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ProBlogger: Keep Your New Year’s Resolution: Set up a Social, Search-optimized WordPress Blog … Today

ProBlogger: Keep Your New Year’s Resolution: Set up a Social, Search-optimized WordPress Blog … Today

Link to @ProBlogger

Keep Your New Year’s Resolution: Set up a Social, Search-optimized WordPress Blog … Today

Posted: 01 Jan 2013 06:08 AM PST

This guest post is by Marcela De Vivo of Gryffin.co.

Recently ProBlogger discussed how to brand your blog, how to find your voice, and how to build your authority.

Mouse

Image courtesy stock.xchng user panoramadi

These articles are powerful, but often I find myself speaking with people who don't have a blog yet, or are using Blogger or custom made, cumbersome platforms. Just this week alone I went through these steps with four different people who want to jump on the blogging bandwagon.

In this article we will go back to basics for those who haven't started their blog yet, or who are on platforms that are hindering their progress.

If one of your New Year’s Resolutions was to improve your blogging presence—or start a new one—read on!

We’ll go through a step-by-step process, including tools and resources for each step, to set up a WordPress blog that is optimized for social and search marketing success.

Setting up your WordPress blog

WordPress is currently the most popular content management platform.  It can be used for static pages or as a blog.  You can add plugins for a shopping cart, image galleries, and much more.

Here’s how to set it up.

  1. Register your domain with sites like Register.com, Godaddy.com, or Enom.com
  2. Create a hosting account with sites like BlueHost.com, WPEngine, or HostGator.  If you would like to do more research on hosting companies, check out WhoIsHostingThis.
  3. Select a WordPress theme. I personally love using StudioPress as the themes are clean, functional, and easy to work with. Search for a responsive theme so your blog will be accessible to mobile users.
  4. Is your site running on a different CMS or platform? Consider using a blog migration service, such as BlogWranglers, to move your current site over to WordPress. Hundreds of thousands have done it, with no regrets.
  5. Upload WordPress to your hosting account, and customize with your relevant theme.  If you are not a techie, this is the part where you'll need some help.  Check out Elance.com, Freelancer.com, or a site like Craiglist.org to find someone who can help you set up and customize your template.
  6. Install WordPress plugins.

Let’s take a deeper look at the plugins you’ll need.

Setting up your plugins

Social media

These are the social media plugins I recommend you consider.

SEO plugins

My favorite SEO plugins include these ones.

Usability

Usability plugins can be a huge help. Consider these:

Doing keyword research

To gain exposure from search engines, you need to have your blog focused on a theme. Select a primary keyword within this general theme for each page of the site.  You can read more about keyword research in this ProBlogger article.

Select keywords by identifying low-competition and high-search terms for your industry from Google's Keyword tool.

Other tools you can use include:

.

Prepare content for your static pages and images

While a designer/programmer is working on setting up your site, you can start by writing and preparing content for your site.

A well-optimized page includes the primary keywords in the Title of the page, Meta Description tag, H1 tag, once or twice in the body, and in an outbound link.

As you’re preparing your content, remember these elements of an excellent blog post:

        • Post title: creative and compelling
        • Social share icons: make sharing your content easy
        • Image: an image speaks louder than words
        • Opening paragraph: include keywords in a teaser into the introduction
        • Body copy: use headers and bold words
        • Lists: make your content easy to scan
        • Conclusion: include a teaser for your next article
        • Related posts: give them more content to consume
        • Comment section: Always respond to comments

Read Darren's compilation from earlier this year for more information on each element in The Anatomy of a Better Blog Post.

Connect your site for optimum findability

By this point you should have a WordPress blog with a range of enhancements made possible by plugins and other customizations.  You will have SEO plugins to improve your on-page SEO, page load times, keyword density, site maps, and other relevant SEO features.

You will also have a selection of social plugins so that you can encourage social shares from your site. You will have other features such as contact forms, tracking, reporting, and an email signup box to build your email list.

Incorporating keyword research will help you to deliver the content that people are looking for in a way that lets it be found.  You can write articles based on long-tail terms, answer questions that your audience may have, and target hundreds of keywords by writing articles specific to each one.

So what are you waiting for? Make your New Year’s Resolution a reality and start your new blog today. And if you have any suggestions of plugins, tools, or services to add to this list, please do share!

Marcela De Vivo is a freelance writer who writes about blogging, SEO and social media at Gryffin.co/blog.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
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Keep Your New Year’s Resolution: Set up a Social, Search-optimized WordPress Blog … Today
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Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Link to ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Blog

December Recap and going forward

Posted: 31 Dec 2012 04:00 AM PST

December was a bit crazy.  PAR continues to grow at a very rapid rate.  We still have not done any sort of advertising or marketing effort but I am excited once we beging that.  I have a very aggressive plan much like what I did with AuctionAds.

The PAR Product is amazing though and we are adding 2 new features that are truly revolutionary.

My book is finally done and I am hoping to kick off a big release on January 7th or 8th depending on the printer.  I can’t wait to finally release it. It’s been along road.

Here are the posts from December:

Dec-03 12:26:34 - Simple email tricks most people don’t think about on the mobile phone Depending on the person, amount of email they do on their phone can be an outrages amount id say some people I know do at least 65-70% of their emailing on their phone, especially if it is their own personal email and not their work email. So this is d…[more]

Dec-04 08:44:31 - Keep hating on John Chow Its human nature to envy someone right? I mean thats why it was named one of the deadly sins… IMO, out of all the sin’s, envy is the ONLY one that has no upside. Think about it for a minute. Sloth, greed, gluttony etc all have some upside… but envy…[more]

Dec-05 13:20:03 - Possibly an Enormous Money Making Opportunity in StarCraft 2 I play StarCraft II.  A lot.  If you log in virtually anytime you will see me there.  At work I use it as a reward system.  If I get X done then I will play a quick game. I play pretty much nothing but custom maps. When StarCraft launched I work…[more]

Dec-06 08:34:12 - FTC Launches Coast-to-Coast ‘Biz-Op’ Rule Blitz From Vermont to California and Oregon to Florida, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has wasted no time enforcing its beefed up Business Opportunity (?Biz-Op?) Rule. Last month, it filed its first six cases across the country (three are the author?s…[more]

Dec-06 10:34:10 - I Spent Millions Using Microsoft Paint A lot of banners you see online look very attractive. Most of them are all polished up and pretty, smooth animation and crisp clean images.  But, guess what? A lot of these ads suck for direct response! If you?re a brand you want the branding that c…[more]

Dec-10 07:00:45 - Stats from sending 30 million emails With our PAR Program we have 11 of our clients that have given us explicit permission to anonymously aggregate their data to provide some statistics. This data is based on sending 30 million emails. Keep in mi…[more]

Dec-11 09:52:28 - What you need to succeed in just about any business… Customers…. it’s what we all seek when first starting a new business. Getting them however is a lot harder than we expected. This is because people are SMART. They can spot those that are reputable from those who are not without much effort. Those wh…[more]

Dec-11 10:12:35 - Want to be a ShoeMoney Author/Contributor? When I first started ShoeMoney.com in 2003 I was a complete newbie. I was documenting items as I was doing them. Everything from my first business as doing eBay Arbitrage… then talking about my fun ringtone site and then one day when I got a call from G…[more]

Dec-12 10:12:09 - ShoeMoney Ad Network Throwback In 2006 when I first got into affiliate marketing I realized that all of AdSense income was coming from people advertising affiliate offers. Now even though I was doing affil…[more]

Dec-13 06:23:06 - What Runs Where XMAS Special What Runs Where is truly a remarkable game changing tool for anyone in the advertising space. Like most great tools it was a in house tool built by top affiliates who wanted to offer it as a service to others. Here is a special X-mas offer for 50 fast…[more]

Dec-14 07:00:47 - Free Shirt Friday – Rap Music Guide This site is pretty crazy actually and great for you rap die hards. You are able to go back and check rap albums that have been released to see if they were the real deal or bootleg copies, they have descriptions of the bar codes on the back even. Someb…[more]

Dec-17 07:27:16 - Francisco Dao is a loser @theman I have had this in my drafts folder for a bit. When I first wrote it I was really pissed. I can’t disagree with this topic more. I stopped going half cocked and letting it fly (for the most part) on the post button so its been in my drafts. I let it go fo…[more]

Dec-17 12:19:56 - I will rep your brand out at Affiliate Summit West 2013 (for charity) I am auctioning myself to wear your company’s shirt for 3 days during the Affiliate Summit West Event January 2013 in Las Vegas. This is a special year.  If the auction goes over $5,000,  our T-Shirt charity auctions will have raised more th…[more]

Dec-19 10:40:08 - How I wrote a book and self published I don’t have the book entirely self published but I wanted to make a post (I will update it as the process goes) to save people perhaps some of the pain that I went through. I will tell you now that if I had to do it all over again I would have gone wi…[more]

Dec-21 07:00:37 - Free Shirt Friday – getDigital This one came all the way from Germany, and just in time for Christmas! I love sites like getDigital filled with just a shit load of cool little toys and gagets that I feel I need to buy each and…[more]

Dec-26 12:06:00 - Your company in my autobiography? You only get one shot at launching your Autobiography right? I started thinking last week about how we could raise a bunch of money for charity and get some publicity for the book. Then it hit me. Each company or website that makes a $2500 …[more]

Dec-27 09:01:44 - Exact Match Domains Getting Nuked There are very few basic knowns about what factors have an effect on your keyword ranking. Put your keyword in the title of your page,  in your page, and in the url of your page that you want to rank for that keyword. But the gold standard for rankin…[more]

Dec-28 07:00:45 - RecipeIdeas.net – Free Shirt Friday Well shoot! I probably should have posted this one before the Holidays so you could have had recipe ideas that you could have taken to your family get togethers.. better late than never I guess. RecipeIdeas.Net ch…[more]
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