Part 10: On blogging and what to write.

Today’s installment, part 10, of the Foolproof, No-Nonsense, Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online is the last that is specifically aimed at newbies. Up to now I’ve been covering the basics of how to get a blog up and running – a skill that I believe every budding Internet marketer should master. Thankfully, as you will have seen, it is really quite easy.

Armed with this knowledge, you can build as many websites as you like – there need be no more excuses!

After all, making money online may not be as easy as some so-called experts may have you believe, but it really isn’t all that hard either – but without a website of some kind, it is a whole lot more difficult. Blogs are the ideal ‘first websites’ for absolute beginners as they are easy to build, simple to maintain, need no technical knowledge to speak of, and are loved by the search engines.

Later in the course we will look at how to build more traditional websites, including squeeze pages, sales pages, product download pages and all that good stuff, but for now, if you are just starting out, stick to cutting your online teeth on a blog.

The video today will show you how to start making posts (it is very short, so no time wasting here!) but here in the text let’s take a moment to talk about what your posts can and should consist of. http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video7/

The term ‘blog’ is a shortened form of the phrase ‘Web Log’ – the original term coined to describe a type of website that acts as an online journal. The idea was that you would post to a blog a bit like you would a pen and ink diary or journal, recording events from your life.

Of course, that soon expanded to include posts about all kinds of things.

In fact, it didn’t take long for people to realize that a blog could be used to display almost any kind of subject matter that needs to be updated or added to on a regular basis.

Blogs started to appear that were, in effect, product catalogues. People saw that they could post about their latest products – or affiliates learned that they could post reviews of items that would get them commissions.

The line between ‘traditional’ website and blog started to blur. And as the software that blogs were build upon (for example, WordPress or Blogger) became more sophisticated, and the third-party addons such as visual themes and plugins became more useful and user-friendly, so the ways in which blogs could be used has increased.

Alongside all of this, and probably driving it to a large extent, the search engines quickly came to see that blogs were an answer to their prayers. Search engines have long struggled to provide searchers with that Holy Grail of objectives: up-to-the-minute results. Google and their friends want to serve up the most relevant search results, but they also are desperate to serve up the most recent. Blogs, they quickly saw, are updated all the time. People are posting new stuff on them every minute of every day, and while the content of the posts may not always be totally on-topic, they were certainly up to date.

As a result, the search engines found ways to monitor when bogs are updated and as soon as they find new material appearing they send in the bots and the spiders to see what it is all about.

Whereas a traditional website can often take weeks or months to get into the search engines, blog entries can regularly be found on the top results pages within a few minutes of being written. I’ve regularly had product reviews that I’ve written appear in Google’s top five results within 15 or 20 minutes of my posting them to my blogs.

There is no sign of this phenomenon slowing down either. It is still a win-win situation for both the SEs and bloggers.

So, while it is easy to get your posts into the search engines – and initially into high rankings – keeping them there can be a challenge.

It seems to me that the search engines like to get the most recent blog posts listed very fast, but then, over the next few days, they take a harder look and decide if the content of the blog post is really as good as it needs to be to warrant high rankings. That’s were your skill as a blogger comes in.

Writing blog posts is a very similar skill set to writing articles. You have to stay on topic, have a coherent theme, make your primary keyword both obvious and focused and, increasingly importantly, have a good range of LSI words within your post so that the search engines can accept you as an ‘authority site’.

If you are unsure about what LSI words are, or how to find them, my Keyword LSI Spy tool is the answer – you can learn more about LSI in general, and take a trial of Keyword LSI Spy at http://www.keywordlsispy.com

Blog posts can be as long or as short as you like. If you write short ‘snippet’ posts, consider writing them more frequently and showing more to a page (10+). For longer posts, you can blog less often and show fewer posts per page. For this course, I’m displaying only one post per page – for the reason that I want the search engines to see that each page is on a focused topic.

Another kind of blog that has become popular with Internet marketers is rather rudely called a splog – a spam blog. These consist of little in the way of fresh, personally written content and are usually just autoposted private label articles, directory articles or ads. Purists decry them, but I don’t. They have their place. Sometimes they can achieve good search engines rankings in their own right – especially if they latch on to a keyword or niche that isn’t well served with ‘full-feature content’ blogs. Oftentimes, though, they don’t get highly ranked in the SEs, but they do provide you with a platform to link back to other ‘money’ sites that you may have in their niches.

Neil Shearing’s 10 Day Cash Secret WordPress plugin – http://www.urlnex.us/10daycashsecret/ – and Kim Standerline’s excellent EasyBlogsPro scripts – http://www.urlnex.us/easyblogspro/ – both automate the production of blogs that are based on externally sourced information. Both work very well indeed – but some people are still wary of creating blogs that are not personally written. To that comment I say that there is nothing at all stopping you from using either of these scripts to augment your own blog. Sometimes you can’t write blog entries every day – in some niches, once a week would be pushing things – but with affiliate ads being fed in regularly (using Neil’s script) or well-written, on-topic articles being posted direct from the main articles directories, your personal blog can be kept fresh, updated and enticing to the search engines while you are waiting for inspiration to strike!

The very best kind of blog to start out with is one that covers a topic you are personally knowledgeable about. My uncle is in his 70′s, doesn’t know a blog from a burger, finds NotePad too complicated, but has still managed to build and maintain a very creditable blog at http://magicderris.com which has, in a few weeks, already started building a list of regular visitors. His latest stats show an average of over 20 unique visitors every day – and growing. And with absolutely no publicity. It is almost all coming from natural search engine traffic.

The next step for him will be to add a few monetization ideas – primarily AdSense, affiliate products and an ebook or report of his own.

Anyone can become a blogger – it just takes a commitment to succeed.

This installment has been much longer that I anticipated, so I’ll stop here. Next time we’ll look at a different aspect of Internet marketing, but meanwhile, you can now review the whole of this course so far at http://imkickstart.com/course/ – please feel free to visit the blog and leave your comments!

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Part 9: WordPress Plugins – and pinging. 

The basic WordPress installation is great. It does all the things a basic blog should do – allows you to make posts and manage them quickly and efficiently. The developers, sensibly, decided that they would design WordPress with an open framework so that third-party developers could build small additional programs – called plugins – that would add all kinds of extra functions.

A few of the more specialized plugins are commercial programs in their own right and are sold as such. Neil Shearing’s 10-Day Cash Secret plugin that I recommended in Kickstart is one such. That one allows you to use datafeeds from affiliate management programs to feed hundreds or thousands of affiliate-linked product posts into your blog.

But despite there being a few plugins that you have to pay for, the vast majority – thousands in fact – are completely free for you to download and use. You can find over 1600 of them at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ – some are brilliant and some make you wonder why anyone would have bothered to create them, but all are free and easy to install, so experiment!

Most bloggers never need to pay for a plugin at all – you’d only do so if you needed the functionality it offered, and were pretty sure you could use it to make your blog more profitable.

In today’s installment of this course I plan to show and tell how easy it is to install and use plugins and how to go about finding some of the best ones around.

When you become more proficient with WordPress you will start to wonder ‘how can I get it to do this, or how can I achieve that’. More often than not, someone has had the same thought before you and has created a plugin to get the desired effect.

The video today is short, but it shows you exactly how to install three of the main plugins that I use on all my blogs. As time goes on, we’ll look at other plugins and how they can enhance your blog and your visitors’ experience of it.

http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video6/

In the video I mention my ping list – you can download my list from http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video6/ping.txt

In the next installment I’ll start making blog posts – in fact, I’ll put all the installments of this course on the blog.

See you then.

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Part 8: Not even a pretty face.

We left off the last session of this course having just created a WordPress blog.

WordPress blogs, as you saw, are very easy to set up, but they suffer from a few disadvantages ‘out of the box’.  The primary one being that they are incredibly boring to look at! The default template is very dull – but the good news is that changing the look of a WordPress blog is really, really easy.

You don’t need to know a thing about HTML or CSS.

There are thousands of templates available for great looking WordPress blogs and all you have to do is find one you like, download the files to your computer, unzip them and upload them to your server.

Then, in WordPress itself, you click on an image of the new template and that’s it – your blog will look great.

It is another one of those things that sounds complex, but when you see it with your own eyes, it is very simple, so take a look at the next video in our series to see how the new imkickstart blog gets a smart new look.

First a quick admission – and an object lesson learned…

In the last part of this course I set up the blog in the root directory of the imkickstart.com domain. That would have been fine, except for the fact that in my haste I failed to make a note of the password I used to enable me to access the admin area of the blog.

Doh!

So this morning I’ve had to uninstall the blog and reinstall it. In the process I decided that I’d rather have it in a subdirectory of the site, so the URL to see it is now http://imkickstart.com/course/

See – even those of us who have done it hundreds of times can make a mess of it sometimes, but it really doesn’t matter. There are very few mistakes you can make that take more than a few minutes to put right.

Don’t let the fear of messing up stop you. I – and everyone I know – make mistakes all the time, but we just move on.

On with today’s video: http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video5/

There’s one more thing to do when, like with this blog, you put it in a folder. If you don’t yet have anything in the root directory of your website – in other words, you haven’t yet created an ‘index’ or ‘home’ page, then you may inadvertently have a security risk on your site.

Taking my domain as the example, typing http:/www.imkickstart.com into a browser would not lead to a page because I haven’t made one yet. In that case, the browser will view your site’s directory structure and any other files that are stored in the root directory – and you may well not want people to have access to that kind of information.

Plugging the security hole is very easy. All that is needed is to create file called index.htm or index.php and put it into the root directory (sometimes called the public_html directory.

If you make a blank file in a text editor, save it as index.htm and then upload it to your public_html folder, your problem is solved. Anyone who types in your website address will get blank page.

But that’s a bit rude, don’t you think? I’d rather send them to someplace useful than just show them a blank page. And where could be more useful than your blog?

In my case, I typed the following into a text editor:

<?php header(‘location:http://imkickstart.com/course/’); ?>

and then saved it as index.php. Note that it should be all on one line with no linebreaks.

Now, when you type http://www.imkickstart.com in your browser you should be redirected seamlessly to the front page of the new blog. And the security risk in plugged.

Next session we will change the default settings in the blog to make it more SEO and user friendly, add a few really useful plug-ins to add to the functionality and, finally, make the first blog posts.

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