But looking at the latest Problogger poll, the majority of Problogger readers haven’t written any guest posts. This is interesting to me, because that is the group of people I would most expect to be active guest bloggers—they know the benefits and have the motivation of growing a blog and going pro.

Some of the comments on that post hint at the reasons for not guest posting, and I’m curious to find out more specifics, so if you’re not guest posting, I’d love it if you’d take this quick poll.

Have any other thoughts on guest blogging? Leave a comment!

Sure, you might still get a little Google traffic, and if it was a really good post, hopefully some other bloggers linked to it and you’re still getting a few visitors clicking through. But wouldn’t it be nice to keep the post alive and kicking on your own blog?

Fortunately, it’s not that hard, especially if you’re using WordPress (I mention some plugins below that are for WordPress blogs, but you might be able to find equivalent ways of doing these things on other platforms, too). Read on to discover a few tricks you can use today.

Help readers find related information

The easiest way to keep old posts visible is to link to them. It’s also extremely effective: you can pretty accurately predict what will be interesting to a reader based on what they’re currently reading.

The simplest way to do this is simply to link to older posts when you’re writing a new post. Use the search tool on your blog to find posts that you may have forgotten about, and quickly scan through the titles of posts in the same categories you’re planning to use for the new post. Anything relevant? Link directly to the old post within the content of your new post.

Don’t stop there, though. Include a list of “related posts” at the end of each post. If you’re on WordPress, there are several plugins that can do this for you automatically (I use Similar Posts). Even if you have to create the list manually, it’s worth the effort.

Why? Because when a reader reaches the end of a post, they’re at a kind of crossroads—from there, they’ll decide whether to read something else on your blog or close it and go elsewhere. It’s a natural decision point, so giving them links to the posts most likely to interest them will encourage them to stick around.

Don’t overlook the value of the built-in archives, either. Many bloggers display their archives as a list of months on their sidebars, but you’re much better off showing categories and/or tags instead of (or in addition to) dates. Most people can pick a topic they’re interested in from a list, but the dates aren’t nearly as useful unless someone wants to read from the beginning.

For the same reason, make sure your blog theme shows a list of categories and/or tags for each post, preferably at the end (for the same reason you should have related posts at the end). This is an easy way for readers to continue reading about a topic that interests them.

Share the love with other bloggers

When you’re trying to keep your readers around, it may seem counter-intuitive to link to other blogs, but there are several good reasons for doing so:

1. Linking makes your blog posts more useful to your readers. If additional information would help clarify your post, but you haven’t covered it before, linking elsewhere is a service to your readers.
2. Linking attracts attention from other bloggers. Most bloggers check their stats and notice when someone links to them, and they appreciate it. They’re likely to check out your post, and might even link to it (or another one in the future) if it’s a good fit.
3. Linking raises your own awareness. If you’re paying attention to what’s being said elsewhere on the same topic, you’re less likely to write redundant posts, and more likely to be truly well-informed.

How you choose to link to other bloggers is up to you. If the content is highly relevant, you might feature an excerpt and link to the full post, or you can just create simple links in body of the post (similar to how you’d link back to your older posts).

Another option is to create a “further reading” section at the bottom. You can use tools like Zemanta or Sphere to automate the process, or do it manually, and you can change your approach on a per-post basis, too. You can even visually show that the links go to another site—the External Links plugin does this for WordPress, and if you’re on another platform, there are a range of methods.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can easily overwhelm your readers with too much good information. As a reader, I always prefer blogs that collect and summarize the best information available, rather than link to everything available, which makes me feel like I have to read a gazillion posts just to be marginally informed.

That said, a “further reading”-type list implies that it’s optional, and is very helpful for those who’ve read your post and want to learn more about the specific topic.

Highlight your best posts

Now that you’ve tackled links from individual posts, it’s time to think about your blog as a whole. Consider it from a first-time visitor’s perspective. Is it obvious what your site is about? If they want to learn more, where do they go to do it?

Highlighting your best posts is a great way to help answer these questions. Like most of the previous tips, you can use a plugin like Popularity Contest to create the list automatically, or you can create it by hand. Doing it yourself ensures you are promoting your very best, but can be harder to maintain. You can also do both and see which works for you.

Once you’ve created your list, there are several good places to draw attention to the best of the best; use as many as make sense to you.

1. List popular posts on your sidebar or other prominent location. You can see an example of this on Yaro Starak’s Entrepreneur-Journey.com, right at the top.
2. Create a special section under your posts. Again, the “crossroads” logic—you hit the reader at the moment they’re trying to decide what to do next.
3. Create a separate page.

Repurpose your blog posts

Bonus tip! This one is a little more work than the others, so I’m including it here as extra credit.

Once you’ve written your blog post, if you find you’ve got a winner on your hands (good traffic, or lots of comments, for instance), it might be worth re-using.

How can you re-use it? Well, you should first be prepared to put a little time into polishing or re-writing so that the new version is at least a little different from the original. How much of that you do will depend on how you intend to re-use.

Here are a few ideas:

• Submit it to an article site (see this selection of article sites). If you write a good mini-bio, you can get ongoing traffic to your blog with this method.
• Use it in a newsletter. If you have a newsletter that’s got similar-but-not-identical readership, this is a good option. Or another blogger might be interested in using it in their newsletter, too.
• Use it as the basis of an ebook or free report. If you expand it or make it more valuable in some way, you can sell it or use it as an incentive to get people to sign up for your newsletter or feed. For instance, Leo at Zen Habits compiled his best posts into an ebook that’s now for sale.

photo credit: 顔なし

Since my last post about how I add followers on Twitter, I’ve received some questions about the metrics I use to choose who to follow back (or not). Then I posted a tweet that generated a much bigger response than I expected:

Can’t believe how many “Internet Marketing experts” follow me who obviously have no concept of Twitter etiquette. Not so impressive.

Based on the flurry of “are you talking about me?!?” messages I got, I clarified:

Specifically talking about the (self-proclaimed!) experts who are following 2k, followed by 15, and only tweet links to their own sites.

Still, it made me realize that many new Twitterers don’t really know what the culture is like, and they’re trying to get started without adequate information and wondering if they’re inadvertently offending people. (Although, honestly, if you’re worried about offending people, you’re already better off than the people who just charge ahead regardless!)

Some people will tell you that you can do anything you want on Twitter, because people have a choice about following you. That’s true, but presumably you’re not hanging out Twitter just to yell into a void; most people hope to get something from it (whether that’s friends, interesting conversation, website traffic, or leads). There are things you can do (or not do) that make your time on Twitter more effective.

Of course, these guidelines are my opinions only; hopefully others will weigh in with comments or posts of their own.

Figure out who you want to connect with and why

What are your goals for using Twitter? You might want to get new clients, or you might just want to find funny sites and videos to amuse yourself. Many people use Twitter with the hope of getting more blog readers (probably most of this blog’s readers fall in that category!). Those are just a couple of examples.

Think about the kind of people who can help you move towards your goals. If you are looking for more readers or clients, then you probably want to connect with people who are similar to your existing readers or clients—people who need to know something you are an expert in.

If you’re looking for entertainment, you’ll want people who are on top of the latest viral videos and send things before everyone’s seen them.

Once you know what you want out of Twitter, you’ll be much better prepared to make connections and participate intelligently.

Post regularly on topics of interest to your followers

Okay, so you might not have anyone following you yet. Pretend you do, and that they’re the people you really want to connect with. Then write your tweets for their benefit. What kinds of things do they want to hear about?

This doesn’t mean you can’t ever post updates on frivolous, personal stuff—that’s par for the course on Twitter. But keep your tweets somewhat balanced, and try to make your frivolous updates as interesting as you can.

This brings up the point of sending out updates about your blog posts: do it in moderation. Start by being realistic. Not every post you write is that great—so save the impact for the ones that really deserve attention. By picking and choosing, you’re showing respect for your followers and highlighting your best work.

Again, balance is key. Figure a minimum of maybe five to ten “normal” tweets per link to your own work. These other tweets can point to other people’s work that is interesting, or quick comments on something, anything useful to your followers, but remember that people will follow you when they get some benefit from doing so.

When you send out an update about your blog post, try and make it interesting and help people understand why they should care. If your post answers a question, use that question as an intro. This is always more helpful than just saying “My latest blog post: ” and throwing in the link. (And yes, this usually means sending these updates manually, rather than using an auto-tweet service. If you’re being selective, you’ll be sending them manually anyway.)

Start slowly

The temptation is always there to follow everyone and anyone in hopes that they’ll follow you back. This generally doesn’t work.

The main reason is what we call “social proof”: if you follow thousands of people and have very few people following you, you look incredibly boring. People subconsciously think, “Wow, nobody cares what this person is saying,” and write you off.

And that’s the most charitable version. If your tweets look entirely self-promotional, or you don’t have any updates, they’ll assume you’re a spammer and that you are only following people to accost them.

Let’s face it: we’re all approaching Twitter with a measure of self-interest. If we didn’t hope to get something out of it, it wouldn’t be worth spending time there. So from a purely self-interest perspective, realize that you’ll be much more effective at reaching whatever Twitter goals you may have if you are a little bit strategic about the process.

The best approach is to follow a few people, keep posting great updates, and be patient. When a few people follow you, follow a few more people. It’s easiest to start with those you already know or have something in common with (like location—I’ll follow almost anyone from my town).

When you’re expanding the people you follow, look at your profile page critically. Will the people you want to connect with see an obvious “hook” in your recent tweets? Will they immediately understand why they should follow you? If not, post something better.

Some of you more analytical types are probably wondering: exactly how many people should I follow? I’d say start with 30 or fewer, and then keep it to a ratio of 2:1 (following:followers), erring on the side of following fewer people. Obviously that’s arbitrary and just my opinion, but that’s what I’d do if it was me.

Engage with others

This is the whole point. If you’re not interacting with others, you might as well be muttering to yourself.

Pay attention to the people you are following who particularly interest you (if you want technical tips on how to do this, let me know and I’ll post something). When they send out a good tweet, use the @reply feature and tell them so.

Ask questions, and listen to the answers. Thank people who help you out or provide you with good ideas. Pass on particularly useful tweets that your followers might find helpful.

If you forget about trying to follow a kajillion people and instead focus your time on helping the people who already follow you, you’ll find you get more followers without much effort at all.

photo credit: luc legay

Having been on Twitter for a while, I find that a dozen or so new people follow me every day. To be honest, I’m not sure why they follow me (I’m only moderately interesting and tend to talk about work too much), but still, they do, so I’ve had to decide what to do about it.

When people follow me, I like to take a moment and view their profile, and decide if I’d like to follow them as well. I have a pretty open attitude towards following people; if they’re interesting, I’ll follow. I use tweetdeck to organize people of particular interest into groups so I don’t get overwhelmed with general chatter, and then rely on serendipity for the rest.

The time management pit of managing Twitter followers

The haphazard nature of new followers makes it easy to waste a lot of time. If I checked out a profile every time I got a new follow notice, I’d never get anything else done—because if I’m being haphazard about it, I don’t just look at the profile… I also click links, follow @replies, and generally wander (delightfully but aimlessly).

I’m a big fan of Tim Ferriss’s obsession with batching regular tasks, so that’s an obvious first step. Instead of jumping off track with every new follower, I let the notifications gather and go through them once every few days or so.

My tools and tactics for evaluating Twitter followers

From here on, this post is going to talk about specific technologies and tools that I use. They’re certainly not the only ones available; they just happen to be the ones I’ve picked.

I’m admittedly a hopeless optimizer; if you have less Twitter activity, more time, or more sanity than I do, this may be overkill for you. I encourage you to look through my list and play with the ideas that appeal to you, and not worry about the rest.

Getting to the essential information

With my Twitter notification settings, I get several types of notices:

• Email copies of direct messages sent to me through Twitter
• Notifications that I’m being followed (by someone I’m already following)
• Notifications that I’m being followed (by someone I’m not following)

I like to glance through the first two types for general info, but only the last group is relevant to the process of evaluating new followers for potential follow-back.

Sorting through email messages is not a good use of time, so I started using filters in Gmail to help with this some time ago. I noticed that only the third group of messages use the phrase “you may follow” (encouraging me to check out their profile), so I easily set up a rule to “mark as read” any message from Twitter that doesn’t say “you may follow”.

That was a good first step. In conjunction with a filter that routed all mail from Twitter to its own folder/label for easy batching, I could tell at a glance what kind of message it was.

Breaking free of email

When it comes down to it, though, email is not really a good tool for this process. The emails themselves don’t contain enough information to make a decision (except in cases where I happen to recognize a name)—it’s the link to the profile that I want, and clicking through dozens of emails just to click one link each is not very efficient. But what would be a better tool?

There are probably other tools that would work, but RSS is the one that comes to mind for me. With an RSS feed, I can very quickly scroll through an expanded list, ctrl-click the links to open them in new tabs, and be on my way.

The only trouble with this idea is that (to my knowledge) there is no RSS feed of recent followers. Enter MailBucket, a tool that takes email and turns it into an RSS feed on the fly.

With MailBucket, all I have to do is edit my Gmail filter to send “you may follow” messages from Twitter to my MailBucket email address, and then subscribe to the resulting feed in Google Reader. If you don’t actually use an RSS reader, you could even take it a step further and run the feed through FeedBurner, subscribe via email, and get one “daily digest” of all new follows.

Edit: The MailBucket feed doesn’t make the profile URLs clickable, so I’ve done a little magic with Yahoo! Pipes to remedy that. The specifics are probably beyond the interest of most readers, so I’m leaving them out, but if you really want to know how I did it, leave a comment and I’ll post more info.

See follower quality at a glance

With a lot of followers comes a lot of cruft. Having specific standards helps weed out the worst. I generally won’t follow those who:

• Only tweet with links to their own posts (if I wanted to subscribe to your blog, I would)
• Don’t ever @reply to anyone (it’s not very interesting to listen to someone who’s talking into a vacuum)
• Don’t have any tweets at all (do you understand the premise of Twitter?)
• Follow way more people than follow them (this seems spammy, or at the least, desperate)

Obviously some of these are very subjective, so they’re just general guidelines. You’ve basically got eight or nine tweets to catch my eye (that’s how many show up in my first screenful).

For the last item on the list, I also use a cool little Greasemonkey script called Twitter User Classify that visually shows me the user’s ratio of “following” to “followers”. (Like all Greasemonkey scripts, it’s only for Firefox, but that’s my primary browser so it works well for me.) The ratio is not the be-all-end-all, but it’s a helpful clue.

When to un-follow?

Honestly, I hardly ever un-follow people unless they’re downright annoying (sending inappropriate direct messages or other forms of spam).

A lot of the interest factor of Twitter is in wandering into conversations that I would never otherwise encounter. Being fairly entrpreneurial, I like to “cross-pollinate” with industries outside my own and see what I can learn and apply to my own projects. Following a lot of diverse people is surprisingly useful to that end.

How do you manage your Twitter account?

I’d love to hear how you handle the info-challenges of Twitter. Leave comments or post on your own blog, and by all means, if you have any questions (about specific tools, my philosophy, whatever), leave those, too.

And follow me on Twitter.

When I refer to blog design on this page, I’m specifically talking about the part of the process that happens in a graphics program like Photoshop or Fireworks. The part that happens after that (where I take the design file and turn it into a working design) is what I refer to as coding—and a lot of designers aren’t interested in that at all (which is fine by me!).

Elements of a blog design

I’m going to start by defining some terms that I use when talking about blog elements.

• The header is the section at the top of the blog that comes before any of the blog’s actual content. It often contains elements like…
  • The blog title usually describes the blog. Sometimes this is also simply the name of the main site if the blog is just part of a bigger site.
  • The tagline clarifies the purpose of the blog (or sometimes just provides a laugh).
  • Many blogs have navigation near the top of the blog to help visitors find their way around.
• The main content in a blog is its posts. Posts usually contain some or most of these items…
  • The post title communicates quickly the point of the post. It’s like an email subject line.
  • The post content is the “article” that gives the post purpose. It’s like the body of an email.
  • Information about the post is called metadata. The following are examples of metadata…
    • Most blogs feature the date and/or time the post was written to help readers gain context.
    • Categories and/or tags help the reader quickly determine the topic and find more posts on the same topic.
    • Blogs that allow comments provide a link to read and write them.
    • The name of the post’s author helps readers associate the post with a specific person. This is essential on blogs with more than one author, and helpful even on single-author blogs.
• Most blogs have one or more sidebar. The sidebar is a place for information and tools that go beyond specific posts. The sidebar is made up of…
  • Widgets are self-contained chunks of information that the blog owner can add and move around.
• The footer contains more “meta” information, typically about the whole blog rather than just a post. It usually has…
  • A copyright notice to protect the content.
  • Credit links to the people or tools who make the blog possible.
  • The footer might also have links to privacy policies, important pages, or contact information.

It is helpful to look at some working blogs to see these elements in action. Click on the images below to see annotated screenshots.

Standard blog layout concepts

When you’re working on a blog design, you’re typically working with “theoretical” content. Because they are dynamic, you never know what the blog owner is going to put in, so you have to design for many possibilities, while also showing enough variations to make it clear to the coder what you intend.

It’s a good idea to show anything and everything that’s different from just plain text. That includes regular links (think color, style, and what it will look like when the mouse moves over it), lists of information (do you want to use a cute little bullet? dotted lines between items?), and images in posts (should it have a border? how much space should be between the image and the text around it?) among others.

Currently most blogs are designed to fit a width of 960 pixels or less. That’s not always true; a particularly tech-savvy audience justifies a wider layout, because most readers will be on new, larger monitors. If you’re not given any guidance as to width, stick with 960px or ask for clarification.

Click the image below to see a basic guide to blog content. Note that this is just to show the main sections of a blog; the layout can be utterly and completely different. There might be more sidebars, or they might be on different sides, or you might choose to put some of the info in the footer. When you look at it, think in terms of “content I need to include,” not “this is a layout to emulate.”

Examples of good blog designs

Here are some blog designs from Alek Lisefski, a designer I work with regularly. In addition to the quality of work he provides, I also like working with Alek because he (visually) gives me all the info I need to code the design.

Notice how every design has a header, multiple sidebar widgets, and mouseover styles for the links? That kind of attention to detail makes it a breeze to get everything right the first time.

Go forth and design

And let me know what questions come up along the way! Leave comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Honestly, I’d much rather spend my time doing search engine optimization, marketing, or coding new themes, but when I get a panicked email from a hack victim, I understand that getting their blog up and running again is (naturally) their number-one priority.

This post explains why WordPress blogs get hacked and how to keep it from happening to you.

How bloggers discover they’ve been hacked

Many times the hackers are pretty slick, and you might not even know you’ve been hacked until you start to lose traffic or see a weird error. I had a few blogs hacked about a year ago and it took me a while to notice because I wasn’t regularly monitoring my traffic.

Some symptoms I’ve seen (on my own blogs or on my clients’ blogs):

• Delisting, a dramatic drop in rank, or a “caution” page from Google. You’ll usually find out about this a while after the hack, either when you search for yourself on Google, or (if you usually get a lot of traffic from Google) when you notice your traffic go down. Sometimes you’ll get an email from Google that alerts you to the situation.
• Strange links in your posts that just “appeared.” You’ll usually only spot these if you go back and edit an existing post, so many bloggers don’t notice these right away, either.
• Weird blog behavior, like blank pages or “secret” pages that only show up if you try to go to a page that doesn’t exist. Not all of this points to being hacked (for instance, an out-dated plugin can cause a blank page) but it’s often the first clue that something’s wrong.

Why isn’t it easier to spot? The hackers purposely hide most of the evidence from you, and intentionally set it up so that search engines (like Google) see the new “content” they’ve added, but regular visitors (including you) do not. That makes it harder to catch the hack right away and makes it more likely the hackers will accomplish their goals.

What’s in it for the hackers

Most of the hacks I’ve seen have one goal: promoting spam sites. No doubt there are some purely malicious hackers who simply enjoy damaging blogs, but most seem to use hacking as a means to an end.

When they hack your blog, the most common thing they do is put in links to other sites, often porn, pharma, or other lucrative targets that are presumably paying for the effort. Why? Because when your site (presumably a respectable blog that Google knows is not a spam site) links to their site, they get a little boost with Google.

Google knows this happens and actively tries to stop it, but until they recognize that the linked sites are spam, those sites get some benefit. Google usually catches on pretty quickly, though, and when they do, your blog gets penalized right along with the spam sites it’s linking to.

This doesn’t bother the hackers much, because they’re already automatically hacking the next unsuspecting blog (and they sure as heck don’t care that their gain is your loss).

How they hack your blog

By far, the number one cause of hacked WordPress blogs is not having the most recent version installed. WordPress is software, and like any software, the people who wrote it try their best to make it as secure as they can, but occasionally there’s a bug. Sometimes these bugs, if not fixed, can allow hackers into the software.

With desktop software, like Windows or Photoshop or Firefox or Word, when a bug is discovered, the software company creates an update that fixes the bug and the software asks you to upgrade. This is the purpose of services like Windows Update—to make sure you have the latest version of the software, and all known bugs are fixed.

With software like WordPress that’s installed on a web host, it’s a little more complicated. Just like desktop software, when a bug is discovered, an update is created and the software prompts you to upgrade. However, the actual process of upgrading involves downloading and uploading files, backing up your database, and other tasks that non-techies find similarly intimidating. So many bloggers just don’t upgrade.

Though the bloggers often assume that they’re only missing out on new features when they don’t upgrade, the much more important fact is that they’re also leaving known security flaws wide open for hackers. Just like Windows, you only get the protection of the update if you install it. That’s why it’s so important to always have the latest updates (both with Windows and WordPress and any other software you use).

How you can avoid getting hacked

After that last section, this will be obvious, but it bears repeating: always install WordPress security upgrades.

How do you know if you need to upgrade? Log into your WordPress blog’s admin panel and go to the very bottom. It will have a version number, something that looks like 2.3.1 or 2.5 or 2.5.1 (or some other number—but it will follow the basic pattern).

If the number is lower than 2.3 (for instance, 2.2 or 2.2.3 or 2.0.1), you definitely need to upgrade.

If it’s 2.3 or higher, you’ll see a line near the top of your WordPress admin panel that notifies you when it’s time to upgrade:

That’s a good clue that it’s time to upgrade.

What if you don’t want to do the upgrade?

This is the root problem for many bloggers. They don’t have the time or the technical skills (or the time to learn the technical skills) to do their own upgrades, so upgrades don’t get done.

Trust me when I tell you that it’s almost always more expensive to fix a hacked blog than to keep up on upgrades, even if you have to pay someone to do it.

And that’s the answer: if you don’t want to do them yourself, pay someone to keep your blog up-to-date. We offer upgrades as a monthly subscription service, or you can talk to the person who set your blog up for you, or you can hire someone on oDesk or Elance when you need an upgrade. No matter which route you take, the temporary relief of ignoring the upgrade is not worth the much bigger headache of dealing with a hacked blog.

A few other precautions

While out-of-date versions of WordPress are far and away the primary cause of hacks, there are also some other things you can do to help protect yourself and recover in the event of a hack.

If you’re a DIY-type, check out this excellent list of WordPress security tips. These are additional things you can do to secure your blog (we do them by default on blogs we set up).

Having good backups on hand (of both your files and your database) can make it less painful to restore your blog to its former glory if you do get hacked.

Another precaution you should take is to create some “standard” email addresses for your site. When Google detects that your site may have been hacked, they usually try to contact you at the following email addresses:

• contact@yourdomain.com
• info@yourdomain.com
• support@yourdomain.com
• webmaster@yourdomain.com

If you don’t have at least one of these set up, you’ll probably be the last one to know if you do get hacked. This won’t prevent a hack, but it will give you a good shot at fixing things before too much damage is done.

If you need more details on any of the above, leave a comment; I’m considering covering these topics in future posts.

What if you’ve already been hacked?

Because there are different types of hacks and different levels of blogger expertise, there’s no one-size-fits-all fix. Usually it involves upgrading, digging into the files, and searching for any remaining hack code. Honestly, it can be tricky if you aren’t a WordPress code buff (because you don’t know what “normal” looks like).

Your best bet is to get a pro to do an upgrade and once-over. If you don’t want to pay, and you’re feeling adventurous, a much-cited post called “Has Your WordPress Been Hacked Recently?” is a good place to start. When you are confident that the hack has been undone, you can request reconsideration of your blog from Google as a first step in getting it back to normal.

What else?

I hope this post has helped you understand a little more about blog hacks and how to prevent them. I know there is a lot of ground to cover here, and I’ve just scratched the surface, so please share your questions, experiences, and tips in the comments!

Since I know people are interested in finding ways to cut costs when starting out, I thought I’d take a few minutes and outline a cheaper alternative to hiring me or another full-service blog/web development firm. This “how to” post is also part of the “Crowdsourcing Business How To’s” extravaganza at Sparkplugging.

Premium blog design is not for everybody

In case you think I’m nuts (or suspiciously unselfish, which hardly ever happens in the real world), I’ll start by addressing the obvious question: why would I tell you how to not hire me?

Simple. My services are not right for everyone!

Don’t get me wrong—if you and I are a match made in heaven, you will get tremendous value out of working with me. If you’re an entrepreneur, a consultant, an author, or represent a business, your investment in my services will generate a great return. My excellent code quality, attention to SEO, and blog savvy easily present a high value that goes on to pay for itself.

However, if you’re doing the web thing as a hobby, or you’re bootstrapping and have no capital to invest (regardless of the ROI), or you’re not sure if you’re going to stick with this business, it’s wiser to hold off on any purchases that aren’t absolutely necessary. In my friend’s case, the site she wants is for an on-the-side business that she doesn’t plan to take full-time for a long time, so her anticipated revenues don’t justify much investment.

Given that you might not be an ideal client for me—yet—I have no problem suggesting something you can do in the meantime. Hopefully you’ll remember me and come calling when you need all the bells and whistles!

Since you’re probably wondering, I’ll define what I mean by “small budget.” I believe you can get an attractive, working site or blog designed for as little as about $800. You may be able to get it done cheaper, but lower than that and I find that the results can be disappointing and inconsistent (sometimes you’ll find a diamond in the rough, but often you’ll just get a ho-hum looking site).

Start by doing your design homework

No matter whom you work with, you’ll get the most bang for your buck when you have a good idea of what you want. I’m not talking about having a specific design in mind (that almost always ends in frustration), but simply knowing your tastes.

An easy way to start is by identifying sites that you find attractive and serve a similar purpose as yours. They don’t have to be in the same industry (and it’s usually better if they’re not), but if you’re looking for a blog design, look for appealing blogs. If you want a site that’s more like a magazine, look for attractive magazine sites.

If you’re not sure where to look, you can get a head start by going through sites that others have identified as good-looking. There are a bunch of “CSS Galleries,” sites that showcase the best designs on the web (as decided by them, usually). Among my favorite galleries: CSS Drive · CSS Mania · Unmatched Style

As you look through the designs, watch for those that just strike you, that seem to resonate somehow. Go until you’ve found maybe 15 of them, and then look for similarities. Do most of them have a similar style (like “sleek and clean” or “grungy” or “shiny”)? If so, narrow down to your favorite 3-5. If not, keep looking until you identify the style that is most appealing to you.

Once you have just a few, make a simple list of likes and dislikes for each design. Think about things like colors, number of columns, advertising (if you want it, and if so, which types and locations you prefer), menu location, that kind of thing.

Create a design brief

A “design brief” is just a document that explains to the designers what you’re shooting for. The more they know about your goals and your desires, the more likely they’ll come up with something you love.

What should go in your design brief? A good starting point:

• A description of the site or blog the design will be used on, including how you intend to make money if you do (e.g. advertising, selling a product or service, affiliate marketing, subscriptions, etc.)
• A link to the site or blog if it exists currently, with likes and dislikes, and notes on anything you’re definitely intending to change
• A link to a high-resolution version of your logo, photo, or any other images you intend to use in the new design, along with any specifics on usage (many new sites will not have any of these things, in which case you can say so)
• A description of your target audience, with as much detail as possible about things like gender, occupation, age, and interests
• A list of the content that will go on the front page (the more detail, the better)
• A short overview of the style you like
• A description of the types of colors you like (pastels vs. earth tones vs. bold vs. bright) as well as specific examples in the next section
• Your list of sites you like (make sure you include the URLs!) with your likes and dislikes
• Anything else you think will help designers understand what you want in a design

You can create your rough draft in any text program of your choice and then copy and paste it in the next step and add links and such.

Set the designers loose

The least expensive way I’ve found to get one great design is to hold a contest (if you are going to need lots of great designs, like I do, it’s easier to find a few great designers to work with regularly, but if you just need one, the “finding” process can be overwhelming).

My favorite place to set up a contest is 99designs. Design contests are all they do, so there are many good designers already using them, making it a lot easier on you than finding designers yourself.

The way it works is relatively simple: you sign up, you buy credits, and you start a contest, using the information you’ve already gathered. You really just follow the steps, but here are a few notes:

• Plan on devoting a good chunk of time to your contest. Setting it up is easy, but you are expected to provide feedback to every designer who enters. Since designers are spending their time without any guarantee of winning, giving them feedback is a reasonable trade-off for the reduced cost. Give feedback every day if possible or you’ll get fewer entries. Feedback is in your interest, too, as it’s public, so your early feedback will be used by all of the designers to create something you like.
• Expect to spend somewhere between $400 and $600, plus the contest fee ($39 as of this writing). If you offer less, you’ll still get entries but the quality will generally be lower, as the best designers won’t consider your contest worth the time.
• Mention the prize amount in your contest title. It catches eyes.
• Pay attention to comments and answer questions. This should go without saying, but it helps the designers help you.
• Understand that in this step, you’re buying a design, not a functional website (that part comes next). Ask for the design in Photoshop (PSD) format.

If you provide detailed information, pay a respectful amount, and generally behave like a nice person, you’ll get good entries. Once you’ve paid for and received the design file, you’re ready for the next step.

Get that design coded!

There are a number of online services that will take your Photoshop file and turn it into a working website, like CSSRockstars. The process is simple: you upload your Photoshop file and pick the options you want, and they give you back working site code.

If you want a WordPress blog theme, they do those for a small extra fee—if you just need a static site, that’s the base package, but for the extra $70, you’re almost certainly better off with a WordPress theme, even if you use it to run a regular (non-blog) website; it just makes things easier to update. You can expect to pay between $149 and $399 depending on the options you choose, but you’ll probably tend towards the lower end.

The final step is to put the site up. If you’re not sure how to do that, we can help; our hosting package includes setup, so that’s an option, or you can find one of the many tutorials on the topic.

Ethical considerations

It should be noted that many designers dislike the contest structure that 99designs uses. They feel that it’s not fair to ask designers to create work without a guarantee of payment (you’re guaranteeing payment for somebody, of course, but not compensating every designer who enters).

I tend to take a fair-market approach to it and figure that if designers are regularly entering contests, then they find the arrangement acceptable. I actually like that it gives skilled designers all over the world a chance to compete for good jobs without discrimination based on location or language.

However, if you’re concerned about this question, I encourage you to do your research and understand the issues. You may find this interview with a contest-enthusiast-designer helpful, as well as the NO!SPEC site, which takes the opposing view.

Understanding the trade-offs

I alluded earlier to the fact that you can pay less if you’re willing to get less. So what are you sacrificing if you go with the above plan?

• Search engine optimization The folks at CSSRockstars are good, but their main focus is on producing functional code that looks like the design you sent them, not going above and beyond and coding for maximum search engine friendliness. Honestly, it probably won’t hurt you a lot in the beginning, but as your competition gets more SEO-savvy, it will become more difficult to be found.
• Online expertise If you need advice on your strategy, feedback on monetization tactics, or ideas about structuring your information, you’ll have to pay for it separately or fend for yourself.
• WordPress experience and setup If you want to use WordPress as the basis for your site or blog (and I highly recommend you do), it can be helpful to work with someone who knows WordPress in and out, someone who knows what it can do and can recommend plugins to get the most out of it.
• Time It takes a fair amount of time and effort to manage the whole process yourself—and frankly, that’s something many people are happy to pay someone else to do. If you have more time than money, it’s probably an advantageous trade-off if you’re okay with the first three on the list.

If you’re so inclined, you can start today based on the information in this post. If you have questions, or any come up as you go through the process, leave comments and I’ll do my best to respond!

What’s the best way to make it so that my initial post, “Stir The Pot,” stays on the first page of my blog? How did you make it so that your findableblogs.com first page stays the same…like a website? I thought that posts automatically get archived as you continue to update and write new posts. I’d like what I said in the beginning to stay on there for at least awhile, but I want to add new material as well.

First, a confession: the only reason the front page of this blog hasn’t changed for a while (prior to this post and a change I’ll talk about in a moment) is that I haven’t written anything for a while! Between client work and an ebook I’m about to release, I’ve been a complete slacker where this blog is concerned.

If you’d rather not do the slacker thing (like Reonne, you have posts to write!), you have three options.

Use a Page as the home page

That probably sounds cryptic if you don’t understand the difference between Posts and Pages in WordPress, but a Page is designed to stick around without changing, while Posts tend to appear and disappear from the homepage, archives, and search results relative to how many other Posts you have.

You create a Page in the same way you do a Post, but instead of going to “Write” → “Post” (or just “Write”, since “Post” is the default sub-tab), you go to “Write” → “Page”. If you want the whole front page to stay essentially the same for a while, this is a good way to do it; just create the page here.

Once you’ve created your page, go to “Settings” → “Reading” (”Options” → “Reading” in pre-2.5 versions of WordPress) and switch the “Front page displays” setting to a “static page” of your choice. For instance, if I was going to change the front page of this blog to my “About” Page, I’d set it like so:

In fact, this is exactly what I’m going to do when I finish coding the new design for this site. In that case, I’ll create a special “Home” Page that will have the front page content, and that will be the first thing new visitors see.

The potential downside to this approach? Your front page is the Page you set up, not a list of entries. That might suit you just fine (like I said, that’s exactly what I’m planning on), but if you want your front page to automatically update with new posts, keep reading.

Use the WordPress time stamp magic

With WordPress, you can easily change the dates on your posts. The newest post shows up at the top of your front page (unless you’re using a very unusual theme), so all you have to do is make sure that the post you want at the top is always dated after the other posts.

This can be a bit of a pain, because you’ll need to change the date on the “top” post every time you create another post, or back-date your new posts to make them “older”, which is just confusing (if I was choosing between the two, I’d change the date on the “top” post each time).

Clearly, this isn’t as passive as the first method, but if you’re only talking about a few weeks or a few posts, it’s not that bad and accomplishes the goal nicely.

Use the sidebar

If the content you want to feature is really a kind of introduction, it might make sense to put it in the sidebar using a Widget. That way, it’s always readily available in a place where people look when they’re searching for context, but it’s not in the way of your content and doesn’t require any particular maintenance effort on your part.

All things being equal, this is probably the route I’d take in most cases, if it suits the content.

Advanced options

You can actually combine some of these ideas if you’re comfortable editing your theme. For instance, if you know your way around The Loop, you could show the content of a Page first thing, directly followed by the regular Posts. You could also just manually edit your theme’s home.php or index.php file to show a certain message before the regular content.

However, neither of these options are as easy or convenient as the previous three “out-of-the-box” options, so I tend to avoid them for short-term changes.