Starting a Blog? Consider the Role of Personas in Your Blog Design

If you are preparing to start a new WordPress or other blog or website, personas can play a key role in the decision making.  I was reminded of this when reading articles at InfoGoRound an article sharing service that I am a member of.  For those wanting to know how to start a blog or improve their existing blog or website you should find this article on the importance of persona very helpful. Read more

Setting Up a WordPress Blog? Plan the Basics

Perhaps you have recently discovered WordPress and are ready to build your first website. Or maybe you are just looking for ideas to make your next website more usable. Here are a few tips that you might want to keep in mind while setting up that site. Read more

How Do I Set Up A Blog – Free Keyword and Article Writing SEO Tools

In the last edition of How Do I Set Up A Blog we talked about some of my favorite plugins and those that would be used at the Teenage Obesity blog. Today I want to mention a number of free tools that were used in doing research for the sites content and articles.

In building a blog or website and setting it up for best SEO (search engine optimization) you will find that there are both free and paid tools that will assist you with this. There are also a number of experts out there that provide a lot of great information for free. Naturally these experts hope that you will purchase their e-books or other products. While I have made some very worthwhile purchases (investments) in information and products I am squeaky tight as to what I buy for it is very easy to end up spending thousands of dollars and not getting a return on your investment.

First of all let me state that I am not an SEO expert. This blog was not set up to proclaim myself as a blogging expert. The purpose of Terry Lile dot com is to share with others that like myself may be new to or stumbling along in the blogging game and want to become more proficient. It is my hope that as I share with other bloggers they will also share with me. Through sharing we can all become more profitable bloggers. As stated before I will clue you in on product and services and experts that I have found helpful to me. I will also maintain an open door policy so that seasoned bloggers and SEO experts can also share their information here.

I presently have several blogs. Most of these blogs have Google AdSense, affiliate advertising or another form of advertising to moneterize them. As time permits over the next several weeks I will continue to make changes to them so that they better appeal to the reader and encourage for clicks on the ads of those on my pages. I will also be doing a lot more promotion to increase traffic to these sites and as I do I will share the steps I am taking with you.

In my latest blog Teen Obesity I am setting this up as a blog that is primarily moneterized by AdSense. AdSense Master Plan has online a group of free video tutorials that has been very helpful to me. While they do not particularly address WordPress they are packed full of some great information from Keyword research to setting your site up and promoting it. Naturally when you visit their site there will be promotional material encouraging you to buy other information though you need not purchase anything to view the free videos. Let me be upfront and tell you that if you happen to make a purchase I will receive a commission. For now though I am just suggesting this as a site where you will find some good free tutorials that you will likely find helpful.

At AdSense Master Plan videos include finding profitable niches, how to conduct proper keyword search, search engine optimization, designing your site, writing content for your site, proper AdSense optimization, getting targeted traffic and a whole lot more. All in all there are 20 free video tutorials at this site.

One of the free search tools you will learn about at AdSense Master Plan is an online tool called SEO Book, which is actually a collection of a number of search tools that are extremely helpful in keyword research. Aaron Wall the owner of SEO Book has also prepared several free videos covering keyword research, on page SEO, site wide SEO strategies and more. Just as everyone else including me, he will offer you the opportunity to make a purchase of other products. Never the less you will find the free information and tools there very helpful and how you decide to invest or save your money will be up to you.

If you check out Teenage Obesity you will notice that I have been in the process of setting up the blog. In doing so I have used the free tools of those that I mention in this article. This site is far from perfect and I will be tweaking it as we go along and keeping you posted as to its progress.

As part of the set up process I wrote a few articles to place at the site. As I previously mentioned one of the reasons I chose to start another obesity site is this is something I can write about. While some people can set at their computer and write on just about anything I cannot. That is one of the reasons that I do not claim to be making money on line expert. It is obvious that I am like many of you and in the learning cycle. For me though by sharing with others I am able to improve my own knowledge and hopefully all of us can learn how to make money.

For those of you that do not have the time or inclination to write your own articles there are a number of people that can be found on the web that will write them for you. The price for article writing is all over the board from about five to twenty-five dollars each.

When writing an article I will usually write it around a keyword. I will also usually do a bit of research to get keyword suggestions and maintain a list of those keywords for future articles. I have learned that it is best for the keyword to appear in the first paragraph and perhaps 2 – 3 times within the article. For me, I try to write naturally so there will be some variations of how the keyword appears. Originally I was making article submissions and then placing the same articles on my own site. In some cases I was also placing the same article on more than one of my sites. Like a fool I did not realize that this was hurting me with the search engines. While on some occasions I still repeat that practice I am trying to train myself to be better at writing separate articles for submission to the free ezines for distribution. Here is a good article of article writing mistakes by Christopher Knight of Ezine Articles. At the bottom of his article you will see a whole list of other excellent articles on article writing.  Ezine Articles are free and you will find them packed full of good information on both article writing and article submission.

As we conclude this series of How Do I set Up A Blog it is hoped that you got some good information out of it. It has been a great refresher for me and as you can see I still have a long ways to go before I can call myself a money making expert. I look forward to many of you joining me as together we learn how to make money with blogs. Please come back and share your thoughts and ideas. There’s still a lot of room out there in cyberspace for the opportunity to make money. I hope you find the perfect way for you,

How Do I Set Up A Blog – Favorite Plugins

In the last section of How Do I Set Up A Blog we discussed themes and uploaded the theme that was going to be used for the Teenage Obesity blog. First of all let me remind you that I am not a seasoned expert. I have been blogging for a while and had moderate success. I am continuously searching for and reading about better ways of making money by blogging. As I have done up until now I will continue to share with you good information that I find including links to the sites of those where I continue to find information that has been helpful to me. I also look forward to your sharing so that we can help each other.

There are a lot of free plugins available for WordPress. Here are a few that I have found that are helpful for Money Making blogs. These are the plugins that I am going to be adding to the Teenage Obesity site at this time. In the future other good plugins will be discussed as I come across them and try them.  If you now have or find some favorite plugins be sure to share that information. A quick check out the WordPress plugin directory will give you an idea of the many free plugins out there.

All in One SEO Pack: This plugin is used to optimize your site for search engines. Once you have installed and activated the plugin you will set it up.

Once the plugin has been uploaded go to the Admin panel of your WordPress site, and click on plugins, which is found at the top of the page. Locate the All In One SEO Pack and click on the word activate which is located on the right hand side of the screen. Once activated the box on the plugin page will now turn green. Now to configure the SEO pack you will go to settings and follow the directions below. These directions show what an expert has taught me to do and others may do it differently.

• Home Title: Enter the main keyword or keyword phrase you are going to target.
• Home Description: This is a short statement about the site.
• Home Keywords: List your main keyword or phrase along with a few others.
• Rewrite Titles: Leave box unchecked.
• Post Title Format, Page Title Format, Category Title Format, Archive Title Format, Tag Title Format, Search Title Format, Description Format, 404 Title Format and Paged Format leave all of them set up as they are.

Use Categories for Meta Keywords: Leave blank.

The following unchecked boxes allow the pages to be indexed.

• Use noindex for Categories: Leave box unchecked.
• Use noindex for Archives: Uncheck.
• Use noindex for Tag Archives: Leave box unchecked.
• Autogenerate Descriptions: Leave checked. By checking a meta description is created for each post page. While I get lost in all of this technical talk I only know that this is something good.

Additional Post Headers, Additional Home Headers, Log important events: Leave all of these blank

Finish by clicking Update Options.

Don’t ask me why I have configured The All In One SEO Pack this way? All I can tell you is that this is how I was told how to do it and the information entered now fills in the HTML Title Tag at the top of your blog with the keyword. On posts it creates an HTML tag out of the post titles and places the post title first, and then the title of your blog or main keyword depending upon the information you have placed in the Blog Title section of the WordPress setup. My own preference is to have my keyword in that area. The way this is done is to go to WP Settings and in the Blog Title box place your blog place your main keyword (phrase) that you want to target instead of the blog title. Working in conjunction with the SEO Pack it places the main keyword instead of the blog title.

Google XML Sitemaps: This type of Sitemap tells Google, Yahoo and a number of other search engines what pages are available on your site for crawling. It makes it much easier for the search engines to find your important content. The Google XML Sitemap makes it very easy for you to generate an XML compliant Sitemap.

Once you have downloaded the Sitemap plugin you will upload it to your site’s server. The plugin is activated at the plugin page of WordPress. You will then configure the plugin from the “Settings” page of WordPress. I use the default settings. Once the Sitemap is generated it will be accessible at http://www.[yourdomain]/sitemap.xml. You are now able to upload your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. These Google Webmaster tools provide extremely helpful information about your site.

Related Posts: This is an excellent plugin that you may want to consider. At the end of each of your posts this plugin automatically inserts related posts. This gives your readers some suggestions as to additional articles to read and helps to keep them at your site for a longer period of time. The longer they are there, the more they will be exposed you your advertising.

Privacy Policy: Google requires AdSense publishers to display a privacy policy on all sites that display AdSense ads or AdSense search boxes. Many WordPress blogs are monetized with AdSense and this plugin makes it easy for you to add a privacy policy.

How to Install WordPress Plugins

Installing a WordPress plugin is pretty much like installing a theme. If you need a refresher on that check out How Do I Set Up A Blog – WordPress Themes? Once you have downloaded the plugin to your hard drive the main difference is that you will need to place the plugin in wp-content/plugins instead of wp-content/themes.

In the next addition of How Do I Set Up A Blog we will talk a bit about writing content and finish setting up the teenage obesity site. I hop you will join me and please feel free to share any ideas you have.

Techless Terry

How Do I Set Up A Blog – WordPress Themes

In our last discussion of How Do I Setup A Blog we added WordPress by using Fantastico on the cPanel at our host. In this article we will continue with How Do I Setup A Blog as we select a Theme, upload it and add plugins. I am going to build a Niche AdSense Blog starting with 3 to 4 articles regarding childhood obesity. More articles will be added later. Teen obesity may not be a real profitable type of niche blog but it is a subject I know something about and can write on. Our goal will be to attract people to the blog who will in turn click on Google AdSense or affiliate advertising that may be added. If you would like to know more about niche blogs, here is an excellent article by DoshDosh. To learn more about Google Adsense check out “What’s AdSense?”

At WordPress and many other places you will find lots of free themes. Basically a theme is the design and layout you see when you are looking at a website. To see a variety of free themes click here.

There are also a number of premium themes that you can purchase. For some of my AdSense Niche blogs I have used a series of Niche Adsense themes by Mark Mason. Mark presently offers a series of 12 professionally made themes for a very low price of $27.00. For some of my blogs I have also used the Revolution Theme Series by Brian Gardner. The Revolution Theme is a beautiful theme that is great for many types of blogs.

For Teenage Obesity we are going to use a free Adsense ready SEO theme called ProSense from DoshDosh. This is the first time that I have used the ProSense theme but it looks great. If you would like to see, read about or download the ProSense theme from DoshDosh.

Once the selected theme is downloaded to your hard drive you need to go to your cPanel and upload it.

Uploading A Theme

Go to the FTP Client on your computer that you uploaded earlier. I use FileZilla which is a free ftp client and will use it is as the example as to what to do. You may want to check out the FileZilla Quick Guide.

If you have not yet added your domain to your FTP client I will try to explain it in non-technical terms even though I am good at confusing myself when it comes to this technical stuff.

After activating FileZilla, directly below the tile bar you see the word File, click on that.

A box titled Site Manager come up, click on that. At the bottom you will click on New Site.

Above you will see New FTP site highlighted. In the highlighted area type either the site name or another name that will identify the site to you.

On the right hand side you see several white boxes. The top box is named Host: In that box type in your domain and instead of using www use ftp. For my site I typed ftp.teenageobesity.us/ naturally you need to use your own site information.

In the boxes with the header Port: The number I used was 21.

The next box down is a drop down box titled Servertype: You want to select FTP.

On the next line is the word Logontype with the choices Anonymous, Normal, Account. I checked Normal.

You will then type in the Username and Password that you previously selected to access the cPanel at your host.

When the panel loads you will see a list of files. Open the file titled public_html, which brings you to another screen with a number of files on it.

Open the file titled wp-content. We now see some more files.

Open the file titled themes. You now should see a file titled classic and another default. These are the two default wordpress themes.

To upload the theme that you previously downloaded, Locate on your hard drive in the box on the left titled Local Site and drag that file over and drop it in the theme file.

As soon as the upload is completed you will be able to log into WordPress to check and see if your theme successfully uploaded to it. If you need additional help use the FileZilla Quick Guide.

As we continue with How Do I Setup A Blog we will next upload and active the plugins that we are going to use with the theme.  I am looking forward to your visit and would appreciate your comments.

Techless Terry