Tag Archives: Content

The Smart Way to Start a Project

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Your next amazing idea doesn’t need to be a big project with a ton of investment. Sometimes people jump directly to the website building part of their next big venture, when really that’s more like a mid-point. You can build an amazing website that costs thousands of dollars and looks pretty, but if it doesn’t attract any users or doesn’t convert, you’ve wasted your time and money.

Have a plan.

People skip the planning stage too often. It’s hard work and they don’t want to do it. They just want to jump right in. A plan doesn’t need to be some 30 page business plan, but it should fill a certain amount of criteria. It also doesn’t have to be that detailed. It should answer the 5WH criteria at least:

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How to Build Content for a New Blog

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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.

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Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 5

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Stay focused and have a backup plan.

During the last three weeks, I’ve been going to trade shows, getting sick, and having family issues. On top of all of that, I started two additional business ventures, and started dumping more time into an existing one I was already working on that. Needless to say, my time has been limited and I’ve been slacking on posting to my case study blog, as well as this one.

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Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 3

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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: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 2

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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

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 you can always contact me.

Shoemoney System Review – Week 9

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I’ve been using the Shoemoney System for about nine weeks now.  I’ve seen all of the videos up to the ‘Facebook Ads Results’.  I personally love Facebook advertising and it was a great experience seeing some of the training videos, because I could pick up things I hadn’t known about.  I consider myself a fairly advanced user and was still able to walk away from the Facebook series with some new knowledge of FBML and Split Testing.  If you don’t know what those are, you really should be a member. Jeremy does a pretty great job teaching you about it.

Other points:

  • The $50 Facebook coupon was released finally in week nine. This means you should expect to see your coupons about two months after you start the system.  We all look forward to seeing the other $2450 in coupons.
  • I can’t comment on the quality of their support, because I haven’t needed to use them yet. I’ll addend this post if I do need to though.
  • In week 9 I’ve seen 27 Videos. Of those videos, I found that seven were useless (i.e. they were how to sign up for something), 4 were entertaining but not really educational (i.e. interviews and tours), 3 were great for beginners, seven were great for novice/intermediates, and five were advanced.  Overall, I’d say the best customer of the Shoemoney is a beginner to intermediate user.

Looking through the comments from the last review I did, some questions came up that I’d like to answer here:

  • Do you recommend this course for a newbie? Yes.
  • Does anyone know if the people that were allowed to join yesterday [Week 7] are already caught up to the people that joined on day 1? No.  The content is slowly released over time, so people that joined on day one will always be ahead (until they finish).
  • …The ShoeMoney System is now permanently open from Jeremy, I thought it was a exclusive program only for 500 student[s]… The first 500 people were just a test group.  I’m sure he doesn’t want to limit his potential to just 500 people.
  • I am seriously thinking about joining the Shoemoney system but not too sure whether it is actually any good at teaching about Adsense? In week 9, Adsense hasn’t been covered.  If you’re looking for something specifically for Adsense, this may not be the program for you.
  • Do you guys have any idea how to cancel you shoemoney system account? I can find the freaking cancel-button…

Here you go dude. Its all handled by Clickbank:

The ShoeMoney System billing is handled by ClickBank. Unfortunately we have no way to initiate a refund to you from our end, but it’s very easy for you to initiate the refund request and get the funds credited back to your bank account in 72 hours.

All you have to do is go to http://www.clickbank.com/orderDetail.htm

Entetr your Order number (this will be in the email you received from ClickBank when you purchased the product) along with your email address and click ‘Submit’

Then follow the step-by-step instructions for requesting a refund.

  • So I guess it is not possible to just get the whole thing, all 12 months, right away by paying all the money up front? True.  You’ll need to wait for the videos to be released.  This may change in the future though.

Have more questions?

Ask them below.  We’ll get them answered for you!

Recent Project: Vermont Quilt Festival

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Vermont Quilt Festival Snapshot

Front Page of the Vermont Quilt Festival Website

We just finished a project for a local quilt festival.  This is their new website, built in conjunction with Graycat Studio:

Vermont Quilt Festival

The entire website is wrapped around Joomla! template and completely customizable for them.  This was an interesting project, and we still have a lot more work to do for them.  We’re going to be building a registration database as well.  Exciting!

Google Sites Leaves me Bored AND Confused

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Overview

Google Sites is a product recently released by Google to create a place for colleagues to collaborate. I think it is meant to work something like a cross between Microsoft’s ultra complex SharePoint, and MySpace. The idea is to give users flexible control over their sites look and feel, while making it easy for users with out development or design skills to launch a functional work space. Once the site is created, users can collaborate in that “space.”

Joining

This is pretty straight forward. Just navigate to the Google Sites main page and set up an account. Your organization will need to be a member – using Google Apps. This can be a bit of a hassle if you aren’t the admin for your organization. I think this is Google’s way to combat the lash back from IT staff.

Setting Up a New Site

From the Dashboard, just click “Create New Site,” and you’ll be prompted for some basic information like: a site name, category, and description. You can also set who you’d like to collaborate with and pick a pre-defined theme from a rather bland selection of pre-made templates. When you’re done playing with these options, click “Create Site.” Your new site is online!

Using Your Site

Now that your site has been created, you can start using it. A nice place to start is with the “Edit Page” button just above the default “Home” page. This converts the whole page to a text area and title bar that are editable. You can place whatever content you want in there now, with standard options like bold, italics, underlines, links, bullets, etc. Click save when you’re done, and the page is published. You also have the option of attaching files and leaving comments.

Just next to the “Edit” button is a “Create New Page” button. This is where you can create new pages and add them the the “parent -> child” tree that the site is built on. Just below this area is the navigation menu, with a conveniently available site map, which is dynamically built, based on the pages you’ve created.

Tweaking Your Site

Really dialing in your site is where the fun begins. In the top right of your browser window, you can click “Site settings” and be taken to a page where you can edit site sharing settings, the appearance, and “other stuff.” The most interesting part is the appearance settings, where you can modify things like colors, fonts, and background images for different sections of the page. You can also modify your theme or site elements here.

Site elements are like widgets on the left bar next to the main content on your pages. Right now, there are only a few site elements, but I would imagine that they would add more as popularity grows. It may become something like the “widgets” for iGoogle (which by the way, I love).

The real meat of the Appearance section is “Colors and Fonts.” This is where you can upload your own background images and change colors for your theme create your own custom theme. I tried fairly successfully to recreate the look and feel of this site. One thing Google Sites does a lot better than a lot of other sites I’ve seen is the style manager. What one would usually use CSS styling for is in a nice GUI. For instance, adding a background image in the top left that doesn’t repeat involves just uploading the image, selecting vertical, horizontal, and repeat settings from drop downs, and hitting save. It’s done. That will probably make a lot of users that don’t know CSS quite happy.

“Other Stuff” is where you change things like your title, categories, and description. Oh, and you can delete the whole site here too.

My Thoughts

I’m quite underwhelmed by Google Sites. Products like WordPress seem to be much better. Although I’ve never used it, Blogger seems like a much better alternative if you’re looking for a Google product. That being said, this is an extremely new offering, and I’m sure it will get dialed in a lot better. Maybe the should have tagged it with “beta” for a couple years, like Gmail. This is also free. I find it hard to give something free a bad review, because your ROI is divided by zero. Im interested to see where this goes in the future.

I also felt like there should be more. That feeling just kind of confused me the whole way through. I think it may have just been so simple it was hard. Maybe I’m just dumb. :-)

What do you think about it?