Become a Blogger "part 3 / 7"

Welcome to the 3rd part of the Become A Blogger
Mini Course. Inside today's lesson, I'll talk
about all the nitty gritty details of optimizing
your blog for floods of new traffic.

But before we get into that, let's have a quick
recap to look at all the things we covered so far.

Inside the first lesson, I explained in more
detail exactly what a blog is.

Inside the second lesson, I talked about a very
important subject - that of selecting the right
topic for your blog.

Picking the wrong topic could be detrimental to
your success as a blogger, and that's why I made
sure I gave you enough information to figure it
all out.

If you have not selected a topic for your blog
yet, don't stress about it. Just be patient and
keep doing research and drilling down on the kind
of activities that you are truly passionate about.

The next step was to get your blog up and running,
and I suggested you use the complimentary videos
on www.becomeablogger.com to help you set up your
very first blog.

So, let's assume for now that you've been able to
select a topic that you want to blog about, and
you've even been able to install your very own
blog.

So what's next after that?

Before you can start getting traction for your
blog you'll need to optimize it.

Unfortunately most installations of WordPress does
not come optimized, but lucky for you, there are a
few neat little tricks you can implement to get
this all sorted out.

There are two areas of your blog that you need to
optimize for...

- Search engines
- And people

Let's tackle the first one for now...

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How To Optimize Your Blog For Search Engines
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There are a number of things you can do for
optimizing your blog for search engines. The first
and most basic thing you need to do, is to install
all the right plugins for your blog.

The essential plugins you'll need to install are:

*** The SEO Title Tag plugin ***

Depending on your theme, this is likely the most
crucial plugin you will need to install into your
WordPress blog. Some themes (like the Thesis theme
for example) takes care of the same kind of issues
that this plugin takes care of.

But in most cases, the SEO Title Tag plugin will
be "gold" for your blog in the weeks, months and
years to come.

Basically, what it does is turn all the titles of
your posts into search engine friendly titles.

In other words, using this plugin, search engines
will be able to easily pick up on the keywords you
use inside the titles of your blog, and therefore
increase your chances of getting ranked on the top
pages for search engines like Google.com.

You can get the SEO Title Tag plugin here:

http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/


*** The Subscribe To Comments Plugin ***

Now this is a really neat little plugin. It's easy
to install, and at first sight does not look like
much. But boy! Can it help you get more repeat
traffic to your site!

The Subscribe To Comments Plugin creates a little
check box inside the comments area for each of
your blog posts which allows people to subscribe
to all the comments that are being made on that
particular post.

Then, every time a new comment is made, the person
who subscribed to the comments, receives an
instant message telling them that a new comment
has been made. They can then click on the link
provided inside their email that will take them
straight back to your blog.

How cool is that!? Simple, but powerful.

You can get the Subscribe To Comments plugin here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/


*** The WWSGD Plugin ***

This plugin is great for increasing your number of
RSS subscribers (watch videos #9 and #10 on
www.becomeablogger.com to get an understanding of
what RSS is).

WWSGD is short for "What Would Seth Godin Do". And
it's named after Seth Godin, a well known marketing
genius.

The WWSGD plugin creates a small subscribe box at
the top of each of your posts each time a new
visitor comes to you blog. You can modify the text
inside the box, but basically, it lets you ask
someone who's new to your blog to subscribe to
your RSS feed.

If they then click on the link supplied, they will
immediately get directed to the page for
subscribing using your RSS feed.

So, whenever you post a new blog post, all your
RSS feed subscribers will get notified, and
therefore drive traffic straight back to your
blog.

You can get the WWSGD plugin here:

http://richardkmiller.com/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do


*** The Akismet Plugin ***

This is an essential plugin if you don't like blog
comment spam. Yes, you read that correctly, blogs
are also plagued by spam. But instead of email
spam, the spam comes in the form of comments on
your blog.

But luckily the Akismet plugin takes care of all
your comment spam issues. There's not much more to
it. You just install the plugin, and it then takes
care of the rest for you.

You can create your WordPress API Key needed for
the Akismet plugin here:

http://en.wordpress.com/api-keys/


*** The Sociable Plugin ***

If you are into the whole social media thing (and
you should be if you're reading this!), you'll
really want to install the Sociable plugin.

Once installed, it creates a list of icons linked
to all the popular social bookmarking sites so
that your readers can easily bookmark your blog
posts in case they want to come back to your site
and find specific information easily again.

Once again, installing this plugin will help you
drive traffic back to your site. So it's
definitely a keeper!

You can get the Sociable plugin here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/


*** The XML Sitemap Generator Plugin ***

The XML Sitemap Generator plugin is one of the
more intense plugins to install.

But it's really worth it.

It creates a special kind of sitemap (called an
XML sitemap) of your whole blog that is easily
readable by search engines like Google.com and
Yahoo.com. And this in turn makes it easier for
these search engines to list all your blog pages
and posts inside their search results.

So, this is a definite MUST HAVE plugin!

You can get the XML Sitemap Generator plugin here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/


That pretty much wraps it up for optimizing your
blog for search engines, using plugins.

There are a number of other things you can also do
to help optimize your whole blog for search
engines. But I'll leave that for another lesson.

For now, the above plugins will be a great
foundation to build on and will help you set up
your blog correctly for search engines right from
the start.

Now, let's look at the next main point...

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How To optimize Your Blog For People
--------------------------------------------------

Next I'll show you two really neat plugins that
you can install to make the user experience of
your blog so much more pleasurable.

The first plugin is called...


*** The Threaded Comments Plugin ***

What this plugin does, is create a threaded style
commenting structure for the comments that are
made on your blog posts.

In other words, this plugin allows you to not only
reply to a post on your blog, but also to reply to
a reply to a post... and on and on, creating
what's called a threaded, or nested comment
collection.

For an example of this, make sure you visit the
Become A Blogger blog at
www.becomeablogger.com/blog.

You can get the Threaded Comments plugin here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-thread-comment/


The next plugin is another keeper...

*** The Contact Form 7 Plugin ***

This plugin helps you create awesome looking
contact forms on your blog.

By installing the Contact Form 7 plugin, it means
that you don't have to list your email on your site
anywhere, hence reducing the chance that spam
trawlers will pick up your email address and send
you a bunch of spam messages.

The best part about this plugin, is that it
makes it extremely easy for your blog visitors to
get in touch with you directly, without knowing
what your email address is.

And besides, the implementation of this plugin is
just beautiful, and it really looks the part. I've
just installed this plugin on a new blog in case
you want to check it out for yourself. You can see
it in action here:

http://freemagiclive.com/contact/

You can get the Contact Form 7 plugin here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/


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What Else Can You Do To Optimize Your Blog For
People?
--------------------------------------------------

There are a number of other things you can do to
help optimize the experience of your visitors. One
major such thing is to install a decent theme for
your blog.

By using a great looking theme, not only will your
blog look more professional, but you will also
stand out from the crowd of other people who just
use no-cost themes.

Another problem with the no-cost themes is that
their coding is often very poor, and could affect
your search engine rankings in a bad way.

The one we recommend at Become A Blogger is The
Affiliate Theme, and you can grab a copy here:

http://www.affiliatetheme.net/625-4-3-1.html

We're already had lot's of really great reviews
from this theme, so make sure you get yourself a
copy.

...and that brings us to the end of today's lesson.

I hope you've found it useful and that you'll be
able to install all the above mentioned plugins
successfully onto your blog.

Don't forget that if you get stuck at all, get a
professional technical person to help you out.

If you don't know where to look for such people,
try a site like www.elance.com or ask in forums.

Once you've installed all the right plugins and
your new theme for your blog, you are ready to
move onto the next major stage of your blog -
content creation.

Inside the next lesson, I'll reveal some
magical content creation tips that will let you
crank out content like a professional author on
steroids. So, if you're stuck for ideas on
creating content, this part will just blow you
away!

This next lesson will help you create the back
bone of a long term very successful blog.

But I can't reveal too much more than that for
now. You'll just have to wait and see inside the
next part of this mini course!

Until then...

Talk soon!

Gideon and Yaro
Become A Blogger