Day 2 – Selecting Your Design and Plugins
I hope by now you have bought your domain, hosted it and installed Wordpress! Today we will share with you how to make your site look good and user friendly!
Finding a Premium Design For Your Blog
You could create a blog just like any other good, awesome blogs! You can get a good Wordpress Theme with some $$. Its not just that theme, they have dozens with lots of great features to personalize it yourself! The huge benefit of buying a premium theme is that you don’t have to be spend long hours and huge sum of money to get the same results as the professionals!
So where did I get my Wordpress Theme? Woothemes of course!
Once you have purchased your theme, uploading is simple. Upload the file to your FTP folder marked Themes which is in the Wp-Content folder. Their is two ways to upload a theme, I personally use a FTP client called FlashFXP which you can get a FREE trial from Download.com
The other way is to upload via your hosting control panel. Login to your cpanel and click File Manager and go to the folder Themes which is in Public HTML and then WP-Content. Next, click upload which is in the top navigation and upload the zip file of your theme, once it is uploaded, unzip it.
Once you have done this, login to your Wordpress Admin and click Appearance and you will see your theme, click it and a preview will open up and then in the top right corner is a button saying Activate, click it and your theme will now work!
If you bought your theme from Woothemes then you can play around with all their really cool settings by logging in to your Wordpress Admin and scrolling down to the bottom of the sidebar and click the name of your theme.
Wordpress Changes
T0 make your website URL’s search engine friendly , is the easiest source of traffic. If you look at your first blog post URL it will be Domain.com/?p=1 when you really want it to say Domain.com/start-blogging-1. You want your URL’s and blog post titles to be what you expect people to be searching in Google, not something that always sounds good, a mix of both usually goes down well!
To make your links search engine friendly, go to your Wordpress Admin and click Settings and then Permalinks on the left side. Change the settings to Custom Structure and use the code /%postname%/ – This will now make your blog post link’s SEO friendly.
Another important SEO change is your page title and description, I personally use a FREE plugin to do this called All in One SEO Pack but as you guys are just starting, you may just want to edit these details from your Wordpress Admin by clicking General under Settings.
A Blogroll on your blog is a great way to start building links and traffic to your website. Find 5 to 10 blog’s just like yours and ask them to link to your site and you will do the same for them. You can add or edit your blogroll by clicking Links in the sidebar of your Wordpress Admin. It is also important to have a SEO friendly link, so instead of getting them to have the link as “55street” ask them to put the text as “Learn to Street Dance”.
RSS Feeds and Building Your List
A RSS Feed is basically a reminder for regular readers to alert them when you have a new blog post, this is one of the most important parts of a blog. I use Feedburner to manage all our feed updates, sign up and create a code and update your RSS link to the feedburner one. Feedburner also have a email update script that you can use, when you are logged in at Feedburner.com click Publicize and then Email Subscriptions, they will give you some code and then you can add it as a widget on your blog. To edit your RSS widget is really simple, login to your Wordpress Admin again and click Appearance and then Widgets, then click on RSS and paste your email code in and then save the changes. Your readers will now be able to subscribe for updates, when you add a new post and they will get a email or RSS message alerting them to check your blog out.
What is the biggest blogging mistake for Problogger? They should start building a list sooner! Creating a list is so powerful and a great way to make money online. Say you had 100 people visit your site a day, you want to get around 10 of them to sign up for your list, that means you can promote your website and products to them in future. You can create a auto responder series which automatically sends them a email every day to encourage them to work harder and make more money online – then promote them a product or two . Don’t be scared to promote products to them from day one, after all you only want people who are willing to spend money on your list. I personally recommend Aweber and iContact which both have a great service!
So make sure you have everything ready tomorrow and we will share our secrets with you 
free to COMMENTS and ask question!
Link to this pageOriginally posted 2009-05-13 12:29:49. Republished by Old Post Promoter
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