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.

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?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: How to Build Content for a New Blog

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.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 2

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 information 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?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: 20+ WordPress Plugins You NEED.

I’m starting a new blog series called 52 Weeks to Success.  It’s going to be about starting a blog and building it up, start to success (notice I didn’t say finish).  It will make decent money online and detail every part of the process from conception to execution to making money.  Without further adieu:

Commitment

Time: 7-10 Hours; Cost: $11

Research a Niche

I’ve been losing weight for about 3 months now and I’m down about 25 pounds.  I’d like to lose about 30 more, so I’m going to focus on health and fitness as my niche I think.  Notice I said I think, because I haven’t done any research yet.  I’m not a fitness expert, nor am I particularly fit.  I do know from hearsay that gaming, fitness, dating, and finance are great niches to work in, but they’re extremely competitive.

Since I know I want to do something in Fitness, I’m going to pull up GoDaddy.com and Google External Keyword Tool.  I’ll start with the keyword tool and check for phrases that are in my niche.  I like phrases have a lot of words and a lot of searches.  3 words and over 5,000 searches usually means it should be easy to reach number one.  On GoDaddy, I’ll try domains that match the keywords that show up in the External Keyword Tool. It’s absolutely important that you know what keywords you want to rank for, because if you don’t you might be wandering a bit.  This allows you to focus.  I found that this is ultimately what lead to my success in building websites.

After an hour or so of playing with variations on diet, health, fitness, exercise, and blog, I ultimately chose “core fitness blog” as my keyword of choice.  It has 27,000 searches and is extremely competitive, but I’m ambitious.  This may blow up in my face later, but we’ll see what happens.

Get a Domain Name and Set Up Hosting

Now that I’ve selected a niche and some keywords, I need to buy a domain.  I just happened to find the perfect one that includes both of my keywords and another fairly relevant keyword.  I registered the domain and proceeded to set up my hosting.

If you have questions about how to set up a domain or hosting, just shoot me an email or leave a comment.  I can help you with that.

Install WordPress on the website and stick with the generic template.  Design doesn’t matter right now.  What you need is content.

Start Writing Content

Write 10 articles, spending about 30 minutes each on the articles.  Don’t go straight from one article to the other either.  Take 5 minutes or a day in between to take a break.  Have some food, surf the net, work, sleep, play Tetris, or do something else that gets your mind off of writing.  If you don’t do that, you’ll burn out.  Remember: this is supposed to take about a week.  Once all of your articles are written, go back and read them all out loud.  I don’t care if it’s awkward.  Also: if you can have someone else read them – do that too.

Once you have all of your articles written, load them into WordPress and date all of them 15 or so days apart going back in time.  If you need help doing that, just let me know.  The reason you do this is to give your blog some long term relevancy right now.  People tend to trust a blog that has been around for a while and has multiple posts.

Get the Word Out

Any time you’re not working on the things mentioned above, you need to be discussing your niche with like minded people.  I’ll be detailing specific effective ways to get the word out in later posts, but in general, just get a conversation going.  Use social media like forums and other blogs to drive peoples’ interest in your direction.  You could easily spend 40 hours a week on this specific part of development.

Concluding Week 1

You should have more than enough work with these tasks.  Always remember that if you have extra time, you can move on to next week if it’s out already, or you can fill your time with spreading the word.  Everything listed in this post should take about 7-10 hours (less getting the word out) to do and cost $11.  You can use this method to build 4 blogs simultaneously as your full time job, or one blog after work.  Tell me how your first week went in the comments below.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 1

I got really lucky with that domain name and put it to use.  I just made a website that tries to be offensive, sexy, and disgusting all at once.  We’ll see how it does.  The system is built on WordPress and is using a free theme for now.  What’s interesting is how low my bounce rate is.  We’ll see if it keeps up.

Here’s a link:

http://www.drunkasshole.com

Note: drunkasshole.com is NSFW.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: New Project: DrunkAsshole.com

Here are some of the more popular blog posts that I made in 2008:

Hands down, the most popular post I made was How to Make Fire in Photoshop.

In March, I made a controversial post about Macs, PCs, and Linux.  I should probably do a follow up on this.

I found a solution to my Outlook / Google Calendar synchronization issues.  Actually Google found a solution.  Thanks Google.

I listed my top ten free applications.  I plan to do another version of this post in 2009.

I made a few submissions to shirt.woot derbies, but never won.  I have no problem admitting that the competition over there is pretty stiff, and the technical ability of some of the artists surpasses my own by quite a bit.

In December, I started doing contests for shirt.woot shirts.  I’ll probably change this up in the future to offer other things.  This just seemed like a great place to start.

I know I also did some things wrong.

By far the biggest thing I regret doing in 2008 was taking a break from blogging from May to September.  I think that really hurt my readership, and I’m going to try and refrain from doing that at all this year.  My blog also lacked focus.  I’m still having trouble breaking my topics apart.  Right now I think my lack of focus leaves readers wondering what I’m talking about half the time.  I’m really passionate about Woot, but a lot of internet marketers probably don’t care, and when I’m talking about internet marketing and programming, Wooters probably get bored.  Interesting perplexity.  I will try to address this in 2009 as well.

I have some pretty exciting plans for 2009 that I will follow up on later.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: A review of 2008.

The News

I first heard about the new Google AJAX Libraries API from Jeremy Schoemaker’s blog.  He mentions using it to reduce WordPress bandwidth, but really it can be used to reduce bandwidth in most AJAX based web development environments.

The Exciting Part

I persoanlly use prototype the most, and I’m extremely excited that I can use their libraries instead of uploading my own for each site.  I’m especially excited that calling specific version numbers is possible.  This makes upgrading a code set extremely simple, especially if you call the code version as a variable at the beginning of your code.

Realistically your javascript code is probably one of the lightest weight parts of your code, but every little bit helps, especially if you’re serving a large amount of users every month.

Optional Settings

Script Compression

I think one of the greatest optional settings for all of the scripts you can load is compression.  It’s not available for all of the APIs, but it is for most.  What it does is remove all of the whitespace from the API to reduce file size for the end user – increasing speed.  If you mix that with something like the javascript compiling on Google Chrome and you’ll have lightning fast AJAX applications.

No CSS

You can optionally remove the CSS from the scripts you’re remotly loading, which allows you to do one of three things: load the default CSS, load your own CSS, or not load the CSS at all.

Resources

WordPress.org: Google AJAX Libraries API Plugin – This plugin uses the GALA whereever possible in your WordPress installation.

Google AJAX APIs Blog – This is a great place to go if this really iterests you and you’ll be using this code regularly.  They’re always adding new scripts to the API, so if you don’t see the one you want yet, keep an eye on their blog.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Saving Bandwidth with Google Ajax Libraries API

I just upgraded this blog to WP 2.7.  I’ve done about three other implementations of 2.7 before I got to this one.  This was actually the first upgrade (the others were just straight installs).  Everything with the upgrade went smoothly.

New Layout

I really like the new layout of the admin control panel.  Having everything down the left side creates a lot more room for the editing pane.  The dynamic layout also flows quite well when the browser window is resized.  I immediately knew I had 4 comments in moderation that I needed to deal with, and it was easy to see.  One of the only things I dislike is there is a big red 3 next to my plugins menu.  I’m not sure what that’s all about, but it makes me feel incomplete.  It’s like that error message you can’t get rid of…

EDIT: I figured out what the error messages for plugins were.  I had 3 plugins that needed to be updated.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: WordPress 2.7

Is the content editor in WordPress too small for you? Just resize it. Look in the bottom right corner. It resizes just like a window in OSX, Windows, or Linux. Just click and drag to the size you want.

It saves the state of the window size, so all of your windows in the future will be that size as well.

-JKT

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Resizing the WordPress Content Editor