15 Steps to a Useful Blog
I’ve posted on How to Start a Successful Blog in 50 steps with some legitimate steps along with some attempts at humor. It is now probably time to give you some vital steps to making a useful blog. Before I begin the list, here are a couple assumptions.
- You know what the blog will be about.
- The blog will utilize WordPress as its blogging engine and WordPress is already installed.
- You would like visitors to your site.
This list is by no means comprehensive and certain steps can be eliminated or modified to fit your preferences. While this list is numbered, it is not sequential and can be completed in any order you like.
- Choose a WordPress Theme that fits your blog topic. (Don’t choose a cartoon theme if you are blogging about brain surgery)
- Create an account on Feedburner and burn the feed for your blog. Whenever you provide a link on your site to subscribe to your feed, use the feedburner link.
- Install and configure the Feedburner FeedSmith plugin. he plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.
- Install and configure the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
- Register your site within Google Webmaster Tools. Be sure to go to the tools tab and choose “Set preferred domain.” I recommend making your preferred domain be www.domainname.com. Now, Google views http://BlissLogs.com as the exact same site as http://www.blisslogs.com.
- Ensure that you have the latest version of the akismet plugin enabled. You don’t want any comment spam do you?
- Install the All in One SEO Pack plugin and use its features for all your future posts.
- To get some stats on your site, visit Google Analytics to create an account and register your site. When you get to the point of adding code to your site skip to step 9.
- Install the Google Analyticator plugin and add your Google Analytics UID to the options page.
- Now for a couple plugins that will make use of widgets to add content to your sidebar(s). Install the Popularity Contest plugin to rank your posts based on comments, linkbacks, pingbacks, etc.
- To make use of the Popularity Contest plugin in widget form, get the JAW Popular Posts Widget.
- Why not try to make a little money from your site? Create a Google Adsense account and skip to the next step to add the code to your site.
- Use the Adsense Manager plugin to add Google ads to your sidebar as a widget or with a simple tag within a post. This plugin makes adding ads to your site easy enough that anyone can do it.
- Once you get someone to read your post and comment on it, you want a way to get them to come back. The Subscribe to Comments plugin will allow them to subscribe and receive an email when anyone else comments on that same post.
- If a reader likes what they have just read, why not direct them to other related posts. The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin determines like posts and will list them on the bottom of each post. It may take a couple days and quite a few posts for this to become accurate so be patient. I like this plugin because it does not rely on you entering tags to each post but will automatically scan each post to determine their matching threshold.
There it is, 15 steps for making a useful blog. Do you have some steps that you would add, change or remove? Let me know about them so we all learn something new.
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Posted on March 16, 2008
By Jason Spence
Filed Under blogging |
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Those are great insights. Thanks alot for the tip.
Maria,
I’m glad you enjoyed the insights. I would be very interested to hear if you have any other tips.