully the use of plugins on WordPress came about allowing anyone to have these features.

Privacy Policy Generators

There are many different plugins that people use on a regular basis in WordPress. Aside from the one mentioned above, there are other plugins such as Easy Privacy Policy plugin.  If you’re going to be selling anything online, you want to have a privacy policy on your website as well as a disclaimer.

If you search in the plugins directory, you’ll find all kinds of different options available to you in order to quickly and easily add these pages. You’ll simply click a couple of buttons to install the plugin, configure it with some information and you’re off to the races!

Amazon

There are also a whole variety of paid plugins available online. For instance, many people like to sell products from Amazon.com. You don’t want to have to go into Amazon, find products and generate your affiliate link over and over and over again. Here’s an Amazon Affiliate Link Localizer plugin to alleviate the hassle of adding these products your website.

In fact, some of the plugins like Amazon Showcase WordPress Plugin pull products that you specify and drip feed them on your blog. So, while you’re asleep or on vacation, content is automatically being added to your site at your specified intervals of time.

Although you always want to add unique content to your blog in order to make it a great experience for the user and more attractive to the search engines, some bloggers find that having a little bit of automated content allows them to beef up their site without sacrificing quality. Also, because many people are interested in selling products or services on their site, these plugins allow for products to be added easier and faster.

Social Media

There are other plugins like the Social Media Widget which will make your site more social media friendly. These days you can often find examples such as Facebook & Twitter button on websites. This option allows people to easily share your content on their favorite social networking sites.

So, if you write a particularly interesting or controversial blog post, users are able to click a button and share it with all of their friends and followers. This is a great thing to have on your blog because it allows you to go “viral” easily.

YouTube Videos

The Automatic YouTube Video Posts Plugin allows you to add media content to your site such as music and videos. You can automatically import videos from your YouTube account corresponding to the topic of your blog. Even though you could lose a little bit of your traffic from people clicking off your site to read more, this kind of content can also pull more interest from the search engines to your blog.

Contact Form

Another great plugin that is free to use on WordPress is the Fast Secure Contact Form. You definitely want to have a contact form available on your website so that your users can get in touch with you with questions and comments about your site. Also, from a legal standpoint you want to make sure that you have a way for anyone to contact you in case there are legal issues with your site.

Link Cloaking

Some other types of WordPress plugins that are popular these days are link cloaking plugins like Pretty Link. These allow for you to mask your affiliate links in such a way as to not alert the search engines that your links are going out to a page to sell a product or service. Instead, they make the links look more SEO friendly.

You can use this plugin to manage affiliate links in one central place.  You should never put a direct affiliate link in an article, because if that affiliate link breaks later due to articles being syndicated (copied, etc.), you might lose that revenue.  However if you use your Pretty Link URL then you always have control of the affiliate link and can change it easily.

Related Posts

You can also use a plugin like Efficient Related Posts or YARPP (our personal favorite) that pulls up other related posts on your own website. For example, if you write a post about organic gardening and you have written posts in the past related to organic gardening, then it will show a list of related posts so that the reader can find more information on your blog.

This simply improves reader loyalty while also keeping people on your website longer. The longer they are there, the more likely they are to click on an ad or an affiliate offer.

As you can see, WordPress offers all kinds of great perks in the way of plugins. Make use of these plugins to increase traffic to your site and improve overall reader loyalty.

Here are 10 more top WordPress Plugins that you should know about.

Be sure to read about our favorite web hosting provider and find out how to start a blog in 10 easy steps!

You don’t need to know how to code the site at all. For example, you might choose to have a theme with two columns or three columns, and a header or one without. There are almost unlimited amounts of design options that you can choose when it comes to having your own WordPress blog.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Find the Themes

So where do you get these themes? There are numerous places that you can obtain them for your WordPress blog. First of all, the easiest way is to simply click on the appearance tab in your WordPress dashboard and then you will see the option for themes.

Once you click on it, then you can do a search within WordPress for all kinds of free WordPress themes that are available, i.e. on wordpress.org. You will see many variations.  Spend some time really looking at all of the options available.

Premium Themes

There are also paid WordPress themes that you can find online from different vendors, including PremiumWP and StudioPress (founded by our friend Brian Gardner, and highly recommended). If you are going to have a site that is for your business or other professional interests, you might want to invest in a paid theme that will allow you to do all kinds of other customizations that many of the free themes don’t allow.

These can range in price from very inexpensive all the way up to a $200 or more. A lot of this depends on whether you’re going to use the theme just on one website or whether you plan to use it on numerous sites. Some theme designers have an option called a multi-site license or even a developer’s license. Make sure you know what the licensing rules are for the package you purchase.

One great thing about WordPress is that it doesn’t require you to be technologically savvy to use it. However, some can be quite complicated and complex to use, especially for a novice.

You don’t want to purchase a theme this could be overly hard for you to customize to suit your needs. However, if you do find one that you don’t think you can set up by yourself, then you can always outsource that task to someone else who does that on a regular basis.

As an example, you might decide that you want a custom header to go at the top of your site. This makes your site stand out from the crowd and gives you an opportunity to brand yourself better. Many people will make a website header for less than $25 by hiring a graphic designer on sites like Elance and Guru.

Map Out Your Site

Before you purchase a header or even use a free one, it makes sense to sit down and map out how you want your site to look. If you are planning to generate passive income on the site by using Google AdSense or affiliate offers, you need to think about exactly where you want those advertisements to be placed.

Certainly, many studies have been done over the years pointing out the best areas to place your website advertisements (like this Google AdSense Heatmap) to ensure maximum conversions. Do some research online to find out the best places to place your ads so that you can make the most money from your website?

If you are not planning to put advertisements on your website, then you still need to think through what you want the user to experience when they come to your blog. Thinking through this ahead of time will help you narrow down the choices when you’re looking for themes that will fit with your blog site plan. You might even want to ask around if you’re on any kind of Internet forums to see what themes other people are using with great success.

You should also review how your website looks in different web browsers.

Install a WordPress Theme

To install a theme, it depends on where you got it. If you’re using one of the free themes that come inside of WordPress, you’re simply going to click on the theme and hit the install button. Once installed, it will ask if you want to activate the theme and you can simply click on the “activate” button.

You can load several themes onto your site and preview each one individually before activating the one that you want to use. Thankfully, themes are very simple and easy to change on a WordPress site, so don’t worry if you load 5 or 10 before you figure out which one you want to activate. It really is just simple clicks of a button to change them out.

If you purchase the theme from somewhere or download one from somewhere else on the Internet, it is still very easy to install on your site. In most cases, you will be given a zip file when you download a theme online.

You’ll simply click into your themes area, click on the install themes tab and then look for a button that says upload. Once you browse and find the zip file that you downloaded, simply upload it to the site and activate it.

As you can see, installing a WordPress theme is very easy. With a few clicks, you will have a site that literally looks like it was designed by a professional. This is one of the biggest perks of using WordPress to build your blog. You don’t have to worry about all of the technical jargon. You just need to know where to click and before you know it you will be publishing the first few articles on your blog!

Be sure to read about our favorite web hosting provider and find out how to start a blog in 10 easy steps!

One of those reasons is because it is so simple and easy for even a novice to install. Previously, many people felt like they had to hire an expensive website programmer in order to have a nice-looking blog online. In fact, many folks gave up after trying to figure out all of the technical jargon such as HTML and CSS.

Prepare Installing WordPress

Before you install WordPress on your site, you do want to make sure that you have purchased a domain name and input the proper name server information into your domain account.

This tells the domain registrar where to forward people when they want to come to your website. Otherwise, the domain will point to a parked web page hosted by your domain registrar. Obviously, this is not what you want to have happen.

Not only is WordPress easy to use, it is also free and easy to install. But you will need to purchase web hosting and a domain name in order to make this site your own. In other words, you’re not going to be using the free (but very limited) WordPress.com hosting service.

Instead, you will be using the free WordPress blogging platform and your own web hosting account (just like we do!).

As mentioned previously, we recommend HostGator (read our review here) for your hosting account because of their great reputation and really low cost (plus no long term commitment like most others – you can start month to month). Plus that’s who we started with so we can personally vouch for them.

Installing WordPress on HostGator

Another reason why we recommend HostGator is because they have a particular software called Fantastico located within their control panels – which makes it super easy to install WordPress for your site. When you sign up for hosting, you will get access to your own control panel which is commonly called your CPANEL.

When you login to your cPanel for the first time, you might be overwhelmed at all of the options available. Rest assured that you will probably never use most of the options that you see on the page. For now, the main thing that we are interested in making use of is Fantastico.

Once you login to your cPanel, you will want to scroll all the way down the page and look for the heading “software/services”. This is where you will find the Fantastico software.

Click on that button and it will take you to the first screen that will allow you to set up your WordPress blog. Next, click on WordPress in the left sidebar.

Now click “New Installation.”

At this point, you will be required to enter some very important information. The first thing you will need to decide is where you are installing WordPress. There is a drop-down menu that says “install on domain” beside it. Use this drop-down menu to choose where you are installing this instance.

If you have any questions about that, contact your hosting company to get clarification. It will also ask you which directory you want to install WordPress. Most of the time, you’re going to leave that blank.

The next blank is for your admin access data. First, you need to choose a username that you can easily remember which will help you to log into your dashboard.

Make sure that you choose a username that other people can’t guess. Also, if you’re going to build multiple WordPress sites, make sure that you don’t use the exact username for each site as it can make your blog much more prone to being hacked.

Next, you’ll need to choose a password. Again, it’s important to choose a password that no one else can guess. Many people use passwords that have letters and numbers to make it a lot harder for anyone to hack into your account.

The next blank starts your base configuration section. Where it asks for an “admin nickname”, this is the name that you want to show up on your site when you make a post.

For instance, if you make a post then this name is what will show up as the author of that post. Many people choose “admin”, but if you’re trying to have a more personalized site then you might want to use your first name or even a nickname.

The next blank asks for your admin e-mail. Normally, you will set up your e-mails in the CPANEL. You can see the option to add e-mail accounts at the top of your CPANEL screen. You can also forward these e-mail accounts so that you get them in one central location if you wish.

This particular e-mail box is specifically for your administrator. This is the e-mail that you would want people to contact if they have a question or problem with your website. It’s very important to have contact information on your site, so make sure that this e-mail is actually working.

The next blank is site name. This is very self-explanatory as you will want to put the name of your site or even be URL address. This is not a necessary blank so you don’t have to fill it out if you don’t wish to.

Keep in mind that sometimes certain themes will show this name in the header. Therefore, if you don’t want these words to show up in the header of your website then you may not want to put any information here. The same can be said for the description which typically shows up as the tagline in the header of your website.

Once you have all of the information filled out, click on “install WordPress”.

The next page will ask you to confirm your installation, email your installation info, and then you are finished! Now, all that is left is for you to login to your brand-new WordPress website. This can be done by putting in your URL followed by /wp-admin/. For example, “your_website.com/wp-admin/”

You will then need to login with the username and password that you choose. As you can see, installing WordPress on your website using HostGator is extremely simple and easy to do.

When you rent a home or apartment, you are paying someone else’s mortgage, but more importantly, you have no ownership over your own space.

If you plant a tree in the backyard, you don’t have ownership over it. Maybe you decide to put tile down in the bathroom, but you can’t take it with you one day when you leave. Renting means that you are living somewhere at the approval of another person.

Owning, on the other hand, means that you can do what you want because you own the space. You can paint, put down hardwood floors and fence the backyard. Sure, you might have some neighborhood covenants that govern certain things, but for the most part, you are the captain of your own ship.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Using Free Web Hosts

With web hosting, many people make critical areas when it comes to choosing how to host their blogs. There are free blog services like Blogger and WordPress.com that you can use (don’t confuse the WordPress.com free web host with the very popular WordPress blogging software – which we use AND highly recommend). In fact, many people start out using these free services because they want to “test the waters”. However, there is a big danger is using free services if you want to build a long term business as a blogger.

Just as with renting, you can be “kicked out” of your free blog in a heartbeat. Let’s say you spend 6 months building up a blog with tons of fantastic content and a following of faithful readers. Then, one day out of the blue, you realize your blog has been wiped clean.

As unbelievable as it may sound, it does happen and is not a good surprise. When you build rankings to a free blog, you are paying someone else’s mortgage payment in a way. You are building rankings for something you do not own which can be wiped out in any time for no valid reason at all.

Also some free services like WordPress.com prohibit the use of affiliate links on your free blog, meaning you can’t make money with your blog. Which really makes “free” into a pretty bad deal?

When you use a free blog service, you have to follow someone else’s rules. If you break those rules, or they even think that you did, they can click a button and kill your business in a heartbeat. It is like building a house on sand. Who needs or wants the stress of wondering if your business will still be there tomorrow?

Paid Web Hosts

So what is the answer? Get your own web hosting! You can (and should) still use WordPress as your blogging software. Web hosting is very inexpensive (less than $7 per month for basic services) and will allow you to be the ruler over your own virtual “real estate.”

As you learn how to start a blog, you will be able to write what you want and build your business without constantly worrying about the possibility that someone will remove your content tomorrow.

When considering a hosting company, it helps to ask other successful bloggers and Internet marketers who they recommend. Many will have horror stories of certain hosting companies, which will help you avoid landmines in your search for a hosting company.

You also want to make sure that the host you choose has CPANEL (control panel) so that you can easily access certain features that you will need as you learn more about blogging and working online. You may also want to ask if the host has support for WordPress, our recommended blogging software. Some web hosts (like our recommended web host below) provide a simple way to install WordPress in just a few clicks.

Another factor to consider is how much space you really need for your new blog. You don’t want to overbuy and overpay each month for space you don’t yet need.

You can always upgrade your plan later as your blog grows in traffic. When starting out in blogging, it’s important to only spend money on the necessities instead of wasting a lot on things that are not needed yet.

Our Web Host Recommendation

There are many web hosting companies out there, but one of the most popular and most reputable is called HostGator (read our review here). They are well known within the industry for their competitive pricing and great customer service.

Also they’re the ones we started with and we recommend you start with them as well.

They have chat representatives available all the time in case you have questions or concerns which makes it a valuable resource for new bloggers all the way up to advanced bloggers. They offer several plans including dedicated servers, but you won’t need that until you have either a lot of sites or a ton of traffic.

HostGator offers unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth and a very easy control panel where you can set up email addresses among other things. They have a 99.9% uptime guarantee which is highly important because that means your website will very rarely “go down”.

Some hosting companies cannot guarantee uptime, and that usually means they experience a lot of technical glitches. The last thing you want to worry about is having your site go down a lot and missing out on traffic and income potential.

As one of the world’s top 10 largest web hosting companies, HostGator has more than 4 million hosted domains. They are certainly not the only hosting companies, but you will rarely hear any complaints about their services.

Another great thing about HostGator is that WordPress can be installed in just a few clicks using a feature called Fantastico. They also have simple tutorials available showing exactly how to install WordPress, and once you do it then you will be a pro at it – and you’ll get your blog started right away.

Choosing your web hosting is important because you want to be sure that your blog is protected and stable. After all, this will be your new business model so you need to take the decision seriously.

Look at all of the factors when you are comparing hosting companies so that you don’t have to move your site later as that can mean a real hassle and potential loss of data if not done correctly. You can also look for special coupons and deals on hosting to get in at a great price.

Check out the detailed review on the ONLY web host we recommend if you’re just getting started – the one we recommend to our own friends and family.  Our recommended web host even comes with 1-click installation of WordPress, our favorite easy to use blog publishing platform: the one we use for all our sites.

This is not to say that you can’t make money in a popular, broad niche, but it does take more time and work to grow that kind of blog to the level where it makes good money.

Click here to view the embedded video.

How to Pick a Niche – Passion vs. Moneymakers

So where do you start when you want to pick the right niche and learn how to start a blog? There are two schools of thought on picking a niche. Some people say that you should just choose something you are passionate about because you will want to wake up every morning and write quality content.

While that is a great thought, if your biggest hobby is underwater basket weaving, you are unlikely to make a great income blogging about it.

One often overlooked component in blogging is that you need to be able to find related products to promote to your customer base in order to make money. Of course, you could create a blog with simple AdSense or other banner ads, but it might take longer to see a profit over time.

On the other hand, some people say you should only pick topics that are known moneymakers whether you are interested in them or not. While that might work for some people, others need to have at least a passing interest in their topic in order to be successful.

In short, when you learn how to start a blog, you want to be certain that thousands (if not millions) of other people share your enthusiasm and interest in the topic and will pay money for products and/or services that you have to offer in the niche from time to time. No matter what, the key to the whole niche selection process is choosing the right keywords and getting your research together before building a blog site.

Keyword Tools

There are many free online keyword research tools to find keywords. One popular tool is the free Google Keyword tool.  After you have entered the keywords, you can check the amount of advertisers in that niche by gauging the bar in the “Competition” column.  You can even assess how lucrative the keywords are by click on the “Columns” button, and then enable the “Suggested Bid” checkbox.

This site is handy for many different tasks including your search for a blog topic. Let’s say you know that dating is a popular niche, so you want to do something in that niche. The problem is that going after such a broad niche can be the kiss of death for most new bloggers. So it’s important to find a sub-niche on dating in this case.

One way of doing that is putting in a “seed keyword”. You could start with “finding a date” and whittle the keyword options down further and further. Perhaps, in the end, you find that you would be interested in blogging about “finding a date for young professionals in their 20s & 30s.” There are many sub-topics to choose once you have a general idea of your topic.

The idea behind blogging is to develop a loyal following. To that end, it is important that you target your niche with laser-like focus so that you are one of the only people providing such specific content to a group of people. Additionally, you want to be sure that enough people are interested in your niche so that you get enough traffic.

If only 10 people per month are searching for your keyword, you need to either move on to another topic or see if there are other related keywords to create a bigger blog.

You can use tools other than the Google Keyword tool also. For instance, two other free tools are the SEObook keyword tool and Google Insights for Search. There are also other paid tools that are a lot fancier. We recommend you get a proven keyword research tool to find your keywords quickly and accurately.

The Google Insights tool gives additional information that can be very important during the niche research phase. It shows you how popular search terms are and what kind of history they have. For example, Christmas phrases would be highly searched from October through December, but most blogs would be quiet throughout the rest of the year. That can have a direct impact on your income.

Check the trends for your keywords and make sure that enough interest is there throughout the year to give you a reason to put your time and effort into the topic. This tool can also help you maximize your chances of making bursts of income at different times of the year as well.

So how do you know the proper way to research a keyword? The answer is that there is no “right” way. Everyone has their own opinion as to the number of searches that a keyword tern should have to make it worthwhile.

You can find yourself spending so much time researching that you never get around to creating quality content for your blog. Don’t over-analyze things. Often, you will find yourself with a list of keywords that, when added up, will give you plenty of potential search volume for the month.

The key is finding a way to get to the #1 slot on Google so that you can get the bulk of the daily searches for your keywords.

Once you have picked your keyword, you can also search what affiliate programs are available and check their commission.  Choosing a niche for your blog does not need to be a long, drawn out process. Use a mixture of your interests and knowledge to make your selection.

Here’s a quick tip: if you do a search on Google for a topic and people are paying money to run AdWords ads on the right side, they are making money. If you see TV commercials or magazine ads about your topic, they are making money. It’s a good bet that you will make money too!  So get started today and pick that lucrative niche that you will dominate!

Be sure to check our How to Start a Blog page to give you an overview of the process.  In our next step, we’ll be talking about our recommended web host, which comes with 1-click installation of WordPress, our favorite easy to use blog publishing platform: the one we use for all our sites.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Just a few years ago, a dedicated server was far too pricey an option for most people. It could easy run you hundreds of dollars / month. But times, like everything else have changed. That means you’re in luck, because prices have dropped. Well, sort of.

So what exactly is a dedicated server?

A dedicated server is private server specifically dedicated to your website and your website alone… nobody else’s. You don’t want to share your server, do you? In contrast, a shared web hosting solution is shaky, flakey and your web can be shut down by someone’s else’s problem or screw up (spike in traffic, bugs, etc). None of that is an issue if you’re just getting started and want to keep your costs low, but as you grow, you need reliability.

What are the pros of having your own personal dedicated server?

Nothing is without it’s upside, so here are the pros.  The biggest one, of course, is reliability. When you start a blog or website and it starts to grow, reliability begins to really matter. With a dedicated server, you never, ever have to worry about someone else’s traffic spike bringing your site down. That’s because you never have to share resources with other people on your dedicated servers, it’s all yours. Also, if you have a dedicated server and you find yourself experiencing a traffic surge there’s no need to sweat it, as you won’t bring other websites down.

Yes, a huge surge in traffic will dramatically increase your CPU usage (or bring your server down altogether) but having a dedicated server means you never get charged for the increased use of resources, as you would if you went the shared web hosting route. And that can wind up saving you a pretty penny, and who doesn’t like saving money?

What are the cons of a dedicated server?

Well, first and foremost, as we mentioned is Cost. A dedicated server may be more affordable than ever, but it’s still not the cheapest way to go. You’re buying a whole big box up-front that you may never use. Who knows if you need all that space and processing power on a server? And even today, you’re still looking at $150/month for an entry-level dedicated server.

Let’s not forget, that one server is where all your stuff is. It’s never  a good idea to put all one’s eggs in one basket, yet that’s exactly what you’re doing when and if you go the dedicated server route.

Also, any kind of hardware failure can bring down your entire box. You’re offline and being offline in the web business is a fate worse than death, but you knew that already, right? Point is, that’s a risk you simply can’t afford to take.

When you’re the only one on that server, your web hosting provider is much less likely to notice a problem. However if you’re on a big server with some neighbors, well, you know how it is… someone’s always quick to complain, so the squeaky wheel gets fixed pretty fast.

Also unless you get into the $1,000/month range, dedicated server don’t get even close to the quality and reliability of equipment of shared web hosting and VPS.

All that said, for us, personally, we know a dedicated server solution would not be a good option. We’ve gone that route and it failed miserably as we slowly outgrow it. We really feel that the negatives far outweigh the positives, though after reading this edition of Web Hosting 101, you may still feel a dedicated server is right for you.

Are there any better web hosting options?

That really depends on you and what your needs are. If you’re just starting out and have a small amount of traffic, keep your costs low and go with a solid, reliable, and cheap shared web host. Just be careful to not go with a flaky one. (Here is the only shared web host we personally recommend to our own friends and family).

Truth be told, once you outgrow a shared web host, we prefer the Virtual Private Server (VPS) route. We’ve really found that it’s a much more effective more cost-effective, if and only if you get a reliable provider.

A VPS, as we’ve mentioned before, is the love child of a dedicated server and a shared web hosting solution. It’s a combination, the best of both worlds, really. We like to think of it as a “high-end” shared web hosting solution. You don’t share with as many people and it still has many of the benefits of a dedicated server. It’s like working out at a high end chain gym, like Equinox.

So who do you go with if you’re in the market for a VPS (Virtual Private Server)?

There are a lot of providers out there. We’ve researched options tirelessly and we’ve personally tried a bunch of them, and most of them tend to oversell their server resources which makes them flaky. On the bright side, after all that research, we’ve found one that doesn’t suck. In fact they’re awesome.

To find out which one we recommend, check out our “web hosting resources“. There you can find our personal recommendations for a Virtual Private Server provider as well as a whole hosts of other recommendations that may be of interest to you. I wonder how many of our recommendations you are going to adopt and how fast you will adopt them.

Be sure to check out the rest of the Web Hosting 101 series, where we’re going to dig a little deeper for you…

• Web Hosting 101: What Are My Web Hosting Options?
• Web Hosting 101: What’s Shared Web Hosting? (coming soon)
• Web Hosting 101: What’s A Dedicated Server?
• Web Hosting 101: What’s A VPS? (coming soon)
• Web Hosting 101: What’s Cloud Web Hosting?

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, what exactly is cloud web hosting?

No, it’s not where Han Solo was frozen in Carbonite. What it is, is the future of web hosting. It’s basically a group of dozens or even HUNDREDS of servers all working together to deliver web pages to visitors. These servers working together make up a CDN (Content Delivery Network), a term that’s becoming more and more commonly used.

Instead of having your website and all your data, images, etc. on one sever, the information is spread across ALL of them. And better still, these servers can be located all across the world, meaning closer to your website visitors, wherever in the world they may be.

So if one server goes down suddenly in the night, who cares? If someone’s website gets mentioned on Oprah three or four times or it becomes really popular on Digg and gets a huge traffic spike, it’s all good. With cloud hosting it’s just not a problem because your data is spread across all the servers meaning they can pick up the slack so your site stays up when you really need it to. And if one of these servers crashes, you probably won’t even know it has happened.

The cloud hosting industry likes to refer to it as “the leading edge of hosting.” Is it, yeah, well… but with a few bags of salt. Cloud hosting is a really great idea, but the technology just hasn’t quite gotten there yet so in some cases it really doesn’t quite live up to the hype. It is however a new and great add-on for certain things.

Back in the day, cloud hosting was used only by the really big and well-funded sites like CNN because they really needed their sites to load fast no matter where the person was in the world. If CNN is in Atlanta and I am in Abu Dhabi, it will load a lot slower than if I am in Atlanta. Cloud hosting solves this issue because as you know the servers are spread across the globe so when the guy in Abu Dhabi goes to CNN.com he will hit the cloud server closest to him and that will result in way faster page loads, which in the internet business is everything. But now cloud hosting is far more affordable and available for everyone – and even we use it for all our websites.

What are the pros of cloud web hosting?

Unlike traditional web hosting, cloud hosting is cheap and you only pay for what you use. It also scales instantly, so if you site gets mentioned on Oprah or hits the Digg homepage, all those servers working together keep your website up and running. Also the caching servers located strategically throughout the world make your website load much faster for your visitors, regardless of where they are.

What are the cons of cloud web hosting?

Ironically, all the advantages of cloud web hosting are the cons. What happens if you get a DOS (Denial of Service) attack for days or weeks and there’s a huge spike in your traffic? Guess what? You pay for that.

Cloud web hosting will happily service the hackers’ requests like nothing’s wrong. Because it’s optimized for speed and delivery. Anything that goes crazy, costs more (think a poorly written WordPress plugin or PHP script).

At this point cloud hosting is great for delivering static content (like the images or CSS files on your website), but the technology really just isn’t there to handle full dynamic websites. This means uploading your entire website to a cloud web hosting provider is neither practical nor realistic for you to do (yet). Yes, it can be done, and some websites are doing it, but they’re incurring much more downtime than we would be comfortable with.

The concept of cloud hosting really is the best thing in web hosting in years, but the reality just doesn’t totally live up to that promise. Yet.

Then how come we use cloud web hosting?

So after all these gotchas, how come we use cloud hosting? Well, because it’s awesome, in a “right tool for the job” sort of way.

Then exactly what do we use cloud hosting for, what you ask? We used it to serve up all our static content (images, CSS and JS files, stuff like that) and it works flawlessly.

Here’s how it works… Let’s say someone from Japan visits our Ask Dan & Jennifer website – which has been called “today’s #1 Love & Sex Resource” – and which is actually hosted on a server in Maryland, USA. They click on our site, get the page from our server in Maryland, but the following 30 to 50 requests for small files (images, CSS files, etc.) hit our cloud web host, which redirects the user to the cloud host caching server in Japan for all that static information to view.

Why do we do that? Simple: faster page load times. We went from having page download times around 1 second to download times around 300 millisecond and that is huge. That means happy people and happy search engines and you want both to be happy. Google and Bing will love you for it and so will your readers.

That’s all the time we have for today. And don’t forget Blog Success Journal has TONS of resources for you. Videos, articles, recommendations, you name it. We have everything you need to build a successful blog and also make money off your blog. We are your one stop shot so be sure to take advantage of us!

Be sure to check out the rest of the Web Hosting 101 series, where we’re going to dig a little deeper for you…

• Web Hosting 101: What Are My Web Hosting Options?
• Web Hosting 101: What’s Shared Web Hosting? (coming soon)
• Web Hosting 101: What’s A Dedicated Server?
• Web Hosting 101: What’s A VPS? (coming soon)
• Web Hosting 101: What’s Cloud Web Hosting?

Top 10 Tools Every Blogger Needs (Part 1 of 2)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Top 10 Tools Every Blogger Needs (Part 2 of 2)

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. WordPress

Once you get set up with a great web host (here’s our #1 recommended web host), you need a blog publishing engine, or rather a Content Management System (CMS) that your site will run on. You have a lot of options, some paid and some free. Google’s Blogger is free, but there’s no support. What happens if you blog goes down (or disappears) in the middle of the night? Who will you call? With Blogger, you get what you pay for: not much. We’ve actually seen this happen. Joomla is well, something that we won’t get into here (lets just say we are SO not fans of Joomla). Then there’s TypePad, a paid option. Let’s just say we started on TypePad, and left as soon as we could.

WordPress is really your only viable choice, plus it’s free. It’s very powerful and customizable, and very easy to optimize for a busy site, which is crucial. It’s the best CMS tool out there, and it comes in 2 flavors, both free: installed on your website or hosted on their servers. Sure, you can get a WordPress blog right on the WordPress.com site, but we strongly recommend against that. That’s a handicapped WordPress that doesn’t give you the power to grow that makes WordPress so valuable to begin with. And their terms of use don’t allow affiliate / revenue generating links.

If your blog is your business, you need to treat it like a business. Get a good, cheap web hosting service and install your own WordPress on it. There’s no reason not to. Our recommended web host even offers 1-click WordPress install.

2. Google Analytics

Knowledge is power. You need to know about the traffic on your site. Where is it coming from? Where are they going on your site? How long are they staying there? Is your traffic up? Or down?  This is information you need. Big time.

Google Analytics has all this. Yes, there are other products out there that cover the same territory, but this is the best one. And it’s free. Have we mentioned that free is good? Because it is. Get it, use it, learn it, love it. You totally met your new best friend. Fun fact: some years ago, Google Analytics was a commercial product called Urchin, which cost upwards of $5,000. Then Google bought it, made it way better, and offered it free to everyone. Best. Analytics. Ever.

3. Chartbeat

Chartbeat very similar to Google Analytics. In fact someone once called Chartbeat “Google Analytics on crack”. It offers you much of the same data, but it does so in REAL TIME. You can see traffic stats unfold right before your very eyes, feeding your Type A personality or offering you a cure for insomnia. It shows you who’s on your site right now, what they’re looking at, where they came from, etc.

Chartbeat has many valuable features, but chief among them is the ability to tell you how long it takes real users around the world to download pages on your site. Is your fancy new flash widget downloading slowly? Is your front page taking forever to load? Chartbeat will tell you, and you desperately need to know. Why? Because the internet makes people impatient. They may have no problem waiting nine months for their child to be born, but they won’t wait five seconds for your site to come up. Google knows that and won’t send visitors to a slow-loading website. Chartbeat lets you know if there’s a problem and gives you real time insight into what’s happening on your website.

4. Pingdom

Is your website up? Or is it down? You hope it’s up, you thinks its up, but is it really? Is it up all the time? Does it go down at the four in the morning on the third Tuesday of the month? Is your web host flaky, meaning having lots of tiny outages that you wouldn’t normally notice?

The truth is that without a great site uptime monitor like Pingdom, you simply don’t know. It offers you uptime reports, error analysis response time reports and will notify you by email, text or twitter if something happens. Pingdom does cost money, but it is an extremely valuable and necessary item for anyone who is in the business of blogging and/or making money online. You simply can’t live without it. Think about it: if you walk by a store and the sign says “closed” are you really going in? You can’t. It’s closed. Your website is the same way. Pingdom makes sure your doors are open all the time. And yes we’ve tried many other uptime monitors over the years, most sucking more or less than the one before.

More than any other uptime service we’ve tried, Pingdom catches any minor server flakiness so you know about it before your visitors or Google abandon you for it. Think of this as your outside agent keeping your web host honest.

5. Google Ad Manager (now DoubleClick For Publishers)

Google Ad Manager is the best ad management tool on the market, bar none. And it’s free.  It is simple, robust and relatively easy to use, once you get the hang of it. Yes, you’ll need to play with it a bit because it’s very powerful, but it’s time well spent.

So what’s an ad manager? It’s a way for you to post ads on your site and make money. It allows you to create “ad units” on your website and then to display (and test) all kinds of different ads through those ad units. And then it allows you to figure out which ads get clicked best, convert best, etc. It’s something you must have if you’re going to make money online.

And it is free, and will remain so despite rumours that this could change with their recent acquisition of DoubleClick. As a result of that acquisition, Google Ad Manager has morphed into DoubleClick For Publishers (DFP). The DFP web page has replaced the Google Ad Manager web page, but the functionality is the same. In fact the functionality and the user interface have both improved considerably since the DoubleClick merger.

6. Aweber (Email List Server)

If you have a website and no email list, you’re really missing out on a huge opportunity. But that’s a topic for another day.

And let’s face it. If you do have an email list, you need your emails to get there and get read. Period. You need a way to get them from your keyboard to John Doe’s inbox. Period.

How do you make that happened? With Aweber.  It’s that simple, and with their $1 for 1 month trial offer, it’s that cheap. At least, to start. It’s true. Aweber is not the cheapest email marketing service out there, it’s just the best, and frankly, it’s only one worth using. We left. We came back. There’s a reason for that. In the past it wasn’t exactly known as the easiest to use or most intuitive  site out there but they have made incredible strides in this department as of late and it is way more accessible for you and we can’t recommend it highly enough. Do yourself a favor and don’t price-shop email list providers; try Aweber, you’ll be glad you did.

7. Tubemogul

If you’ve started a video show (or video podcast) you know that it can’t just be on your website, it has to be everywhere. That means YouTube, DailyMotion, 5Min, Blip.tv, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, Sevenload, etc. You also know that each video file is HUGE (especially with HD), and uploading them is a HUGE PAIN. And that’s just uploading it once. With multiple sites, you have to upload each video multiple times, right?

Wrong. Tubemogul takes care of this for you. With Tubemogul, you simply upload it to their site once and then boom! They use their proprietary magic to distribute your video content to all the major online video platforms.  That saves you time, and sanity. And if that wasn’t enough, they have analytics built in! See how many times your video has been viewed, for example.

8. VodPod

Oh, VodPod, how do we love thee? Well, we’ll spare you the details, but we love them a lot. You are seeing them right here, at the top of our page! You see that sexy row of our videos? That’s them.  They are really amazing at giving you ways to do something with your videos in a stylish, organized manner. Lets say you upload your video to Youtube. Great. What do you do with it now? Embed the heck out of it? That’s fine, to a degree, but if you have multiple videos like we do (we have over 550 segments and counting on Ask Dan & Jennifer alone) that just doesn’t cut it. Vodpod gives you a way to integrate and display your videos on your website in a way that is as accessible as it is aesthetically pleasing.

9. Sendible

The simple fact of social media is that it is always there. If you want to be a force in the social media world, you must always be there. You need to be regularly posting to Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc. You can’t be robotic, but you must be consistent. The phrase “out of sight, out of mind” certainly applies to the digital age and social media.

Fortunately, with Sendible, that’s never a problem. Sendible is a tool that allows you to schedule you tweets and other social media posts on all platforms hours, days, weeks and even months in advance. Going on vacation? No problem, set up your tweets in advance and your followers will never even know you were gone. Another way to look at this is that your followers who expect your great tweets regularly will keep getting them regularly. Just don’t go totally automated or everyone will stop following you… they expect personality and engagement too!

10. TweetDeck

TweekDeck is a free desktop tool that functions as your personal real-time social media browser. It allows you to keep up with and post to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and seemingly every other place you can think of – all from one application. Think of it as a sexy, digital command center from which you can control your burgeoning media empire. Okay, maybe not, but it is really simple and fun to use. You simply enter in your account information for each network and that’s it. You are officially off and running.

11. PollDaddy

Yes, we know this is #11, but you will thank us for it. Face it. People have opinions and they LOVE to share them. That’s a fact. It’s also a fact that user interaction is a key component of a successful site. People love to take polls and they love to see what other people think.
PollDaddy is the way to go, and there’s no point in you looking around at other polling options. We did. They look bad; really bad. Recently it was acquired by Automattic, the good people who bring you WordPress, which is definitely a good thing. Here’s a poll we ran on Ask Dan & Jennifer…

That’s all for our top 10 (and by 10 we mean  11) tools that all bloggers need! We’ve done all the work, research and experimentation so you don’t have to. All you have to do is run out and get these tools and put them to work on your site. And remember, if  your website is your business, you need to treat it like one. Now get out there and get to making money and changing people’s lives!

We know we went kind of fast through this list due to time constraints, but stay with us. In the coming weeks we’re going to get into all the details you ever wanted to know for choosing all of these tools and using them like a pro.

• “what are all these weird characters suddenly showing up all over my blog: Â â €™ ¢?”
• “I just upgraded my WordPress and now I see funny characters all over my posts – what gives?”
• “I just moved my blog to a new web host and now I see funny characters all over my posts – help”

I know, because we’ve been there… searching everywhere for a way to convert the data from one character set to another.

And most of the solutions we’ve found online have not been very helpful… stabs in the dark on average. The notable exceptions were these 2 very helpful posts in a sea of really scary guesses… MySQL latin1 → utf8 (WordPress upgrade) and Fixing mixed-encoding MySQL dumpfiles with WordPress.

The real problem is, I was asking the wrong question, so I kept finding solutions that didn’t work. Until now.

So let’s take a step back and better understand the problem…

What causes those funny characters in your WordPress posts upon upgrade / migration / whatever?

It’s a character encoding thing, and I won’t go into too much detail on it, but suffice to say: WordPress stores your content in a MySQL database, encoded in a character set called UTF8.

But if you installed your WordPress site before WordPress 2.3 (yeah, a while back), at that time WordPress didn’t specify that default character set when creating its storage tables (posts, etc.)… so the tables were created with whatever the default character set was in the MySQL installation. As it happens, back then it was Latin1.

“Yeah, so what” you say. Well, WordPress is still expecting the content to be in UTF8, which is why you’ll occasionally see those funny characters on your blog… Â â €™ ¢?

Sure, there’s a “fix”  for that (read: duct tape patch)… you can just tell WordPress in it’s wp-config.php file that your data is stored in Latin1, and those funny characters won’t show any more.

define('DB_CHARSET', 'latin1');

But you’ve still got a database created with Latin1 encoding, storing your UTF8 data. Which in some cases will start causing you problems – such as when we tried to upgrade to WordPress 3 and enable WordPress MultiSite, and it will fail over and over again with no discernible error messages.

So how do you convert that data from Latin1 to UTF8?

Trick is, the content is (and still was back then) stored/encoded in UTF8… but MySQL “thinks” it’s in Latin1 because that’s how the tables were created.

So the better question is… how can you extract that UTF8 data from your MySQL database without corrupting it when MySQL dutifully attempts to convert it to UTF8 for you on export… essentially attempting to convert something that doesn’t need converting.

So how do you fix the Latin1 encoding, a.k.a. convert it to UTF8?

This situation can be fixed quite easily with just a few Linux commands performed on the server. Yes, it could technically be done through CPANEL & phpMyAdmin and using Windows tools to edit your data, but that’s far more likely to corrupt it. Your data is much less likely do get corrupted in this way.

Note: the fix below assumes at least a very basic familiarity with Linux (UNIX) and the ability to connect to your server command line (Telnet or ideally SSH) and run a few basic command.

“Whoa, what’s that?”, you say. Never fear, if you are not comfortable doing this, it’s likely that your web host will do it for you – the procedure is very quick and simple for someone familiar with these commands.

Also, if done correctly the approach below will create a whole new “clean” database, it will NOT change/fix/mangle your current database. That means you’ll be able to literally just edit the WordPress wp-config.php and “point” your WordPress from the old database to the fresh, clean new one. And you should be good to go.

That’s the tricky part.

Disclaimers: The following assumes at least a basic understanding of MySQL and WordPress config files and export functions. There is absolutely no warranty or guarantee of accuracy with anything you read here (or pretty much anywhere, lol). You and only you are responsible for any damage to your database, WordPress installation, mental health, ego, etc.  as a results of following these or any other suggested directions. Also, look both ways before crossing the street, and be advised the beverage you are about to enjoy may be hot, and never spit up-wind.

The actual step-by-step WordPress / MySQL fix…

1. Back up all your stuff first (likely using phpMyAdmin / CPANEL)

Before doing any of the following it strongly encouraged to back up all your data and files. Just to be safe. At the very least, your full database and the WordPress config file: wp-config.php

2. Note the settings that your WordPress is currently using (from wp-config.php)

Specifically, your MySQL database configuration, including DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, and also DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //

/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'database_name_here');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'username_here');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password_here');

3. Create a new MySQL database and create a new user with full privileges to that new database (both using phpMyAdmin)

After you export and “clean” you current data, you’re going to import it into this new database. Then you’ll be using this new database going forward.

4. Export your current WordPress database

The following exports all your data into a single text file (exp-my-database-latin1.sql).

mysqldump --opt --default-character-set=latin1 --skip-extended-insert --user my_db_user_here --password my_db_name_here -r exp-my-database-latin1.sql --log-error=log-mysqldump-my-database.txt

5. Change the character set in the output file (to the correct one)

replace "CHARSET=latin1" "CHARSET=utf8" "SET NAMES latin1" "SET NAMES utf8" < exp-my-database-latin1.sql > exp-my-database-utf8.sql

6. Run a compare script to sanity check your changes

diff exp-my-database-latin1.sql exp-my-database-utf8.sql

7. Import the cleaned data into the NEW database

mysql --default-character-set=utf8 --user=my_db_user_here --password='my_password_goes_here' my_db_name_here < exp-my-database-utf8.sql

8. Update your WordPress config to point at the shiny, clean, new database

Just update your wp-config.php file with the database name, login, and password of the clean, shiny new database.

Also, update your encoding settings in wp-config.php to reflect the new UTF character set:

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

9. Test your changes… browse your website thoroughly and look for those funny characters

If it didn’t “work”, you’ll have funny characters all over your posts; they’ll be quite obvious as you browse 10 to 20 posts looking for them.

That’s it, you should now be able to pull up your website and enjoy the yummy UTF8 goodness, no more Latin1.

IF for whatever reason you need to back out this change, that’s very easy to do… just point your WordPress back to the original database (that you didn’t mess with).

To do that, just edit your wp-config.php file and restore the information you noted in step 1: DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, and also DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE. Then bring up your website and all should be good again.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Congratulations! You’ve made it this far. You’ve got your niche, figured out what you want to talk about, who the other players in the niche are, decided what you like about them, what you don’t like about them, and you’ve started interacting with their readers on their blog and you have begun to build up your presence. Now what?

Now you write your first blog post.

Oh, how this strikes fear in the hearts of many a blogger… “What will I write about?” They ask “How will I come up with a topic.” Writer’s block sets in at this point and for many, but really, it’s not a problem if you’re writing about something that you are passionate about.

Not satisfied? Fine. We’ll give you a sure-fire way to come up with your first subject.

Lock yourself in a room. Literally. No cell phone, no significant other, no T.V., nothing. Sit down in front of a pen and paper and write down every idea that you can think of. Don’t stop until you have a least 50-100. Then pick one. How do you pick you? You pick the one that speaks to you. How will you know which one speaks to you? It just does. Try not to over think this. Your first blog post is important, but the fate of the world doesn’t depend on it. Just your world. Kidding! Just relax, and pick one. You’ve got like a 100 to choose from, right? See, it wasn’t that hard. You’ve done it! You’ve chosen a topic. And now you have your first blog topic ready to write about to your heart’s content.

Here’s something to get your juices going: What keeps your audience up at night?

What are their hopes, dreams, problems, etc? Now pick one of these and write about it. Now we come to blog length. How long should it be? As long as a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the goods, but short to keep it interesting. Spell check it, and be sure to test any links in it you might have to say, your twitter account or a product page.

On a side note, always have a notebook handy.

You will often find yourself getting ideas at the most random times, when you least expect it. Write them down whenever they come to you. You may never actually use any of these ideas that you come up with on the go, but you will have them and it will help relieve any fear or pressure you feel about coming up with topics. You’ll never be stuck.

Once you have that first blog post written, when do you post it?

This is a bigger question than you think. The name of the game with posting is consistency. Do you post every hour or every day or every week? You have to set a schedule and stick to it. If you’re going to make money at this, you need to have people consistently coming to your site to check out your content. It has to be new, constantly updating content. They aren’t going to be checking out your greatest hits, either. They want new, fresh content. It’s not going to help if you post ten times a day for a week and then don’t post again for another month. If you do that, you’ll come off as flakey to your readers and that’s just death to bloggers. You won’t get those readers back, and you won’t be generating any traffic or making any money, either.

But it’s not just readers that hate inconsistency and flakiness. Search engines hate it too. You want to be on their good side, and you’ll need to be posting regularly. We’re talking at least once a week, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to manage that. The more posts the better, but don’t commit yourself to something you can’t deliver and end up flaking out. There’s plenty of scheduling software’s out there that can help you make sure you never miss a posting. WordPress even allows you to schedule a post to go live at a certain date and time. So there’s no excuse to not be posting regularly!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The first thing you have to do is know the four main types of web hosting out there, and they are:

Web Hosting Type #1: Shared Web Hosting

What exactly is shared web hosting? Just what it sounds like: a bunch of websites on one server, and everyone shares resources.

Pros of Shared Web Hosting: This is the cheapest option (some starting well under $10/month), and there are tons of providers for you to choose from. (Although there’s only one shared web host that we’ve relied on ourselves and actually recommend to our own friends and family – read on, we’ll tell you which one that is).

Cons of Shared Web Hosting: If someone else’s site goes down, yours goes down too. Or if someone screws up or gets a traffic spike you get affected by that too. Or you get a massive traffic spike (or you make a mistake) and you take everyone else down with you.

Basically, in web hosting, you get what you pay for. If you get anything out web hosting 101, we hope it is this: don’t cut corners. We’re not saying you should spend like a drunken sailor, but don’t cut your nose to spite your face, okay? It’s not pretty, trust me. And it does nothing for your blog.

Web Hosting Type #2: Dedicated Servers

Whoever invented the web hosting business must’ve been a big believer in truth in advertising, because again, this option is exactly what it says it is. A dedicated server is a server that is entirely dedicated to you and your website. You don’t share it, it’s all yours. This is not an option we, your illustrious hosts, recommend. Why? Well, first the good news:

Pros of a Dedicated Server: No neighbors to worry about, it’s all you. That results in better reliability.

Cons of a Dedicated Server: You have to buy the whole server, whether or not you need it. It’s not scalable which makes it very difficult when your website outgrows your current situation. It’s also very expensive for most of you just starting out in the world of blogging (costs $150/month to start)

Now you see why we don’t recommend it. Most of you can’t really afford to spend that kind of money on your web hosting solution (at least not initially), and even if you can you’re going to outgrow it at some point and then what? You can’t quickly and easy ramp up to the next level when you need to.

Web Hosting Type #3: VPS (Virtual Private Servers)

This is our preferred solution. VPS is what we use, and what we recommend you use as well. What is a virtual private server? Simply put, it’s a cross between a shared web hosting solution and a dedicated server. You still share, just not with as many people as you would if you went the shared web hosting route. We like to think of it as “high end” shared web hosting. We use it and we love it because it’s very easy, and you can just scale up to as much as you need, as soon as you need it.

Pros of a VPS (Virtual Private Server): Fast, easy, affordable ($50/month to start), you can ramp up later at the flip of a switch; and we use it (isn’t that reason enough for you?)

Con of a VPS (Virtual Private Server): You still have neighbors and you may still have to be very careful of VPS providers: they may over-sell the service, resulting in a flaky server for you. In fact many do, and there’s only one that we trust to power our own websites. (read on, we’ll tell you which one)

Web Hosting Type #4: Cloud Hosting

What is cloud web hosting? Hundreds of servers (many spread all over the globe) all working together to serve up your website (and the sites of all their other clients). If one of their servers goes down, no problem. The rest of their global servers will pick up the slack. It’s really great in theory, but not quite all the way there in real life. We don’t recommend using this as your sole web solution.

We use VPS coupled with cloud hosting for static content. Why? Because this combination decreased our page load speed time to less than half of what it was before – and that matters (a lot) to both your website visitors and to Google. Before it might take a couple of seconds to load our page, now it takes a matter of milliseconds, because our static content is on cloud servers all over the world. So someone from Japan gets our static content from a Japan based cloud server, for example.

Pros of Cloud Hosting: Pay only for what you need. Scales instantly. Global server network.

Cons of Cloud Hosting: You can but really shouldn’t offload your whole website to them (yet) – that technology just isn’t reliable enough yet. And you pay for all you eat – so a poorly written WordPress plugin or PHP script, or a denial of service attack, can drastically increase your web hosting cost.

By now, you’re probably wondering: which specific web hosts do you recommend Dan & Jennifer?

Well, we’re happy to tell you:

Our Recommended Shared Web Host:

HostGator - At just $7 (or less) per month for solid service this one is our first choice. It’s who we’ve used personally relied on for our websites, and the only shared web host we refer our friends and family to.

Our Recommended Dedicated Server Host:

N/A. We don’t recommend dedicated servers. Go with shared web hosting (above) or VPS (below) if you’ve outgrown shared web hosting.

Our Recommended VPS Host:

ServInt – Very solid VPS; they’re the ones we trust to power our websites today, serving just under a million page views per month (and growing fast!!) – all dynamic content, mostly WordPress and vBulletin.

Our Recommended Cloud Host:

Rackspace CloudFiles - Cost is less than Amazon S3, and it just works. We’ve been very happy with the service.

“This is a lot of information, just tell me what to do!” you say! Okay, fine. Here goes:

Keep it simple! If you’re just starting a site: go with a shared web host that’s solid, reliable, and cheap – just be careful to not go with a flaky one. (here is the shared web host we personally recommend).

Then when your traffic grows over 100k page views a month, jump to a VPS. As your traffic keeps growing, say around 300k page views a month, offload your static content (images, etc.) to a cloud host. That’s exactly what we did with Ask Dan & Jennifer and our other websites with amazing results.

Coming up in the Web Hosting 101 series, we’re going to dig a little deeper for you…

• Web Hosting 101: What’s Shared Web Hosting? (coming soon)
• Web Hosting 101: What’s A Dedicated Server?
• Web Hosting 101: What’s A VPS? (coming soon)
• Web Hosting 101: What’s Cloud Web Hosting?

Click here to view the embedded video.

You need to have a topic for your blog and you need to make sure it’s something you’re deeply, truly passionate about.

“Without passion you don’t have energy, without energy you have nothing.”
– Donald Trump, Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day

This is absolutely critical. There is nothing else more important than this. You may not be ready to hear this or think that it could happen, but the fact is sooner or later you’re probably going to be making a living at this. This will be come your job. This is something that is going to consume a great deal of your time. You’ll be talking about it constantly. It might as well be something that you love. Something that you eat, sleep and breathe. Because then, it’s fun. If not, well, what’s the point?

Another really simple yet profound thing to consider is this: is this just a hobby, or do you plan on making money off of it?

Would you like it to become a source of income at some point? If you’re just looking to vent about something or indulge in your inner nerd, or talk about your favorite pro wrestler than you probably don’t need to worry too much about your niche. Because it just won’t matter. If your blog is your hobby then all you have to do is indulge your passion to your heart’s content and not say anything too stupid that will get you fired from you “real” job (and yes, that has happened to people before).

But if your blog is something you’d like to make money off of, you need to consider the market place. Some niches monetize better than others. Some just don’t offer than much money. Some are already well covered (that is, there are already a great number of people blogging g on that topic), while some are completely ignored or relatively underserved. If it’s a crowded space, then you really might want to rethink it. It’s always better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.

Once you’ve decided that, it’s time to jump right in!

Step one is doing your homework: research the blogs in your niche.

Learn the lay of the land. Find out who the players are in your space. Do all the research that you can. Google and other search engines are great for learning everything from how old the blogs are to who founded them, what kind of money are the generating, etc.

Next, make a list of the most popular blogs in your niche and study them closely.

At the end of the day, it’s all been done. There is not any reason to try to reinvent the wheel here. Just look at what other people are doing and copy what works, while placing your own personal spin on it.

Get to know the most successful authors in your space.

Read their blog, post comments, be part of the discussion. The more interactive you can become on their site(s) the better. Sooner or later, you will become known and that will lead people to becoming curious about you and what you have to say and ultimately lead people back to your blog. Increased presence means increased traffic which means increased revenue. For you.

Now go out there and do it! Get in the game people! You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Now you may be asking yourself “Should I even bother?”

“The niche I want to blog about is already so crowded and they say not to write in a crowded niche!” True, but then again, we started Ask Dan & Jennifer and that’s a love and sex site and that niche is about as crowded as it gets! And we do, in fact make a living off of it. So, it can be done. There are no absolute rules. These are only guidelines, so definitely, by all means go with your gut and your passion, but make it easy on yourself, too!

For example, we started Ask Dan & Jennifer to focus on all topics love & sex, but not long thereafter we also started Blog Success Journal to share all the fun stuff we were learning about blogging. And a while after that we kicked off yet another site, Today Is That Day, which is about all topics personal development.

See the trend? They’re multiplying!

So what’s the problem with starting multiple blogs?

Nothing really, it’s a great idea and in some cases works great, i.e. for us it’s a great thing. But even we have to be careful in balancing our time and effort between the 3 sites… you only have so much focused time you can invest every day.

Then there are the technical gotchas: managing the tech behind all those websites. Let’s say you have a great web host and they keep your server running smoothly (here’s the ONLY web host we recommend if you’re just getting started).

But you still need to install and run your website software, which for most blogs is (and really should be) WordPress. And until recently, you could only run 1 single blog / website from a WordPress installation. That means that every time you wanted to create a new blog / website  you had to do a brand new WordPress install… which leaves you with a bunch of WordPress installs to run. We have about 10 WordPress installs at this point, but more on that.

OK, so what’s the problem with running multiple WordPress installs?

No big deal right? Sure it may take 30 minutes to get it up and running, but that’s just the “down payment”; here’s where it gets hairy: you’ll have to maintain yet another new WordPress install going forward. That means regular WordPress updates, installing and configuring all the required plugins, updating those plugins regularly, etc. Pretty soon you’re a support slave to your several sites – argh! If only there was a better way…

So what is WordPress Multisite (formerly known as WordPress MU)?

Great news.. now there IS a better way! As of WordPress 3.0, the previously separate project called WordPress MU (WordPress Multi-User) has been fully integrated into WordPress so now it’s much easier to install and manage for the rest of us.

So that means that when you install WordPress you can now choose to install as a single site, OR create a “network” – meaning you can run and manage all your WordPress websites from one place. Awesome!

Benefits of WordPress Multisite over many standalone WordPress installations

1.) One WordPress is much easier to manage than 10 = better use of your valuable time

Installing, configuring, managing, and upgrading one instance of WordPress and all its plugins at one time for all your websites is a GOOD THING… much easier for you to do and keep track of than say, 10 WordPress installs. And when managing a system is easy and straightforward, you’re much more likely to do it right and do it consistently.

Time, friends, is the most valuable commodity you will ever have. You don’t so much spend your time as you invest it. And as the stock market has shown us all, some investments net better returns than others…

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff that life is made of.”
– Benjamin Franklin, Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day

“To spend time is to pass it in a specified manner. To waste time is to expend it thoughtlessly or carelessly. We all have time to either spend or waste and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever.”
– Bruce Lee, Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day

2.) Better site performance = faster response time = more search engine traffic

Each WordPress installation takes a significant amount of resources on your server (that means CPU cycles and RAM, and a little disk space)… and you can pretty much multiply that requirement by the number of WordPress installations you’re running. Think of it this way: they leaner you run, the less your hosting bill will be, and the FASTER your website will be. Faster website = more search engine traffic – because Google absolutely cares and takes site response time into account when ranking your site compared to others.

Have you actually seen a working WordPress Multisite in the wild? Is it stable?

Absolutely! In true Dan & Jennifer fashion we put our money where our mouth is so to speak, and went “Multisite” on our site Today Is That Day.

Previously, Today Is That Day was made up of two WordPress installs:

1. The Today Is That Day Magazine – articles, videos, etc.
2. Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day – our hand-picked selecting of hundreds of the best Inspirational Quotes

Today those two WordPress installs have been combined and are running smoothly as 1 WordPress Multisite.

And don’t think that combining those two WordPress installs into one is not worth it… it absolutely is. Today Is That Day “for now” only had two WordPress installs running it, but we’d already planned two more for features to be added in the coming months.

And Ask Dan & Jennifer, which has been around significantly longer and is far more complex, is currently running on 4 WordPress installs, with more planned. So moving THAT to Multisite will be a great help.

One minor clarification: a Wordpres Multisite install an be for different domains (www.site1.com, www.site2.com), or for different “sections” of one website, which is how we use it (see example above for Today Is That Day: one is a “subdirectory” of the other).

You can also certainly install a single Multisite to manage your different WordPress domains… and at some point we’re going to do that for the several simpler WordPress website we’re running. But our current goal is consolidating all the different WordPress installs for each of our main websites into one WordPress per site.

So how DO you upgrade your existing WordPress installs to WordPress Multisite?

So now that we know about WordPress Multisite, the obvious next question is… how do I migrate my 10 WordPress installations into a single “easy to manage” WordPress Multisite?

Yes, between Ask Dan & Jennifer, Today Is That Day, and Blog Success Journal, we really do (or rather did) have about 10 active WordPress installs. And yes, it was quite a pain staying on top of them all. So we’re quite pleased to be migrating them all to the Multisite model.

First, you’ll want to be running the latest version of WordPress. You can even use WordPress auto install (or auto upgrade) for that, very easy.

But then comes the more involved process… enabling your “Multisite” and then migrating your other sites INTO it. Stay tuned, that answer along with all the gory and magical details of “how to do it” is coming up shortly…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Answer: not on your website. Yes, yes, we know. Every good web host (and even the not so good ones) gives this away for free when you host your site with them. This is exactly why you DON’T want to take them up on it. Think about it: if your website goes down (and trust us, it WILL) what’s going to happen to your email? Oh, that’s right. It’s down too. Why? Because you put all your eggs in one basket. So your website and your email server are BOTH down. How are you going to be notified? D’oh! You can’t be notified by email because that’s not working either. You’d better hope you get notified by SMS, and forget about receiving any important emails from perspective clients, fans or anyone else.

Think that’s enough reason not to host your own server? Well, we’ve got more. As if this wasn’t enough, hosting your own email can eat up half of your resources making your web page load slower. In the internet business that’s a fate worse than death. Because no first time visitor to your website is ever going to say “wow, that page loads really slow. I’ll come back later and give them another chance.” Doesn’t happen. Pure and simple. Also Google measures every millisecond it takes to load your website, and they track that daily. If you’re slow, Google will be happy to send their visitors to someone faster.

Your web server exists to load your website pages fast. Period. It exists to do nothing else. Anything that gets in the way of this is simply bad for business. That’s why you don’t ever, under any circumstances host your own email server. Period.

So, now that we’ve scared the pants of you and told you what not to do, what are your options? We’ll the truth is, you’ve only got two in our opinion. But they’re really good ones, so fret not, fledgling website owner. We’ve got you covered.

Email Hosting Option #1: Gmail

First and foremost is Gmail. They are simplest option. They are free, and for your domain they are the cheapest option which may be all you need to hear if your website is just getting started. Beyond having an unbeatable price, they also offer something else that’s much more attractive: piece of mind. See, Google has big, huge buckets of money to throw at, well everything. This means they’ve invested in the best people and technology money can buy to ensure that nothing bad ever happens. You won’t ever have to worry about your Gmail going down, because if that happened, a lot of insanely well paid people would lose their incredibly cushy and killer jobs unless they get it fixed FAST; and they just aren’t going to let that happen. So Gmail won’t let you down and it’s incredibly simple and easy to use. You don’t need a huge amount of technical knowledge. A few simple clicks and you are up and running.

Email Hosting Option #2: Rackspace

Rackspace (or as we like to refer to them “The Artist Formerly Known As Webmail.us) is our recommendation, and they are our email hosting provider. Why? Rackspace is comprised of rock stars. Their support people are awesome, and when you call or email them with a problem, they actually call or email you back – with an actual solution. People at Rackspace aren’t just passionate; they are, as they like to call it “fanatical.” And we mean that in a good, non cult-y way. Rackspace has created a culture (they refer to it as their ‘special sauce) where employees thrive and have been named one of the best companies to work for by Computer World and The Sunday Times. All of this means that your business is handled by happy people who actually want to go to work and not some disgruntled college kid sitting in a basement somewhere. You can probably tell by now that we’re pretty big fans of theirs. It’s really hard not to be, actually. They’re reasonably priced too! Give them a try and you’ll see why we love working with them.

As a small side not on Rackspace, we also use them for Cloud Hosting all the static content on our websites, but more on that soon in a separate article.

Whether you go with Gmail or Rackspace, your email will still be up and running if your website ever goes down… and you won’t be impacting your website load times every time you get an email with those huge NSFW pictures from your pervert friends and funny cat videos from your less perverted friends. FTW!

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.

So if you’re staring a blog yourself and decide to install WordPress for it (which in our opinion is the only way to go!) these WordPress plugins are a great place to start.

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