How to Outsoure Writing

Well now that we have taken all the steps to where we need to be I am going to start talking about various topics that are important to developing your blogs once they get off the ground. We need to keep up with our blogs so that they don’t die off and our efforst can reap some rewards. So today I’m going to talk about how to oursource your writing so you can focus on other things.

Outsourcing Saves a TON of Time

Outsourcing is the act of paying someone else to do work for you. It’s a simple concept and it saves you a lot of time but it does cost you money. However, if you find a quality person to do your writing or other activities then you will get plenty of quality for your money. In the long run it is always well worth it to spend a few extra dollars for your content because if you buy low quality content you will ust have to spend your time going through and editing it and fixing any errors it may contain. That is really annoying since you basically paid someone for a rough draft of an article. I’m a person that never likes to waste any time so for me I always try to spend a little more if it means not having to edit the article later. 

Now that we know what outsourcing essentially means we can find places to get the people to write our articles. There are many places you can go to oursource your writing but one of my favorite places to find writers is the WarriorForum because there are many skilled and experienced writers there that can really help you out. They may cost a little bit more but they are so much better then other writers I have hired. It’s pretty easy to find people there that are available to write content for you. If you scroll down and go to the Warriors For Hire section you can see many offers for content creation. After taking a quick look at the current offers I’d say the average price per article is around $5 but some threads have articles at $3 per and as high as $10 per article. I think that’s a pretty good representation of what you will find there. My suggestion is find one person who you feel will do the best for you, purchase a few articles to see what quality you get and if you like it stick with this person long term. It’s always best to get long term agreements because it builds a relationship and often saves you money. 

You don’t have to outsource your article writing but if you are feeling like you are getting too busy to write for your blogs then I suggest you do it. Also, if you start developing multiple blogs at once it becomes quite tiresome to write posts for each one and it is often easier to just outsource it while you work on other things. Whether you outsource or not is up to your but I tell you it will help you out and probably will make you more productive! That’s all for today so I’ll see you guys tomorrow.

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Tags: outsourcing

WordPress Theme Talk

After the slight veering off topic yesterday we are back on course today and the discussion today is all about themes. A blog is nothing without a decent theme so let’s take a look at how to get a good theme.

We Need a Quality Theme

It’s well known that themes that look clean and professional are much more likely to keep users on the site. Would you want to go to a site that has the default template on it? My bet is that your answer was no. I wouldn’t either and most people would agree with us. That is why it’s so important to have a nice looking blog.

There are a couple of ways to get a theme for your blog, there’s the free way and there’s the paying way. Both options have pretty good themes but both have pros and cons. The free option has TONS of themes out there, and I mean tons. A quick search of “free wordpress themes” yields over 2 million results. Now some of the themes out there will be garbage but you CAN find some really nice looking themes. TopWPThemes have some excellently well made themes that are free for download. If you just do a little bit of searching you can find a theme to fit your needs and your blog. The one con of free themes is that other people can have the same one so you lose a little credibility if you have the same theme as thousands of other blogs, but if you don’t have the money for your own custom theme then this is just fine for now.

The second option is the option that costs you money. This is definitely the best option out there. Getting a custom theme designed, while costing you money, will definitely give you that professional feel. If you get a custom theme then you can get it exactly how you want it and the quality will definitely be better. However, if you are just starting out this may not be the best option to switch to right away. It does cost a good amount of money and I would say the average cost for a decent custom designed WordPress theme would be about $100. Now of course you can go find a freelance that could probably do the job for about $50 or you could go and find a company that does it and be charged around $500. Either way you need to decide for yourself if the expense is worth it right now because it is a decent amount of moneyto invest in a blog. 

I hope that helps clear up any concerns or questions about Wordpress themes but if it doesn’t just elave a comment and I’ll try and answer it. If you don’t have a new theme on your blog then I suggest you go out and download a free one and upload it to your site.

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Tags: development, templates, Themes

Permalink Settings

Today I am going to discuss something that I wasn’t planning on until it was brought to my attention. Since I really want this blog to get noticed then I have to do everything I can to make sure my on page SEO is the best that it can be and when something was brought to my attention that showed that my SEO wasn’t as strong as it could be it caused me to take immediate action to keep my SEO the best it can be. Now I want to show you how to do it so you don’t make the same mistakes. 

How to Set Solid Permalinks

Well permalinks are the URL links of each of your individual posts, for example the permalink for this post is http://websitedevelopmentology.com/2009/01/18/permalink-settings/ . This is important because we want to make sure our article titles stay in the URL for increased SEO benefits.  The default for WordPress permalinks sets your posts as .com/?p=23 where 23 is the number assigned to the post and as you can see that’s not very good for your SEO because that doesn’t mean a thing to me or the search engines. Now I will explain the steps to checn your permalink settings.

1. In your WordPress admin area go to Tools and then Permalinks.

2. Click on Day and Name and then click Save Changes.

3. If your .htaccess needs to be changed, which I needed to do, then do this. 

3a. Open Notepad.

3b. Paste this,

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

</IfModule>

3d. Save as .htaccess

3e. Upload to your public_html folder.

4. That should be everything, refresh your permalinks settings page and see if the changes were saved, it should say so in the top left corner of the page if you did it correectly.

Now that you have done that you will have much better on page SEO and you need to make sure you do this very soon because your previous links will lose whatever is attached to them so switch over to get yoru new links some juice. That’s it for today and I’ll see you back here tomorrow for some template talk.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: Basics, development, SEO

Importance of Frequent Updating

Hey guys, I’m back today to explain why we need to make sure that we keep updating our blog. We’ve learned how to update our blog and how to write the articles to put onto our blog and now I today I want to discuss why it is important to keep our blogs updated. 

Google Loves Fresh Content

The basis of today is the fact that Google absoultely loves fresh content. The whole basis of a blog is the fact that your are constantly updating your site with new information and articles and this attracts those spiders like crazy. It’s critical that you get spidered by Google, and other search engines, because without them then you won’t get indexed and thus won’t see results from all your hard work. At this point our number one goal is to get indexed on the major search engines, that is Google and Yahoo. If you don’t ever get inndexed then you won’t get any traffic, or at least not as much as you can if you get in the search engine results which is our primary objective.

Since I posted my post on how to write articles two days ago I think that you should have posted at least 1 article onto your blog by now.  At this point I want to instill a writing discipline that I have been trying to put onto myself and that is to make a post every day for your blog for the first 30 days. The results I’ve seen from this have been spectacular and I think it is the best way to get indexed fast and stay indexed. You don’t have to necessarily write a new post for your blog every single day for like a whole year, but for the first 30 days I would highly recommend it and then after that you can sort of back off a little bit. There’s an old saying, “Content is KING!” and that is certainly the best statement that sums this all up so go write some more articles!

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How to Update Your Blog

By now you should have at least 1 or 2 articles ready from yesterday, and if not then that’s okay just make sure that you do work on one to get up onto the blog. Since blogs are all about updating today we will talk about the simple process to get your articles onto your blogs. Before that though you must have an article ready, so if you do let’s get started, if not go write one!

How to Update Your Blog

Updating your blog is really easy! There’s no messing with code or figuring things out, it’s simply copy and paste and enter some details and you’re ready to go! So first things first.

1. Open up your article in Notepad, or whatever you wrote it in.

2. Login to your blog dashboard.

3. Under Posts click on Add New.

4. At the top enter the title for your article, I usually like to put my keyword that I am targetting into the title because I feel it helps with on-page SEO.

5. Then go to your article and copy the whole thing then paste it into the body on the page. 

6. Now for some minor details, enter a category for the article and a few keywords to associate with the article.

7. If you have the All-in-One-SEO Pack, which you really should, then scroll to the bottom and enter a title, description, and keywords to add more SEO benefits to your page. 

8. (Optional) If you don’t want the post to be shown immidiately then go under Publish on the right hand side and click Edit and enter the time when you wish the article to be posted. This is especially helpful when you have several articles ready to go in advance. 

That’s all there is to it! It is really simple and I think anyone that has come this far should easily be able to get their articles onto their blog to get it filled with some content. Content is king afterall so make sure you get a post or two up and then come back tomorrow for more information.

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Tags: articles, Content, updating

Let’s Write Some Content!

Well today we get to the meat of our blogs that we have worked so hard over the past week and a half or so. We have put in lots of work setting everything up so that now we can just focus on one thing, and that one thing is writing the content for the site. Once we get the content on the site it will look like a real blog and people will actually want to visit it! So let’s check out how I go about writing my blog posts, and for this situation you can do this your own way, I just like doing it my way.

How I Write My Articles

First off for every article I choose which keyword I’m going to focus on and this will lead me to a topic to write about. After all that keyword research we did you should definitely have at least a few ideas for stuff to write about. Then I open up Notepad and start writing. I usually like to start with an introduction to just overview what I am going to be talking about and set up what the post is going to be about, you don’t have to do this but I like to just give a little step before I dive right into the discussion. Depending on the type of article I’m writing I will have around 2-3 paragraphs for just a normal article and if I really start writing like crazy then i may end up with 4-5 paragraphs but that’s only if I really get into the topic. Then I usually will type up a conclusion paragraph to just finish off my ideas and end on a high note. That is how I usually go about writing my articles.

You may however have a different approach and that is completely cool. Also one more thing is that if I don’t really know that much about my topic I will just pop the keyword phrase into Google and look for a good article onthe topic and do a little research. You don’t want to talk about stuff you don’t know so the more you can find out about the topic the better you will sound as an “authority” on your topic. If your readers trust you then you are much better off so don’t try and fake it because people will see right through most of the time. 

Writing content is really not that hard but it does take time, so make sure to give yourself proper amount of time to devote to writing your articles. Once you practice you will get better and faster at writing these, like most of the other topics we have discussed it just takes time to get better. Maybe you’ll be a pro right away but I doubt that. Once you’re a pro then you’ll be making articles at about 1 per 15 or so minutes. So go and get starte on your content and I’ll be back tomorrow!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: Content, development, writing

How to Install a WordPress Plugin

In the last post I talked about the 5 plugins that every blog should have but I never acutally adressed how to install those plugins, my bad. I seem to do this sometimes, and this si the second time that I have assumed that you already knew how to do this and you have my apologies if you don’t know. So in this post I will teach you how to install the plugins that we talked about and any other plugins that you find.

Installing Plugins

With the current WordPress release adding plugins is really easy and takes just a few seconds of effort. If you have Wordpress 2.7 then you can follow these steps.

1. Log into your admin panel

2. Click Plugins and Add New

3. Search for the desired plugin

4. Click on install and then enter your details for the FTP, these can be found under your Cpanel if you don’t know it

There you have it, the really easy way to install plugins on WordPress. As long s you have the latest Wordpress update then you can do this whenever you need a new plugin. Now of course there are occasions when you can’t do it this way and there is also a very easy way to install them if they are not available in the previous method.

1. Download the plugin from wherever you are getting it.

2. Open up your FTP client, I use FileZilla but it doesn’t matter.

3. Login to the FTP and open up the directory with you blog.

4. Navigate to wp-plugins under WP-content and drop the plugin into the file.

5. Go into your admin panel for your blog and activate it under plugins.

That’s all you have to do! Wasn’t that easy? I think it was. So now you can go and get all those plugins that I suggested and the plugins that you find on your own you can now easily install in seconds. Well that’s it for today, it was pretty easy but I have more for you tomorrow.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: development, plugins

5 Must Have Plugins

Welcome back guys! Today we are going to continue setting up our blog with some must have plugins to make our blog even better and more user, and spider, friendly. I’m going to highlight just the 5 plugins which I feel are the most important but there are many more out there that are very helpful and most of them are free. Let’s get started.

1. All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack is, in my opinion, the most important plugin to have on each and every blog that you have. It makes your blog very search engine friendly and helps a ton with SEO. It’s very important that we get the best SEO so that our sites can get ranked as high as possible in the search engines. Go ahead and install that plugin. It’s prety easy to use, whenever you make a new post there’s a section towards the bottom that allows you to enter a title, description, and keywords for your article and that’s all there is to it.

2. Google Sitemap Generator

Google Sitemap Generator is another helpful plugin to help your site get indexed appropriately. This plguin is really easy too. All you have to do is install the plugin and then go to the settings page and create a sitemap, and then you can go over to your Google Webmasters account and put it in for your site, that’s it. 

3. Cforms

Cforms allows for integration of contact forms on your site wherever you need to place them. This is really handy so you don’t have to code up your own contact forms and the forms are really nice and easy to set up. Once again it’s just install and edit the settings to your liking.

4. Sociable

Sociable is a plugin that adds a social bookmark section to the end of each blog post you make, just look at mine at the very end. It allows you to pick which social bookmarking sites you want to show and is extremely easy to set up. Like the others it’s as easy as install and select what and where you want to show. Social bookmarking is a great promotion tool so we should definitely get this.

5. Adsense manager

Adsense Manager is a plugin that allows you to insert your adsense ads into your blog without having to edit the actual files of the blog and rather just inset them into the sidebar via the plugin. It makes everything really easy, just go to your Adsense account and creat an ad and insert the code into the plugin. Then you just pick where it should show up and you’re set. This is definitely a must have if you plan on making money via Adsense.

Those are all the plugins which I feel are the most important to have on all of your blogs because they will only help and are easy to use. I use all of them on my blogs and I highly recommend the same, plus they are all free and downloadable via your admin area in WordPress. Go ahead and get these going and I’ll have more for you tomorrow.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: development, plugins

Installing Wordpress

Here is the day that I have been waiting for. We’ve done the research, we’ve got our domain, and we’ve set up our hosting and now it’s time to start the blog. I love when this happens because I just get so excited when I set up a new blog. Setting up a new blog is just so much fun as it means starting something new and I just love the feeling of that. It’s such a wonderful feeling to see all the hard work you’ve put into this so far come to life. so without further adieu let us begin.

Installing Wordpress

Ok, so you may be thinking, “This is going to be really hard and I won’t know what to do,” you’re wrong because it’s really easy. It will be even easier for you if you have Cpanel because there are easy one click install buttons right inside Cpanel to make the simple as easy as clicking a button and inputting in a few fields. However, if you don’t have Cpanel it’s still really easy! Essentially it goes like this,

1. Download the WordPress files from WordPress.org.

2. Follow the instructions right on the 5 minute handy installation guide. 

It really is that easy. The only thing you have to worry about is this, download, edit the config.php file with your database name, upload, run installation. If you have a little trouble with the database stuff it’s really easy. That guide has the process to do it all no matter what you use so you should definitely be able to figure it out, if not come back here and leave me a comment, I would LOVE to help you out. Maybe even I could install if for you if you are having a lot of trouble because I find it really easy and actually kind of fun

That’s it for today, so get your blog set up and get ready for tomorrow. Again, if you don’t understand something on the guide or if you just have a question or comment I would lvoe to help you out so don’t be afraid to drop me a line and I’ll get back to you as fast as I can.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: development, wordpress

First Thing We Need

Well welcome to the first post on the development part of this whole process. This is the beginning of where it gets really fun, at least I think so. Today is going to be a light day and we are just going to get some stuff set up for us so that we can move onto other stuff later. Let’s get started.

Development Beginning

In order to have everything set up we just need to get a few things in place. These two things are hosting and a domain, because to be serious online you are going to need these because you can only go so far with free services like Blogger or Squidoo. First things first we are going to need a hosting account. Now it really doesn’t matter where you sign up, just don’t be fooled by sites claiming “Unlimited Everything” because that’s just a bunch of BS. I am a big fan of HostGator because they have excellent service for an excellent price. You don’t have to host with them but they are definitely one of the best in the business. However, if you don’t have all that much cash laying around you can go with a free hosting account for now and upgrade later. All that matters at this point is that you get some hosting.

After you have some hosting it’s time to get a domain. As with the hosting you can really get these anywhere but some places are better then others. I usually stick with GoDaddy for my domains but sometimes Dotster has some really nice promotions for cheap domains. Wherever you get your domain just keep this in mind, you should try and get your keywords in the domain. Odds are that the domain will be taken for your keyword in the .com and .net but think a little creatively and you can find some real gems. Also I like to stick with .com, they cost another buck or two but they are the kings of domains and are much more respected by internet users. 

Once you have both of those you should connect your domain to your hosting by editing the nameservers for the domain, your hosting should tell you what to change it to. It’s really pretty easy so go ahead and do that. It’s good to get this out of the way now because it takes 24-48 hours for your domain to get set up properly on the hosting. 

Well that’s it for today. Go ahead and do those couple things and then take a break. Tomorrow I will talk about setting up your site.

Popularity: 72% [?]

Tags: development, Domains, hosting