Laying the foundations for a successful WordPress website

Hi my name is Mitz from WordPress Website Builder. I build websites for a living and love sharing what I know about websites. When building your first, second, or one hundredth website, laying the right foundations down in the first place should be your number one task. Certain things just have to be done and I have found that a “website foundation checklist” is a great help. As I only use WordPress for my websites, the list only applies to this content management system and the steps I use to build a WordPress Website. Many of the steps will be familiar to you, however we often forget to complete them all before launching into a website or blog.

Research a niche.Make a list of keywords that apply to your niche.Buy a domain name that includes your top keywords.Install the website. Upload WordPress.Install a basic theme. You will probably change it later so don’t waste time now.Add Categories that use your keywords. Do not make them up as you go.Change permalinks structure and settings for WordPress.Install all your plugins that you use. (I have another list for that)Create a Twitter account, a Facebook Page, and a Feedburner account. Hook these accounts into Twitterfeed.Add links to these accounts on your sidebar.Add your Mailchimp or Aweber optin code to the side bar in the top position.Setup 7 auto responder emails to to go out to your new optins.Add 5-10 great posts. Schedule 20 more.Change your privacy settings to let the world in.#1  Research a niche

There are many ways to research a niche, however the easiest one is to do a search in Google for something you are interested in. Then do the same search in the Google keyword tool and Google insights. What you are looking for is a niche that gets people searching for it but doesn’t have too much competition. Some people also go to Clickbank to find a product to sell and then create a website around that. If you are new to all of this then I have already prepared a basic step by step article and video tutorial showing how to research a niche for your new website.

#2  Make a list of keywords that apply to your niche

When you are researching your niche in Google search and Google keyword tool you will see a list of related searches and keywords that you can add to your keyword list. These words are great to use as WordPress categories, subjects for posts, and link building anchor text.

#3  Buy a domain name that includes your top keywords

Buying a domain name with your keywords in it can take you to the top of Google organic search. If you build the right foundations to your website you will most likely stay there too. For example the first website I made was a great domain name, Tips4pc.com, however I wanted to rank for “computer tips” and the guy that included this in his domain name is always number one in Google search. I have to struggle while he has the keywords in his domain name. After a few years I finally woke up to this mistake and created all my websites with keywords in the domain name. I am number one for all of these.

#4  Install the website. Upload WordPress

Again I have learnt by my mistakes and now use WordPress for every website I build. Why not use it when it does everything for you?

#5  Install a basic theme. You will probably change it later so don’t waste time now

This is where most people waste time, installing a theme, tweaking it, and then changing their minds and starting all over again. I now install a simple theme, very basic with minimal features, and add to it. By the time you add the plugins and banners, the whole website comes alive.

#6  Add Categories that use your keywords. Do not make them up as you go

People usually just slap any old category into a WordPress website, however I have found that if you plan your categories and create them beforehand thoroughly, you will benefit from more natural search traffic. If your categories are clearly defined it also helps the visitor find what they want.

#7  Change Permalinks structure and settings for WordPress

Of course everone knows you have to change the permalinks in WordPress. It takes about one minute to do and changes your urls into search engine friendly URLS.

#8  Install all your plugins that you use. (I have another list for that)

Yes I have a list of plugins that I use and choose from that the ones I need for a particular niche or style of website. Installing plugins is very important and must be done before launching your website. That way every post from the start will be pinged, added to the sitemap, and optimized, all to your advantage. Comment plugins encourage input from website visitors which is a must when building a website.

#9  Create a Twitter account, a Facebook Page, and a Feedburner account. Hook these accounts into Twitterfeed

For every website I create it’s own branded Twitter account, Facebook page and a Feedburner account. Then I go to Twitterfeed.com and enter all these details in. Twitterfeed will publish my posts automatically to my Twitter and Facebook accounts via my RSS feed. So all I have to do is post on my website and information is shot out everywhere. Of course there are other software and websites that do the same thing. It doesn’t matter which one you use as long as you are doing it.

#10  Add links to these accounts on your sidebar

Once you have created these accounts you should make them accessible on your website. This way you will get people following you. It will not happen if you do not display the icons.

#11  Add your Mailchimp or Aweber optin code to the side bar in the top position

If you do not have a Mailchimp account or an Aweber account then you are not serious about your website marketing and your foundations. Both these companies offer a free signup for new accounts so you have no excuse. I have a Mailchimp account and it is used to collect email addresses for me. I just create a new list for every website I build, then create a form for that list, and get the code and paste it into a text widget on my sidebar. Its that easy. Mailchimp does the rest.

#12  Setup 7 auto responder emails to to go out to your new optins

If you set up emails in your account to send out to your optins and certain times, automatically, it will save you time and stress in the end. I usually setup 7 emails to send out over a few months. The more emails you have lined up, the better. In the emails you can link back to your website, add affiliate links, and more. Always give valuable information to keep them wanting more. Setting up this foundation is very valuable. You do not want people signing up to your list and then receiving no correspondence from you. You need to keep your website fresh in their minds and give them a reason to visit.

#13  Add 5-10 great posts. Schedule 20 more

When starting a website you need to make it look like it has some content. Visitors who land there want to see something interesting. You also need to make sure your content is relavent to your niche and valubale information at the same time. If you are not very good at writing content yourself you can outsource the job. This is all the rage at the moment. Scheduling your posts in advance will give you time to concentrate on other things like getting traffic and SEO.

To schedule a post simply ==>click on the Edit link next to Publish immediately==>then move the publish date forward==>click ok==>the publish button will then change to a schedule button==>press it to schedule.

#14  Change your privacy settings to let the world in

I know this might sound like a lot of work, but who said it was easy to start a website? You can just slap up a website and hope for the best, but why not do the hard yards first and then sit back and relax, knowing that the background work is done. Once you have done all these steps you can concentrate on creating great content for your website, knowing that the wheels are already turning.

I have more details about each step on my newest website WordPress Website Builder. If you examine this website you will see that I have followed the steps above to the T. The website is ranked #1 for my main keywords ” WordPress Website Builder” and is climbing the ladder on other harder to get keywords also.

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Filed under: Motivation, foundations, Laying, successful, Website, WordPress

How I Grew a Second Blog to Over 6,000 Subscribers – Twice as Fast

I’ve had a lot of public success with blogging over the last few years in terms of both making money from my blogs and growing the size of their respective audiences. What a lot of people didn’t see before this success is the number of failed blogs I’ve started which consumed hours upon hours of my time, only to go nowhere.

I attribute some of the success I’ve found now to the lessons learned from those failures, and I still feel like I’m learning a lot today, which is one of the reasons I love blogging so much.

At the end of 2009 I sold my personal development blog, PluginID, for a mid five-figure sum (I can’t reveal the exact amount) when it had no less than 6,600 subscribers. It took me a little more than 18 months to reach what I consider quite a substantial readership.

In 9 months I’ve grown by a similar figure with my marketing blog, ViperChill, which I re-launced a few weeks before announcing the sale of PluginID, which had been sold a few months prior.

Though I don’t think blogging is a great way to make money fast, there are ways to speed up the growth of your blog. Similarly, if you’re just focused on growing quickly and making some easy money, then you’re in blogging for reasons that will probably stunt your growth.

There are a few core principles that I believe really helped me to grow my blog fast that I want to share with you today.

I Focused on the Essentials

When I first started PluginID I was literally doing as many things as I could to help grow the site. You would find me going through dozens of sites per day on StumbleUpon, leaving comments every time a blogger in the same niche posted an article and connecting with as many people as possible on Twitter.

Some things were effective, but others were pretty much a waste of time. Now, with ViperChill, I have two simple aims:

Write the best content that I canWrite the best content for others that I can

I haven’t used StumbleUpon for as long as I can remember, I leave less than 5 blog comments per month and I generally just communicate with the same people on Twitter that I did a few months ago. I found that the two most useful things for me were writing the best content I can – which others talk about – and writing great content for other people (guest blogging).

By focusing on these two things, I was able to maximise the effectiveness they had and leverage these strategies to help me grow far quicker than I had in the past.

I Worked to Build Fewer, But Stronger, Connections

Another thing I did when working on my personal development blog was try to become a ‘friend’ of 50+ bloggers in the niche. Not only did this distract me from the essential items that should have been my priority but it also led to lots of mediocre relationships, rather than a few great ones.

In the marketing field now I’m in contact with a lot less people on a daily basis, but the connections I have with these people actually result in things that help my blog grow. For example, some of the relationships I’ve built have led to me getting press mentions and regular links on popular blogs.

They also make it very easy for me to grow my reach whenever I have something to promote, as these connections as more than happy to help me. Similarly, I’m more than happy to help them with things that they need because I’ve built what I think to be genuine relationships with them.

I Made Subscribing the Most Prominent Thing on My Site

Over the last few weeks I offered one-on-one coaching for a short period of time. I had many bloggers sign-up to work with me and the number one critique I had for most of them was that it wasn’t clear what they wanted people to do on their website.

Some had pop-ups for newsletters which were more prominent than their RSS feed (yet they didn’t care as much about getting newsletter subscribers) while others had Adsense ads all over the place yet were making pennies with it and turning away the traffic they did get.

Though I eventually did this on PluginID; I made subscribing to my feed the number one focus of ViperChill. The site is very clutter-free, with only a few places to navigate and take action on besides the content itself. Unlike most blogs, I don’t even have links to my post categories.

Instead, I have clear links to my RSS feed in the sidebar of the blog, at the bottom of all posts, and frequently in the post text. I believe this focus reduces distractions for my site visitors and makes it clear what I want them to do – which also happens to be the thing I think will help them the most (get free content updates).

Instead of feeling like you have to be everywhere and offer everything. Try narrowing the focus of your blog and see where that takes you. I think you’ll be surprised with the results.

This article was written by Glen Allsopp who writes on the topic of viral marketing. If you found this useful, you might love his most popular post which is about WordPress SEO.

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Filed under: Motivation, 000, 6, Second, Twice

What Would You Do Differently If You Were Starting Out Again?

I recently saw this question on an internet marketing forum. The writer was specifically looking for responses from ‘successful internet marketers and veterans’ to see what they would do if they had to start out from scratch again. I thought it was a really good question for a newbie to ask.

Most people spend years becoming truly successful online and most will have made every mistake known to man to get there so asking them what they would do if they had to start again from scratch is an ideal question.

Interestingly enough, all of the responses were different. So what does that say?…well, to me it simply says that there are plenty of ways to make money online. How wonderful is that?! You don’t need to worry if it will work or not because once you find a system or method that suits you; it WILL work if you keep at it. Persistence is the key with this business but most people don’t have it in them to keep at it until they do eventually succeed. And they keep buying the next “big thing’ hoping it will help them make money overnight, and of course that doesn’t work for them either because they don’t put the time in.

So let’s look at some of the responses to that post to see what some of the ‘successful’ internet marketers would do:

1. ‘Create your own product’– in other words, write your own ebook, create a membership site, create and sell your own WordPress theme, build a plugin etc. Now prior to us releasing our ebook we wouldn’t have put much stock into this one but I can say with hand on heart that this is one that I would recommend, to someone with experience on the web. However, for someone new to it all, it’s not an easy one to start with and personally I wouldn’t suggest it to someone brand new on the internet. Others may disagree on that one but I really think you need to know the basics on how to build a website and how to market a product on the internet before you get into something like this.

2. ‘Give value in everything you do’ – now I love that response because that has become our philosophy. If I were starting again I would make certain that I have that line floating around in my head instead of ‘How can I make money online’.

3. ‘Approach article marketing differently’ – basically this poster said that he wouldn’t have wasted his time posting to Ezine etc and instead would have created a relationship with a couple of authority sites and submitted his articles to them exclusively. Personally I wouldn’t just stick to one or two but the basic idea is there. If you can get your articles on authority sites or blogs that relate to your niche then you will be streets ahead of the rest of those who simply submit to article directories.

4. ‘Create an email list’ – this one was a common response. This is the one thing we have been a bit slow to take on although that is changing now. If you have a nice list of people who follow the same things you follow then you can promote products to the list and make money that way. One of the main advantages of a list is if your websites suddenly disappeared overnight then you will still have a following of people and it won’t take long to get back up and running.

5. ‘Create a plan’ – as the poster said, most newbies don’t have a plan or a set of goals – all they think about is the money. Setting goals is extremely important. We have a roll of butchers’ paper that we roll out and write our plans, ideas, and goals. And we do this at the very least once a week. Its not set in concrete, we can make adjustments to suit what is happening but by doing this we always know exactly what we need to do in the coming days, weeks and months.

6. And finally my response to the question was that if I were starting out again I would create only one website instead of many and would create 5 really good product reviews for that site using Amazon products. I would then spend 80% working on getting traffic and backlinks to those 5 pages and the other 20% of my time writing informational type articles to add to the site. That’s all I would do. Nice and simple and this is the one method that I know absolutely works.

FINALLY RELEASED – Our complete guide to making money online by promoting Amazon products. Head over to the AMAZONIAN PROFIT PLAN website for all the latest info.

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Filed under: Amazon, Again?, Differently, Starting, Would