Get social.

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for your blog, it’s time to get engaged.  You have great content and you’re tracking your visitors. Now you need to get out to the community and interact. If you’re focusing on the gaming niche, do things like hit up gaming forums and talk about the games you’re playing. Don’t blatantly advertise your blog. Just put it in your signature. People will click on it, I promise.

Be creative when you’re baiting people to come visit your site. Back on gaming: if you’re playing, why not set things up to do live casts of whatever you’re playing. People can interact with you while you’re trying games out and that entices users to visit and subscribe. You can take the archived video and turn them into posts later.

Commitment

12 hours or more.

Constantly be Producing Content

Back to that content thing. You’ll most likely see this every week for the rest of the series and then beyond. This is the groundwork and foundation that your website rests on. Without nice, high quality content people won’t have a reason to visit. Try to vary things up a bit. I have three major topics I focus on with mine: diet, exercise, and motivation. I try to hit at least one a week, and never three of the same one in a row.

Twitter

Search.Twitter.com is a powerful tool to interact. You can use this to find out what people are talking about in your niche(s) and correspond with them. You want to be spending at least an hour a day doing this. If you’re not an expert, use it to find experts and ask questions. You can also aggregate news stories in your niche that you find. This will provide value to your followers as well.

There are some more advanced ways to interact with Twitter that I won’t go into here. There are all sorts of things you can do, like setting up bots to aggregate information for you to using services to respond to high volumes of followers. I just want you to know that they are out there and I might cover them in the future.

Facebook

You should definitely have a fan page for your blog. You can do one of two things: if you have brand awareness already you can just create a page for your blog; if you don’t, you can create a page about the niche for your blog. What does that mean? It means that if you’re in the gaming niche and you blog is: MyGamingSite.com you could either make a fan page called: 1) MyGamingSite.com or 2) Playing Video Games. The latter will attract more likes from people that don’t know who you are.

You can then leverage that population to advertise your site. When you reach a higher level of traffic, you can create a new fan page for the same blog and name it whatever the site is. That fan page will be much more targeted and convert better when you’re soliciting your fans, followers, and users. You should spend at least an hour a day conversing with people on Facebook and creating awareness of your pages.

Problems I Had Last Week

I didn’t really have any problems last week. I did change my mind about some plugins, etc. That was mostly a function of response to the post I did about plugins. That wasn’t anything major. I’m mostly talking about plugins that added widgets that could easily be HTML in a text widget. For example: Feedburner subscription boxes.

How are things going so far?

Please let me know if this was useful to you and how things are going. I’m truly interested in helping you do this and want to help you along the way.

Series: 52 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 3 is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

Get your house in order.

You’ve written content going back ten posts, so now your blog has some roots.  You don’t look like you just started that’s good.  Now you need to do the additional setup to get things going.  Setting up tracking, search engine submission, comments, spam protection, and a slew of other details is next. First, though, you need to write some more content, because, well, that’s what having a blog is all about.

Last week I intentionally didn’t tell you what domain I registered, because I didn’t want everyone to flock there before everything was at least partially set up.  I was still on the fence about giving out the domain name, because I didn’t want traffic from this blog to boost traffic to that blog. I want to grow it naturally without any help from my other online properties. That being said, I am going to tell you, but only so you can keep your eye on what I’m doing. I’m only going to mention it this once though, and it might be the end of the project later if everyone copies the strategy. It’s CoreFitnessBlog.com.

Commitment

13 hours. $0.

Next Wave of Content

You should be doing at least one post a week with a minimum of 2000 words per month. Never do a post under 200 words.  What does that mean? Do 1 post a week with a minimum of 500 words each, or Do one a day that is at least 200 words.  I prefer to do longer, less frequent posts, so I’m opting for the 4×500 method. Also: one minute of video is worth about 100 words, so feel free to do video posts as well.

I find it’s best to sit down for 4 to 8 hours and bang out all of the posts for the month, assuming that your niche isn’t based on the news.  You can then drip those posts out scheduled on specific days. Remember: you can always add posts on the fly when breaking news in the niche comes up.

Subscriptions

Get subscribers with Aweber.

Set up a Feedburner account and start soliciting subscribers. There is a plugin for adding a subscription widget and changing your WordPress feed URLs to Feedburner URLs that I talk about below.  The best visitors are return visitors and RSS and Email subscriptions is the easiest way to keep people updated and make them return visitors.

If you’re feeling ambitious, set up an account with Aweber too. It’s never too early to start your email list. You might be jumping the gun just a smidge, because there is so much more to set up and get going.  This will be covered in a later post and if you already have an account, it’s really a no-brainer.

Plugins

I did a post last week, listing all of the plugins I use on this blog. Go read that post and install the ones that are relevant to what you’re doing. You need to be especially aware that you need to install the Google Analyticator and Feedburner Subscription widgets to make sure you can track what’s going on and start building a subscriber base.

One plugin I forgot in the post I did last week was FD Feedburner, which changes all of your WordPress URLs to Feedburner URLs. This is essential, because if you want to track RSS feed. I actually made that mistake when I started this blog and couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get subscribers.  The minute I installed it, my subscriber count went up by 500%subscriptions, you need to use make sure people are going to Feedburner and not your WordPress. My subscribers didn’t actually change, but I could see the data.

Here’s a quick list of plugins that you need, no matter what your vertical is: Akismet, Google XML Sitemaps, FD Feedburner, and Sociable.

Problems I Had

The biggest problem I had was when I wrote a post highlighting other blogs. I quickly realized that I only read one fitness blog. I didn’t want to make poor recommendations, so I spent almost 5 hours reading fitness blogs trying to find some that I would actually stand behind. I picked some that seemed great, but we’ll see how that turns out.

What I should have done was table that post until later in the blog when I was reading other peoples’ information and got to know the players in the niche. Don’t stay on projects that are time sinks. I could have easily written an extra 3 or 4 posts in that time.

How did your first week go?

Please share your success or failure stories with me below.  If you have questions about how to do something, please feel free to contact me in the comments or via email. I will help you set everything up. Also, if you haven’t nailed down hosting yet, remember my hosting contest.

Series: 52 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 2 is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

This post is more for me than you.  Now that I have 20 plugins that I install on every blog I set up, I need a list.  I use widgets for a lot of the features I need in a theme, so that if I change the theme to something completely different, the custom code I need for things like Feedburner and Analytics stay as widgets.  If you think there are some that are better than the ones I list here, just let me know.

Akismet

This one should be self explanatory.  As your blog grows in popularity, your spam comments will too.  If you have comments activated, you’re going to want this plugin.  It comes as part of WordPress by default, so don’t feel like you need to go looking for it.

All in One SEO Pack

This is probably the single best thing you can do to optimize your blog for SEO.  You can do things like set your meta tags, page titles, headers, and SEO friendly URLs.  In general, it does a good job setting up your on-site SEO, and every blog that’s looking to rank well should use it.  That being said, don’t forget about your off-site SEO.

Auto Post Thumbnail

I think every post should have an image in it.  It pulls your readers in and sells your posts.  A lot of new themes for WordPress are set up with featured images since they added them in version 2.9.  The new term for themes revolving around featured images is a “magazine” style theme.  This plugin will automatically take the first image in your post and make it the featured image in the post.  Now you can be lazy about your featured images.

Contextual Related Posts

You can increase your page views by giving your readers similar posts to what they like.  It keeps readers on the site longer and increases your overall readership.  This checks the context of your current post and then indexes the inforation and looks up similar posts in your archive.

Feedburner Subscription Widget

If you’re not sending your readers to a Feedburner Feed, you’re really missing out.  Feedburner can aggregate your content and notify people via RSS when your blog is updated.  Their email service is great for people that don’t know what RSS is or don’t use it.  It emails a subscriber automatically every day you make updates to your site.  This plugin allows you to add a subscription widget to the sidebar of your blog.

fbLikeButton

This simply adds a Facebook “Like” button to your website.  Facebook is a great way to drive traffic, so be sure you’re leveraging the social graph to increase your popularity.

Follow Me

You can add all of your social profiles to the Follow Me widget and give people the ability to connect with you outside of your blog.  My favorite setting for this is the pullout window frozen to the left side of the page.  It then uses Lightbox to pop out a selection window when they decide to follow you.

Google Analyticator

This adds your Google Analytics code so that if you change your theme, your analytics don’t go down.  If you’re not using Google Analytics, then you’re missing out on a level that I can’t even begin to express right now.

Google XML Sitemaps

Submitting XML sitemaps to Google is the best way to update their index with new content from your website.  This is especially important if you’re publishing news that can be breaking.  If you hit the top of Google first, you tend to stay there.  The best way to get indexed immediately is by submitting a sitemap.

Robots Meta

This updates your robots.txt file and removes dofollow links from URLs that don’t need it.  It really helps indexing bots for search engines find the right content.  Depending on the size of your site, this can have a significant impact on your search rankings.

RSS Footer

You can add a footer to your RSS feed.  This is really good for getting links from people that are stealing your content by syndicating your RSS feed to another website.  You can also use this to add your social media links and other important information to the footer of each post in your RSS feed.

SEO Slugs

This removes Google stop words from your url Slugs, so you don’t have useless words making your URLs longer.

Sociable

This allows people to easily submit your articles to social media websites like Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, etc.  You need to make it really easy for your users to submit your articles to other websites, otherwise they won’t do it.  Many of the social media article sites are very key in driving traffic and can make or break a website’s success.

Subscribe to Comments

You should make it easy for your users to subscribe to your comments, so that they can follow up with what they’ve said before.  This allows them to be notified via email when the comments on a post are updated.  If users are commenting on many blogs, they will undoubtedly be looking for and using this feature.

Top Commentators Widget

Everyone that knows me, knows that I run TopCommenter.com and I stand behind this widget.  It promotes comments on your blog by incentivizing users to compete to be in the top commentators.  If they are, they get a dofollow link from your site to theirs.  This is a great way for people to manually increase the off-site SEO of their site temporarily.

TweetMeme Retweet Button

This is strikingly close to the functionality of the Sociable plugin, but is even easier and is specifically for twitter.  Your users can easily retweet your posts, which will be tracked by TweetMeme.

Twitter Tools

There are a slew of tools for twitter in this plugin, but the biggest reason I use it is for updating my twitter feed whenever I add a new post.  There are other features that are useful, like twitter feed digests daily or weekly.  Basically that means it will take all of your tweets for the last week and make them a blog post.  I think that feature is annoying to users, but that’s my opinion.  It also includes a widget to put your Twitter feed in the sidebar.  I use that widget usually too.

Twitter Tools Bit.ly URLs

You need this to use shortened URLs in the Twitter Tools plugin.

WordPress Threaded Comments

This allows users to reply to eachother (or you to reply to users).  This creates more of a conversation feel in the comments and eliminates the issue of people at the bottom of the list from responding to people at the top of the list and creating confusion.  Some people don’t like this because sometimes people will reply to the first comment to be at the top of the list.  Meh.

Wait! There’s More: 2 Bonus Plugins

Self Shortener

If you’re sending people to the same links over and over, send a lot of links, or are simply looking to mask the destination URL, why not keep all of the URL shortening in your control?  This also works great if you have a short domain name, because it makes even more sense then.

NextGEN Gallery

If you post artwork or photos often, this is the single best way to keep yourself organized.  I usually recommend this to artisans or people that take a ton of pictures and want to share them.  They have some pretty cool widgets for showing galleries and random images too.  They have built in slide shows and gallery navigation as well.

Conclusion

This is what I use.  I’m not sure if they’re the best, but they work really well for me.  If you’re having issues with any of them, just let me know and I can help you.  Do you have other plugins you use?

20+ WordPress Plugins You NEED. is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

Many people think that hitting home runs in business is quite a bit about luck.  I hear all the time that I’m lucky I work for myself and I can live the way I do, making my hours, etc.  My first response is usually: “yeah I make my own hours, but usually it’s 16-20 hour days.”  What really happened is I was preparing myself mentally to start a business for some time.

When the opportunity presented itself, I was ready to execute.  I knew I would be changing jobs soon, and so I decided to take a leap of faith and depend on my ability to execute.  It worked.  Since then, I’ve started and joined many ventures with many people, some of which didn’t work out, but others that worked tremendously.  Most of all I learned something from every single venture.

I’ve started or joined businesses making t-shirts, building websites, fixing computers, doing real estate, Internet Marketing, general sales, creative writing, fine art, and some other things I’m probably forgetting.  The first extremely sustainable was my main business, Acute Technology, which started as a hodgepodge of IT support and website development, but is now building enterprise level applications for businesses, educational institutions, and government.  I was able to leverage my clout with Acute Technology to get into other projects that I’m passionate about as well.

Luck doesn’t just apply to the large victories, but the small ones as well.  Just the other day, I heard through Twitter that Brian Brushwood was looking for someone to help with Name That Autocomplete, and was on a very tight deadline.  I was able to make things happen for them and make some friends along the way.  I think the ROI on my few hours worth of work will pay off, and that small victory makes me feel lucky, but really I was just listening at the right time, with the right knowledge and skills (preparedness).

What are your thoughts on luck?

Luck is Just Being Prepared for Opportunity is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

This blog is not:

Here to help you make money online. I am just kind of rambling about things I try and get other peoples’ opinion on.  Now, granted a lot of the things I say may help you make money, but I fail a lot too.  Better that you learn from what not to do as well.

An authority on anything. Games, Marketing, Business, or anything else – I’m good at ‘em but not great, so there is probably a more informative thing out there.  If you’re close in personality to me, my perspective may help you.

Trying to sell you anything. I may occasionally drop an affiliate link somewhere, but only because I’m truly recommending something or stand behind it.  There are no ads here.  I make my money other places.

This blog is:

A public place for my personal reflection. This is basically a chronicle of things I do.  It’s not necessarily complete, but it’s got some meat.  I usually post things that I’ll want to look up later.  It’s like the reference section of my brain.

What this blog is not: is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

Here’s my submission for the Shoemoney System Theme Song:

The Rob Hustle video is pretty good, but this is different and makes a better ‘theme song’ I think.  What do you think?

Why did I do this?

Shoemoney is having a contest for a theme song, and giving the winner $1000 plus a trip to the Playboy Mansion for the Azoogle party.  I’m going this year hell or high water.  Check out the contest page.

Shoemoney System Theme Song is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

Best. Beer. Ever.

St. Paddy’s day is my favorite Holiday.  My birthday is in less than a week, and I still haven’t planned anything for it.  Hopefully someone throws me a surprise party.  Anyways – I digress.

I want to talk about capturing the attention of special days of the year – be them holidays, birthdays, etc.  People are in a purchase-friendly mood when they’re celebrating – especially when alcohol is involved.  When you’re thinking about your next affiliate project, consider what holidays are in close proximity.  You’ll want to be promoting things for that holiday up to two or three months in advance, because people often times buy their products early to get the best possible prices they can.

Brainstorming and Execution

Make sure you brainstorm as many monetization paths as possible when you’re beginning to formulate your first plans.  Here are some of my successful St. Patrick’s Day affiliate sites and how they were monetized:

• A blog for hospitality businesses to brainstorm promotions for St. Patrick’s Day.  I directed people to offers for custom shirts, mugs, guiness, etc.
• A holiday deals website giving out coupons for SPD schwag.  I all of the coupon offers I could find, centralizing a place where people could get discounts for all of their Paddy’s Day needs.
• An Irish music website, complete with funny YouTube videos.  I focused on generating income from Audible.com, iTunes, and Amazon.
• A website with the complete history of St. Patrick’s Day.  I just ran Adsense on this one – I’m not sure why it was so successful.

Conclusion

I hope this helped you decide what to do for your next affiliate project – or at least gave you a little treasure chest of ideas for projects you may want to do in the future.  The other thing that is great about holiday offers is that with a little tweaking, you can run with the same website next year.

Like any other project – the more insight you can give your customers, the better.  If you don’t know much about Easter, you probably shouldn’t build a niche site about it.  Luckily my birthday is so close to St. Paddy’s Day, and I have a little bit o’ Irish in me.  Hopefully this next week isn’t too blurry.

Have questions? Ask them in the comments.  I try to answer EVERY one.

St. Patrick’s Day Insights is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

Don't waste your time. Have a plan.

Building content for a new blog can be extremely formulaic.  I find it’s actually easiest to get the first ten to fifteen articles built before writing starts to get more challenging.  That’s because after you write the first set of articles, you need to start getting creative.  I’m going to give you a blueprint for building those initial articles and we’ll cover on-going content in a later post.

Creating the Initial Content

This really depends a lot on your niche, but I’ll try to give you the building blocks for building that initial push towards bringing your blog online.  The core step to launching your blog is building the initial content.  I say ‘building’ instead of writing, because this is extremely formulaic in nature.  The goal is to create ten articles to cover your first month of content release, so you don’t want to throw all of your knowledge into one article.  Always hold back a little bit of information to give them later.  That will keep them coming back AND give you material for later.  Also make sure your posts are not more than 700 words.  People tend to get bored if they’re much longer than that.  If you have a post that is over that, consider breaking it into multiple postings.

There are a few different types of niche.  Most notably, those types are: products and services, skills, ideas and opinions, or some combination of those.  For instance, some niche ideas that fit those categories are: left handed golf clubs (product), building a tree house (skill), or Buddhism (idea/opinion).

• Article 1: Introduce the niche in it’s most basic form.  This is a building block post.  It brings everyone to the same level, and be linked back to for reference if questions come up about what you’re talking about.  You can also use this post to create an outline of your next nine posts.
• Article 2: Showcase the different brands of the product / sides of the argument or idea / how different skills can be approached.  Basically this is a breakdown of the different factions of a niche.  Many products have different sub-products/brands/etc.  Many skills have different ways of approaching a problem, and many ideas or opinions have multiple sides.
• Article 3: Talk about yourself.  Explain why you’re an authority on the niche.  Give quotes from other authorities on the niche.  Don’t skimp on the social proof and details.
• Article 4 – 7: Give a tutorials on ‘how to’ do something relevant to your niche.  This could be something like: ‘How to line up for a left handed golf swing’, ‘do simple double column accounting’, or ‘raise money for your next political campaign’.  These ‘How to’ articles are the core of your posts and will keep people interested and coming back to your blog.  In a specific niche – say ‘Left Handed Golfing’, three ‘how to’ posts might be: ‘How to select your first set of clubs’, ‘Lining up your first drive’, and ‘chipping with accuracy’.
• Article 8: Do another – more detailed post about yourself.  Case studies work great.  If you’re doing a case study, pick a specific event which proved your authority in this niche.  When you give specific details, be sure to reference the most impressive connections to other authorities in your niche, so your audience relates you to them.
• Article 9: Do a top X list post.  This could be: ‘Top 13 golf club brands’, ‘Top 7 accounting packages’, ‘Top 11 reasons to us a mac over a pc’, or ‘top 3 video games of the year’.  Notice I didn’t use ‘top ten’.  That’s because that is over used.  People are drawn to other numbers than ten, because top ten posts have been over done.
• Article 10: Do a review post, reviewing the key points of your previous nine posts.  Write a paragraph on each post, giving additional insight to what you originally said, while linking back to other relevant articles.

Slowly release content over time.

Once you have your articles written, you can launch them in one of two ways.  You can do a retroactive launch where you set their ‘Publish date’ to dates in the past, or do an active launch where you set them to dates in the future.

Retroactive launches make your blog seem like it’s been around longer, building trust, but require that you do this initial process twice, because you’ll immediately need to pump out new content to keep people interested.  If you have the extra time, this builds trust faster, and will lead to a faster influx of returning visitors.

If you actively post your information, your blog will be almost empty when you first start, not giving people much information to go on.  This doesn’t build trust, but takes about half as much work.  By the time you’ve reached the end of your article pool, people would have been along for the ride for almost a month by now.  This means that your work to traffic ratio will be much higher.

I prefer the first method of producing twice as many articles and retroactively posting, while scheduling the other half to release slowly over the next four weeks.  What do you think the best method to building that first wave of content for your blog is?

How to Build Content for a New Blog is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

Bob: What should I blog about?  I want to make money off of my advice.

Fred: I don’t know, but what do you like?

Bob: I like playing golf.

Fred: Are you any good?

Bob: No.  I just started about 3 months ago.  My handicap is 38.

Fred: You shouldn’t blog about golf advice. Are you good at anything?

Bob: I’m a wizard at Excel.

Fred: Do you like it?

Bob: Kind of, but only when I have a challenging problem.

Fred: Why not do a blog about challenging excel problems?  You could also start a blog – more like a journal of learning to golf better.  I suspect the Excel blog will attract more people.

Bob: Two different blogs?

Fred: Yeah, I think that’s a great idea.  The point is: don’t do what you love, do what you like and are knowledgable about.  People out there are looking for GOOD information, so make sure you give it to them.

Bob: How do I make money off of it?

Fred: Wait until a few hundred people actually care about you and then come see me.

Bob: How will I know they care?

Fred: You’ll know.

Blogging Tip: Picking a Niche in Narrative is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

The expanded Publish Date field.

The easiest way to release content on your blog is to write it all at once and slow release it over time.  This also works really well when you’re on vacation or otherwise indisposed.

1. Write your post like you normally would, but hitting the “New Post” button in the top right corner of your dashboard.
2. Look on the right side of your post window and you should see some publish options.  Click “Edit” where it says Publish immediately.
3. The window should expand and look something like the image to the right.
4. Set your date and hit “OK” and it will release in the future.

If you use this on all of your posts, you can dedicate specific large amounts of time to setting up your posts for the week or month.  This way you can have periods of inactivity on your blog and still be releasing content.

Scheduling Posts in WordPress 2.9.x is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson