9 Things To Do With A New Blog

There are thousands of blogs created every day, and while you may not be planning to create a new one soon, somebody out there certainly is. With this statistic in mind, shouldn’t there be a checklist that new bloggers can go through to make sure they have all their bases covered?

That’s exactly what I want to create with this post, and of course with your participation in the comments, so hopefully we can help build an excellent resource.

1. Optimise Your Permalinks

The permalink options for Wordpress can be found by going to Settings >> Permalinks. Basically, this is the formatting that your URL’s will take on. There are lots of different options for this, but personally I like to keep the most optimised format and in the ‘custom’ field enter:

/%postname%/

Additionally, you can change the ‘base’ name for your categories. So if you use the structure above your categories will look something like:

http://example.com/category/categoryname and you can make this

http://example.com/anything/categoryname

I like to keep the category name short as well as the URL’s in general. It’s a good idea that this is one of the first things you do with a new blog so that you don’t have to setup redirects later and potentially miss out on some backlinks that were pointing to your old URL’s.

2. Set-Up Feedburner

Just like how you don’t want to be changing your page URL’s at a later date, it’s a lot easier to stick to one RSS feed URL as well. Feedburner hasn’t changed much since being acquired by Google for $100m but it is still a very useful service.

Such features include:

* Being able to see how many people subscribe to your feed
* Being able to see what people use to subscribe to your feed
* Easy option to allow people to subscribe via email
* Links for voting buttons in your RSS feed
* …and much more

Once you have your feedburner link, make sure that you change all references on your site to the new RSS feed.

3. Change the RSS URL in your Header

I added this separately because if you are using Feedburner then this is important and needs a point on its own. One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of bloggers forget to change the URL to the RSS feed in the header of their site, so when people subscribe via the address bar (shown below) they get the wrong URL.

To do this, go to your header.php file for your theme and find something that looks like this:

RSS Feed” href=” ” />

The part in bold is what you will want to change to match your RSS feed, so for my site I would put this:

RSS Feed” href=”http://feeds2.feedburner.com/hqhow” />

Alternatively, you could use this feed to feedburner redirection plugin.

4. Stats Tracking

This is a relatively simple and obvious step, but needless to say, you need to know where your visitors are coming from. For stats tracking I use free services from both Google Analytics and BLVDStatus. BLVDStatus allows for live tracking of my visitors, while Google is better for more advanced reporting and in-depth stats checking.

Both sites will give you some form of javascript code which you should ideally place just before the end tag in your code.

5. Optimise Titles

There are quite a few plugins out there that allow you to optimise your Wordpress titles; some of the most popular include the All-in-One SEO Pack and SEO Title Tag by Stephan Spencer.

Currently, I don’t use a plugin and actually changed my code manually, so in between the tags in my theme header, I have the following code:



The part that is in bold is for the homepage of the site, so you could change this to whatever you want. The code is then saying that if we are not on the homepage for the blog, just use the title of the post and nothing else. If you would like more control over this though, I recommend one of the plugins above.

Speaking of plugins…

6. Install Your Favourite Plugins

Everyone has their favourite plugins, but if you’re buiding a site for the first time it might help to get to know some of the ones available. A few that I like include:

* Brians threaded comments - this allows replies in comments, although newer versions of wordpress enable this
* Feed Footer - this allows you to add text to the bottom of your feed, I include a link to a free eBook but you can put anything there
* WP-Contact Form - created by Joost Devalk, this plugin lets you see the pages people visited or how they found your site before they contacted you, a good way to know if an email is just spam

Installing plugins can be tedious on older versions of Wordpress but it’s nice to see your site come together how you like it.

7. Subscribe to Your Own Feed

This is simple so I won’t rant on, but it amazes me at how many people don’t do this. It took me over a year to realise one my RSS feeds was severely broken and included no line breaks, occuring because of plugin conflict.

Subscribe to your own feed so you can see that things are getting formatted to your liking and you can test that it is actually working.

8. Put Together a Traffic & Income Strategy

This won’t be for everyone, but there are a lot of you out there who are looking to perhaps become full-time bloggers someday or at least earn some nice side cash from blogging. With this in mind, get 2 sheets of paper or open a word document and put a list of the things you plan to do in order to:

* Building Website Traffic
* Earn Money

If you don’t have a list then you have nothing to follow, and the chances are you aren’t going to be as efficient and effective with your goal as you would like to be. I now do this for every website and it’s worked out well for me.

9. Tweak Your Design

Of course, I couldn’t write this post without having an option to improve your design. While it’s great that there are so many themes available out there for the likes of Blogger and Wordpress, it’s still best if you tweak things a little. Even getting a nice logo can be the difference between a site that looks generic and a site that the owner really cares about.

Source: http://www.carlocab.com/

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