How to Set Up Your First Blog the Right Way the First Time

Are you convinced you need to start a blog, but you’re overwhelmed by the setup process?

If this describes you and you’d like a little hand-holding in setting up your own blog, I’ve been secretly working with Chris Garrett on a free resource that’s designed just for you. It’s called:

Getting Started Blogging

It is a six-part course that will walk you through everything you need to know about setting up your blog the right way, the first time.

Set up your blog with good foundations

In a recent survey of ProBlogger readers, I discovered two fairly large groups of visitors with similar needs:

Group 1. Readers who were yet to start their first blog.

I was a little surprised to find this out at first, but it makes sense. Many people reading this blog are PreBloggers—they’re convinced that they need a blog, and they’re now researching how to do it.

When I drilled down into the needs and challenges of these bloggers, I found that many felt real apprehension and fear about the setup process, and wanted some hand-holding in getting started.

Group 2. Readers who had started their first blog, but had regrets about the way they’d set things up.

This group had taken action on their desire to start a blog, but they’d done it in a way that left them with regrets. Perhaps they’d made poor domain choices, hadn’t thought through platform selection, or hadn’t thought carefully about content and technical issues that hampered them as their blogs grew.

Many of this second group were reading ProBlogger as a way to research setting up their second blog in a way that was better than their first.

Getting Started Blogging

Whether you’re just starting your first blog, or you’re setting up your second, third, or fourth, you may be feeling a little overwhelmed by the options and how to do it right. Chris and I would love to walk you through the process and help you set up a blog with good foundations.

This course will walk you through six lessons:

1. Preparation. In this lesson, you’ll get tips on naming your blog, keyword research, and domain names.
2. Platforms. Where will your blog live, and which platform is right for you?
3. Types of Blogs.  This class is an introduction to some of the different blogging approaches you might consider.
4. WordPress. Here, we cover how to install and customize WordPress.
5. Adding Killer Content to Your Blog. This lesson is an introduction to the types of content you’ll want to add to your blog.
6. Introduction to the Pillars of ProBlogging. Once you’ve got the foundations right, I’ll walk you through four areas you’ll need to work on moving forward to build a successful blog.

Lessons contain a mix of both video content and articles. This course is completely free and is being run over at SitePoint’s courses area. And you’ll get immediate access to it all six lessons when you sign up.

We’ll send you daily reminders over the week to help you keep on track, but you can take the course at your own pace—all in one go, or over a longer period if you choose.

Interested? Sign up for Getting Started Blogging now.

Too Basic for You? Check out the ProBlogger Academy

Getting Started Blogging is unashamedly for those at the beginning of their blogging journey—those who are starting their first blog.

If you’re more experienced, you’re still welcome to take the course, but you might also be interested in a new series of short courses that Chris Garrett and I are putting together at the ProBlogger Academy.

These four courses can be completed as a bundle, or you can pick and choose the topics that are most suited to your needs from the following:

1. Creating Killer Content
2. Boosting Your Blog Traffic
3. Building a Community on your Blog
4. Monetizing Your Blog

Each course will be held over a week, and will have a forum area as well as Q&A sessions with Chris and myself.

These courses are not live yet, but they will be rolled out in the coming months. You can sign up now or leave your email address to be notified of them as they go live.

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Are Blog Contests Still Worth Running?

I’m running a month long contest through my blog BenSpark.com. I’ve dubbed the contest SwagsGiving. I have a bunch of products that I’ve gotten over the past year from attending conferences and connecting with companies and brands. Basically I have a ton of stuff that I cannot use. How many Flip Cameras does one person need. I guess I could videotape myself from multiple angles or something at the same time but for the most part this is stuff I do not need. So I want to give it away and I want to promote my blog and get a few followers/fans/readers along the way as well.

There are so many blogs doing giveaways and contests all over the place. How do you stand out? Here are a few tips that I have towards promoting and running your contest.

Running a month long giveaway contest.

Post every day at the same time so that people know when they can start entering the contest.

Tease the prizes – Talk about what you are giving away but don’t reveal what people are going to win each day until that day. I’ve got Seagate GoFlex drives, Kodak Cameras and signed books to give away. However no one knows what day I’ll be giving those prizes away. They will be given away during the month but the contestants don’t know which day those will be given away. This gives a sense of mystery around the whole contest and gets people talking.

Use Twitter - Set up a twitter account that promotes the contest and create your own hashtag for the contest.

Buy the Domain – I posted my first SwagsGiving post and Jim Kukral asked if I had the domain name for it, I didn’t but I bought it immediately. I then linked that address to a facebook fan page that I feed with the links to the contest each day.

Invite Your Friends – Look, everyone likes to win free stuff, especially cool free stuff. Invite your friends to your new Facebook fan page for your contest.

Allow people to win more than once. It keeps them coming back and since the winners are picked randomly it is fair.

Follow up with each winner quickly. Get in touch with the winner, they will post that they won and further promote the contest.

Thank entrants each day who didn’t win. E-mail each entrant telling them that they still have a chance the next day to try again.

Set up multiple tasks to enter the contest – Tweet, sign up for your newsletter, follow you on twitter, subscribe to your blog and so forth. The main point behind the contest it to garner more followers, readers and fans.

Use Video – Make a video each day of your winner and the prize the won. Congratulate the winner, leave links to the contest and further promote the contest.

These are just some ways that I run my contests. Do you have ideas for more ways to promote the contests that you run?

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Fanning the Social Media Flame for Viral Exposure

Are you a content marketer? If so, you have a choice to make.

You can sit around and wait for your content to go viral.

You can hope you’ll get sudden bursts of traffic, hope your readers will spread the word, hope your content will catch fire.

Or you can bring your own matches and lighter fluid to set the dang thing aflame yourself.

As bloggers and content marketers, which will you choose?

Sure, sometimes the passion you have for a subject will be enough to ignite a spark and compel your audience to share your content with their network. Being able to unleash something with such conviction and power that it combusts on its own is great.

Over at my SEO consulting firm Outspoken Media, we’ve been able to do it several times.

Sometimes we post something like The Power of the Unexpected, something that goes hot without us lifting a finger. As content writers, we live for these moments.

However, they almost never happen.

What is more common is that marketers need to fan their content to help it ignite and go viral. And sometimes that means stepping in when an accidental hit shows signs of life. How do you recognize those signs to take advantage? Here are some methods we use at Outspoken Media.

Identifying the spark

You know what’s normal for your community. You know how many comments an average post gets, how many tweets, how many shares, etc.

When you start to see activity that is double/triple what you’re used to seeing, act.

For example, early on we published a post called It’s Not The Recession, You Just Suck. Almost immediately after hitting the publish button I noticed the post being retweeted and passed through social media at a velocity that dwarfed anything we had seen prior.

Once we noticed we had a spark, we jumped in to add fuel and fan it.

Adding fuel to the fire

As soon as you notice a post showing signs of life, it’s up to you to keep the momentum going.

On the social Web, that means keeping the conversation alive. Find people who are talking about your post and encourage them. Respond to comments, engage, fan the debate, and keep the conversation on a healthy note.

When we called out Robert Scoble last year for spreading misinformation, he was the first person to come and engage on our post, and he did so negatively and aggressively.

The tone he set could have killed the conversation right there and caused people to be fearful of jumping in. But we weren’t going to let that happen. Instead, we went in there to engage Robert and show the community this was just the beginning of the conversation that would ultimately take place. We made it obvious that we were still in the post listening, and that everyone who commented would be heard and responded to.

No one wants to hang out at a party that’s dead or on its way out. Its important people see you’re still there.

Another way to add fuel is to allow readers to subscribe to comments so that they’re alerted each time a new voice enters the fray. This will keep them in conversation mode. It’s good for debate, but it’s also good in terms of SEO. The more page views the post receives, the more time people spend reading comments, the more it’s going to give off positive toolbar data to the search engines and help the post appear on an Alexa hotlist.

Fanning a positive flame

So, let me fill you in on something you already know — it’s really hard to have an intelligent conversation on the Internet.

Things always start out okay. Someone chimes in to offer an intelligent opinion and then, almost before your eyes, it devolves into threats, accusations and commentary about who still lives with their mother.

While it’s 100 percent entertaining to watch people have emotional breakdowns in public, conversations that get too far off track hurt your chances of going viral.

As the owner of that community, you’re responsible for fanning the flame in the right direction. When you see personal attacks being made, it’s up to you to steer the conversation back. If you think people are going too far, moderate.

Be careful, though. Viral conversations are typically rooted in debate. So you don’t want to discourage or squash it, but do keep things productive. You need to be the adult in the room, regardless of how good it feels to throw things.

Hitting the social streets

Once you’ve helped fan the flame, hit the streets!

Make sure your piece has been properly submitted to all the right social media sites, that it’s been Stumbled, that it’s on Reddit, that niche social sites are aware of it, and that it’s hit all of the communities and blogs you know are friendly to you.

Once you complete that, look outside your bubble to find other networks that may find your content interesting. What you’re trying to do here is pull people in from other networks so they’ll go out and talk about it with their community, one that doesn’t currently follow you.

It’s great that your own readers are passionate and involved in the conversation, but you want to use the natural sparks to pick up on other readers to help grow your blog and authority.

Tipping off mainstream media

You’ve covered your bases on the social networks, now look toward news sites and blog aggregators that may be interested in the conversation happening around your post.

If you’re part of the marketing community, you want to watch aggregators like TechMeme and TweetMeme. If you have a hot social media story, you want to tip off someone at Mashable. If it’s Google or heavily tech-related, tip off TechCrunch. If it’s a broader tech story, tip off more mainstream outlets, as well.

For example, our post about what we perceived to be brandjacking by Seth Godin received coverage from Business Week. My partner Rae Hoffman’s post on Google’s Real Time Spam Problem was noted in USA Today. And my other partner Rhea Drysdale is often featured on CNN.

These don’t happen by accident. They were opportunities created by tipping off the right people at the right time. This is where having a linkerati list comes into play. It helps you know who to contact for what type of story.

Making sure the post is optimized for SEO

The final thing you want to do is properly SEO your post to capitalize on search.

Going back to our Robert Scoble example, when we saw that taking off, we went back and edited the title tag to include Robert Scoble’s name. It was a small tweak that allowed us to take advantage of Google’s freshness factor and appear in his News results.

It’s a temporary rank, but it made sure that anyone who searched for Robert Scoble that day found our post. Sometimes that’s all you’re looking to do, to help keep the momentum going and get eyes to the page. You have to build awareness.

Content marketers don’t have the luxury of sitting back and hoping something goes hot. It’s up to you to help things take on a life of their own, whether it was planned from the start or you picked up on early signs of success.

Savvy content marketers always have the matches and lighter fluid ready for when a spark presents itself.

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Awesome WordPress Plugins to Empower Your Visitors

This guest post is by Jeff Starr, co-author of the book Digging into WordPress.

Helping your visitors get the most out of your site benefits everyone. Visitors get more relevant and useful content, and you enjoy better statistics and more exposure. Unfortunately the game is set up to keep people away from your site. Think about it:

• Search engines are used to find your content
• Feed readers are used to read your content
• Social media is used to share, tag, and organize your content

These are major obstacles, certainly, but they don’t have to work against you. People use search engines, feed readers, and social media because they provide functionality missing from most websites. By integrating some of that same functionality into your site, you empower your visitors to maximize its usefulness. This may sound like a tall order, but if you’re using WordPress, improving your site couldn’t be easier. Let’s look at some awesome WordPress plugins to make it happen.

Google-power your search results

People will always use external search engines like Google to find content on your site. That’s a good thing, but you also want to empower your users with the best possible search results. WordPress’ default search is limited in several ways:

• does not do “exact-match” searching
• only searches posts and post titles
• only searches your current WordPress installation
• can be painfully slow, gobbles resources

Fortunately, we can harness the power of Google and empower your users with the most accurate, comprehensive, and speedy search possible. Integrating Google Search into your site provides the following benefits:

• exact-match searching (i.e., using quotes to match specific phrases)
• searches your entire site plus any other desired sites or directories
• usually works pretty quickly – much faster than WordPress default search
• optional additional revenue through Google’s AdSense program

Sound good? Here are some of the best plugins to make it happen:

Google Search for WordPress

This beautiful plugin works silently behind the scenes to replace WordPress’ search results with Google’s search results. You simply install the plugin and enter your Google API Key in the Google Search Settings. If you don’t have an API Key, it’s free and easy to get one. The only other requirement is to include “Powered by Google” next to your search form and on the search-results page. Once it’s installed, all search results will be replaced by those from Google. No code-wrangling required.

More information and downloads are available at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Google Custom Search Plugin

The Google Custom Search Plugin is another excellent way to integrate Google Search into your WordPress blog. Instead of signing up for an API Key, visit Google Search and create your own custom search engine by walking through the steps. After setting up your own form, grab the generated code and paste it into the plugin’s Settings page.

More information and downloads are available at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

More from Google

The More from Google plugin works a little differently by adding to your default search results instead of completely replacing them. After installing and configuring the plugin, your search results will include matches from both WordPress and Google. If Google has yet to index your entire site, this may be the perfect way to ensure that visitors are getting the best search results.

More information and downloads are available at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Other Ways to Improve WordPress Default Search

If Google Search isn’t for you, don’t fret. Here are two additional plugins that will vastly improve WordPress’ default search:

• Search Everything – literally searches everything in your database, based on your preferences
• Better Search – highly customizable solution for improving WordPress’ default search

Regardless of how you do it, improving your site’s default search functionality is a great way to help your visitors use your site and find the content they crave.

Socialize and communitize your WordPress site

Bring the excitement of social-media to your WordPress-powered site! There are so many reasons to empower your readers to favorite, share, and rate your content directly on your website, and just as many awesome plugins to make it super-easy to do. Here are some of the best plugins for making your site fun, social, and more interactive.

WP Favorite Posts

WP Favorite Posts is a popular, five-star plugin that enables your visitors to add favorite posts to their own list of favorites. Installation is easy, and the plugin is straightforward and easy to modify and customize to fit any design. I use the plugin on my Angry-Birds fan site. You can see the “Add to Favorites” link in the upper-right corner of any post. There is also a link to “View Favorites”, where each user can view (and delete) their favorite links. And even cooler than all that, you can display a list of everyone’s most-popular favorites, very similar to how Delicious works.

More information and downloads are available at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Star ratings and reviews

Post ratings are a fun and informative way to engage visitors and promote content. And there are many post-rating plugins to choose from.

In terms of functionality and customization, the GD Star Rating plugin can do just about anything, but the endless configuration options may be overkill. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got the elegant simplicity of the Vote-the-Post plugin, which is lightweight, flexible, and easy to customize code-side for tight design integration. I use this plugin to enable voting at Angry-Birds.net (see any post for example).

These plugins also enable you to display lists of top-rated posts anywhere on your site, so you can uninstall that most-popular-post plugin you no longer need.

Chat forum

Chat forums aren’t for every site, but when done right they’re great ways to build community and facilitate conversation. As with post-ratings, there are many chat plugins available in the Directory, but there are two that stand above the rest:

• WordSpew
• Pierre’s Wordspew

Both of these plugins are popular, highly rated plugins that provide flexible, customizable chat functionality. WordSpew is great because it uses Ajax to refresh everything automatically, keeping the chat window flowing in real time. Pierre’s Wordspew works without AJax, but it also uses a Flash .flv file that prevents it from working on devices like the iPad and iPhone. You can see a highly customized example of the WordSpew plugin at Dead Letter Art.

Show online users

Just like showing off counts for feed subscribers, Twitter followers, and Facebook fans, you can also show off the number of users currently online. An excellent plugin for this is WP-UserOnline, which provides several templates for easy configuration of how and where the user-online count is displayed. You can also set up a “Who’s online?” page that shows detailed statistics of where your visitors are on the site, who they are, and where they came from. This awesome plugin takes only minutes to implement using template tags and/or widgets.

Social media

Even after socializing your site, you want to make sure that visitors can easily share and bookmark your content on their favorite social-media sites. I tell you the truth, there are a gazillion plugins and widgets for adding every social-media site under the sun, but you really only need one plugin to do the job. Just install and configure WP Socializer and done. Any combination of social-media buttons, icons, links displayed virtually anywhere on your site. Tons of options yes, but they are all well-organized and easy to configure from the comfort of your WordPress Admin.

Wrapping up

No matter how awesome your website, there’s always room for improvement. With the techniques and tools described in this article, empowering your visitors to get the most from your WordPress site is as easy as installing and configuring a few choice plugins. As you go, keep an eye on site performance. Loading up with too many plugins can burden your server and slow things down for visitors. All the functionality in the world means nothing on a slow-loading website. A good strategy is to cherry-pick a few choice plugins and watch the results. Remember the goal is to help visitors get into your site and really use it for all it’s worth.

Jeff Starr is a web developer, graphic designer and content producer with over 10 years of experience and a passion for quality and detail. Jeff is co-author of the book Digging into WordPress and strives to help people be the best they can be on the Web. Read more from Jeff at Perishable Press or hire him at Monzilla Media.

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“The Rent is Too Damn High!” Guy Sells Out to Penny Auction Site

What a perfect and timely post for this November 2nd Election Day. Everyone should know who “The Rent is Too Damn High” guy is… it’s Jimmy McMillan of course, the candidate running for governor of New York. Put aside any politics and frustrations for the economy, Jimmy McMillan knows how to gain attention and with that attention comes money and power… potentially more than enough money to pay for his rent, which I’m sure is “Too Damn High!”.

Let’s quickly jump to another topic… Penny Auction sites, which are all of the buzz lately. Every place you used to see Acai and other rebill type advertisements, you now see these auction type ad spots filled with “Apple iPod Penny Auctions… Only $1.74” type of ads. These campaigns pay anywhere from $25 to $100 per sign up to affiliates, and are quite the buzz among the affiliate networks. A post was actually released yesterday about how one of these largest auction sites, SwipeAuctions is currently ceasing operations. It’s no surprise, as these ad campaigns are being promoted the same way the rebills and diet pills were, and it’s only a matter of time before lawyers, FTC and complaints start piling up and action has to be taken.

Back to Jimmy McMillan… he just released his own YouTube video of him pushing BidHere.com, which is a penny auction site with the same basis as SwipeAuctions and many other sites. BidHere.com is running a promotion on November 2nd for Election Day called, “Pay Your Rent for Pennies Auction“, so who more fitting than Jimmy McMillan to provide an attention grabbing video? No one…

What’s the bigger attention grabber here? Penny Auctions going mainstream with a “celebrity-like” testimonial… or how awesome Jimmy McMillan is for coming out of no where with his “The Rent is Too Damn High” party and slogan and getting endorsements and even a doll made up of himself! Is Jimmy McMillan… the second coming of Billy Mays? Probably not… but he does have America’s attention for a few moments, let’s see where it goes!

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October Trends + The 10 Horrors of Blogging

For those celebrating Halloween, it’s the spooky season, with haunted houses, terrifying costumes, and creepy decorations around every corner. What better time to look at the horrors that plague bloggers? Gruesome typos and grammatical errors, ghastly headlines, confusing echo chambers, dreadfully empty comments sections, and more!

Since it’s the end of the month, it’s also time to unveil October’s most-blogged-about stories, according to Regator.com’s trends. They were, in order: Halloween, Windows Phone, Brett Favre, Chilean Miners, Breast Cancer, ‘The Social Network’, Jon Stewart, World Series, Kanye West, and Nobel Prize. We’ll use posts from Regator about these top stories to illustrate how you can avoid the ten horrors of blogging…

The Horror: Typo terrors

See you next month with more blogosphere trends from Regator. In the meantime, you can get your niche’s trends or other free widgets for your blog at Regator’s new widget site.

Kimberly Turner is a cofounder of Regator.com, Regator for iPhone, and the Regator Platform, as well as an award-winning print journalist. You can find her on Twitter @kimber_regator.

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Review: Successful Blogging in 12 Simple Steps

For the beginning blogger who has limited experience, but lots of enthusiasm, Successful Blogging in 12 Simple Steps makes an ideal primer.

Written by Annabel Candy, from Get In the Hot Spot, this twelve-chapter ebook (lucky thirteen, if you count the bonus chapter) touches on all the basics, from choosing a blog topic to using social media to support your blog.

I found the structure of the chapters very clear: each chapter starts with a goal — this explains in a single sentence what you’ll learn from the chapter. It’s followed by a discussion of the relevant information, and a series of action points — practical tasks for readers to complete. The checklist that ends each chapter ties together the goal, learnings and actions so you can easily identify what you’ve learned, and anything you need to research further.

Annabel’s skills in web design and copywriting give this ebook a richness that others lack. She discusses issues like branding, website design and layout, and the basics of WordPresss. She also offers three chapters on writing: writing your blog’s static content, writing blog posts (which pays special attention to the all-important headline), and writing for the web.

The author covers all the key blog-promotion techniques in chapters on social media, online networking, search engine optimization and guest posting. Importantly, she stresses the value of understanding your blog’s statistics, and using these to help direct your blogging and promotion efforts.

This isn’t a detailed how-to guide for those with some blogging experience under their belts: Annabel keeps things fairly general and approachable. Her writing is, of course, great, and the ebook has a friendly tone that makes her advice seem eminently doable. If you’re squaring up to the challenge of running your own blog — for fun or financial gain — this ebook is a sound place to start. For more information, visit Successful Blogging in 12 Simple Steps.

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