6 Steps To a Better Blog – Part Six

Promotion, Themes, Plugins and Content

Unless you are keeping a hidden personal journal, obviously you want people to read your blog. You can make a better mouse trap, but you have to let people know about it. In this section we will look at the pros and cons of various ways to get readers to your site.

Themes
By now you should have a theme installed. Through all this promotion business, always put yourself in your readers shoes. Will that frilly background be annoying or does it enhance? There are two salient things to consider about themes:
→Is your theme SEO friendly?
→Does your theme visually say what you’re about?
This is why God made designers. They have studied and understand the importance of visual impact. It is because good designers provide templates and themes that you can follow simple guidelines, use the KISS principle and have a professional looking blog.

Some general visual No-Nos
Women tend to add frilly, pinkish backgrounds with lots of doodads. This is like wearing your identity with loud clothes and body piercing.
Guys tend to use black or deep red with white text, garish looking sites, hard on the eyes. I’ve seen some sites that hurt my eyes so bad I didn’t stay to read them.
I can’t over-emphasize the importance of easy to read text. We are adults, and we want to read as such.

What does SEO friendly mean?
This means the theme is coded (it should be) to meet standards, and allow search engines to find and index your blog with the least difficulty. Some themes are much better at this than others. Thesis was built from the ground up to be SEO friendly. And yes, I am a Thesis affiliate. I used Thesis long before I became an affiliate and would continue to use it regardless of that.
Unless you choose some bizarre theme with too much junk coded into it, don’t be all that concerned with this aspect right now.
SEO is complex. For the best advice about SEO be sure to read Ann Smarty’s blog.
Have a look at For The Lose and Theme Lab for more insight into themes and SEO.

Plugins
Some people get crazy with plugins. Don’t. Only use a plugin if it is necessary and adds needed value to your blog. Do be careful with plugins. Incompatible plugins can easily take your site down and make it inaccessible. Too many plugins can have a deleterious effect on loading time. No one wants to wait and wait for a site to load. Add a mere few seconds to load time, and most people will leave.

The reason people have problems with both themes and plugins are nearly always compatibility issues. WordPress releases frequent updates which often break existing plugins. It happens, but not as often with themes. I do not recommend auto-updating WordPress for this very reason. This is akin to beta testing. Wait a week or so before updating and see if others are having problems with new WordPress updates. Do install security updates, regardless of themes and plugins.

So, what plugins should I install?
This is what I use:
Akismet – Installed by default. You need a WordPress API key to use.

BackUpWordPress - Essential, makes backing up your database easy.

WordPress firewall - Another must have for security, especially for those less knowledgeable about coding.

WP Super Secure and Fast htaccess - The htaccess file is far too complex to go into here. Suffice to say, this plugin will write to the htaccess file code that hardens security even more. At some point you should know more about what it is and how it works. For an in depth look see htaccess.

WP- ContactForm – You should have a way for people to contact you. This hides your address from spammers, and allows people to communicate with you privately.

A social bookmarking Plugin – I use SocioFluid and DIGG DIGG. Many times I’ve wanted to RT or DIGG a post, yet I see no convenient way to do that. Make these icons easy to see. Never make people work to promote you.

What would Seth Godin Do – This is a great plugin for returning visitors. It is self-explanatory once you install it.

Optional Commenting – I use Disquis. There are pros and cons for every system of commenting. Again, think in terms of what is easy for your readers, not what you like to look at. Have a look at a comparison of styles and decide for yourself what is best.

Optional – Use the All In One SEO plugin if you are not using Thesis or a similar theme.

Optional – Use the Google XML sitemap plugin. Use this because it will generate a sitemap of your blog for Google indexing.

The King of All Promotion

When talk turns to getting people to your site, one aspect is almost universally agreed on – Content is king. This is not particle physics; it is common sense. You must have something on your blog that interests people,  else none of the other things make much difference. This one thing is the hardest part of blogging for most people. It is so important let’s break it down.

Your best chance for success is to find a niche and keep within that niche with your posts. What is success? In this context it is getting the largest number of people possible to read your blog.

Your least chance for success is a blog with your rants and opinions. This is especially true for beginners. A well-established A-Lister may have a highly successful gossip blog. Not many people will read your blog just to hear you bitch about something. We all see enough of that elsewhere online.

We live in a time of blog saturation. You will be hard pressed to find a niche that someone isn’t writing about, and doing it well. You have to do it better.

You can blog as I do, leaving yourself open to write about various things. This scatter-blogging style is not usually as successful as a niche blog. In my case, I write for me. I hope I can help people with some of my posts, this series being an example.

The Wrap Up

• Use a clean, well organized and SEO friendly theme.

• Use plugins sparingly. If it doesn’t add value it takes value away.

• Make it easy for readers to promote you. Be sure you have sharing and RSS feed icons visible and easy to use.

• If you want to be successful, you must post often and your content must be excellent. Merely good is not good enough. Niche blogging affords you a better chance than scattered blogging.

• Guest posting is the best promotional device you can use. Find others in your niche, contact them and ask if they will accept a post. Ann Smarty has created a great Guest post community. No matter how you set up your blog, joining this community and writing good guest posts will bring attention back to your blog better than all the social networking put together. Danny Cooper has created a Backlinks movement you should consider as well. The more backlinks to your blog, the higher your page rank with Google.

• Serious blogging is not easy. Success will not come quickly for most. Don’t fall for all the hype about making money blogging. Do read this wonderfully honest post by Someone Bull at Thesis Theme HQ.

This is the end of this six part series. I sincerely hope all who read this, or parts of it gain some benefit from my years of experience building websites. If you have questions, please feel free to contact me. For personal answers that require more than a few lines please use my Contact form. I promise to get back to you as quickly as possible.

Peace

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