I didn’t spend much time this weekend looking after any sites, or reading any blogs, so this morning I had quite a few to catch up on.  One in particular stood out… maybe because of it’s relevance to the last post: Do You Have A Plan To Be Successful?

In that post, I discussed the importance of defining success. For me, success MUST include spending time with my family.  I’m certainly guilty of missing great moments because I’m working late, but in general, I try very hard to spend a defined amount of time working and to keep it limited. . . especially during the times when my kids are up and home and wanting to play. If I made twice as much money, but lost that time with my family, then I have failed.  That’s just my take on it.

Jason over at JohnCow.com posted a similar article about the importance of taking time off and setting priorities in life.  In the post titled, “Work Stress Affects Your Overall Life - So Take Time OFF!” he ends with this:

For me what really brings it all into perspective is this –> What do you want your loved ones to have engraved on your tombstone?

“Your Name Here” was a hard worker who knew how to put work above everything else!

or

“Your Name Here” was a loving husband, dedicated father and lived life to the fullest!

I hope you’ll take the time to check out his post.  Also, take some time to let me know how you deal with balancing your work and family time.

We sit down and plan so much of our lives. . . what we are doing today, what we are buying at the grocery store, how much money we are putting away in savings. . . the list could go on.  Growing up you may have had something that you wanted to do with your life, or a career that you were interested in and you did whatever it took to be successful.  Some things take more preparation than others; for example being a doctor requires more school than being programmer.  It may be that there are certain things that you are just naturally better at.  I have a friend who can take anything apart, figure out what’s broken, and put it back together again.  I always end up with parts left over when I try that.

The thing that surpises me though is that there are so many cases of people who look at blogging or starting an online business as an easy way to wealth, and yet don’t seem to put a similar amount of planning in to make it happen.  More times than not, their blog or business fails in the first few months, and they end up shutting it down or selling it for a few hundred dollars.  There are always going to be exceptions, but in general I believe to be successful, you need to figure out what success looks like to you and create a strategy to get there.  Here are a few steps to get you started:

1. Define Success:  Success does not mean the same thing to everyone.  I see ton’s of bloggers who make a few hundred dollars per month and are content.  For me, that wouldn’t pay for the groceries or gas in a month, but many are younger and don’t have the overhead that come with a house, cars, and a family.  It may be that success to you is only partially financial, and instead it’s the lifestyle that it affords you that you are really after.  Figure out what that looks like to you.
2. Write It Down: If you are like me, you are constantly coming up with great ideas to make your business/blog/life better.  Unfortunately, if you are like me, most of those great ideas are lost before they ever come to fruition. As you start to develop a plan for success, make sure that you capture it in writing.  This not only helps solidify it in your mind, but it gives you an easy way to reference back and make adjustments as necessary.  With this site in particular, I felt I needed to sit down and outline what I wanted to write about so that I could stay focused and on topic.  I created an outline for the types of topics and articles I want to write, and I can’t even begin to explain how refreshing it was to be able to put that somewhere and free up that space in my mind for something else.  It’s probably only 60% there, and I’m sure I’ll write about items that aren’t on topic or on that list, but at least I have a baseline to work from.
3. Make It Complete: As I wrote the section above, it occured to me that some might see that list and think that is what I’m talking about when I say create a plan.  It’s not.  That is just part of the plan.  Depending on your site, you need to think about things like how much time you are going to invest in your blog,  how much money and how it will be allocated, how are you going to attract people to your blog and what will make them want to come back.  You need to think about how you will generate revenue from your blog if that is part of your strategy and you need to be realistic.  All of the same principles you apply to building any other business can apply to your blog.  You can develop a business plan and a marketing plan and a budget and I guarantee that you will be more successful because of it. That being said, the level of planning should be in line with what you want out of your blog.
4. Talk To Others: I learned a long time ago the value of getting outside feedback.  It’s so easy when you are passionate about something and right in the middle of it to neglect certain areas.  I’ve found that as I talk to others about my ideas that they typically ask me very simple questions that I don’t have an easy answer for.  In the beginning I used to make up something off the cuff and move on, but as I matured I began to realize that those were probably the areas that I was most neglecting.  As you develop your plan, ask others what they think.  Talk to people who have nothing at all to do with your topic or blogging and you’ll be amazed how many holes they can find in your plan.  Don’t discount those holes! Fix them.
5. Embrace Change:  After all that planning, it will be easy to get so structured that you don’t see the tide is coming in.  Pay attention to trends in your market.  When things don’t work out the way you anticipated, adjust and jump right back in. Your plan should be fluid and you should review and adjust it periodically to ensure that it is still appropriate for your current situation. 

Hopefully this will help you be more successful.  I can guarantee that the time you spend planning will pay off in the end.

If you create quality content, then people will WANT to link to your site, without you having to ask. These are the most natural links you can receive and believe me when I say that Google will eventually figure out if you aren’t linking naturally.

Let me give you an example. I was reading an article recently which lead me to a website which maintains a pretty exhaustive list of “do follow blogs.” Because I think that the site is valuable to you and me, I have linked to it in the previous sentence using the anchor text of “do follow blogs.”  Let me be clear though… the value I found in the list had more to do with some of the blogs that I found and am interested in and less about finding a place to post comment spam.  And my link is a “do follow link”. Technically speaking, a do follow link is just a link that does not use the nofollow tag, which is designed to tell search engines NOT to follow the link.

Why would you want to use a nofollow tag?

Let’s say you have a website that sells products.  You probably have a lot of administrative pages on your site that don’t actually contain content that you want included in the search results, either because of the type of information, or because you don’t want to dilute your links with less valuable links.  You can use nofollow tags to accomplish this. If we talk about Google Pagerank, then a nofollow tag tells Google not to pass some of your pagerank through that link to the other site.

That being said, it’s easy to understand why you WANT sites that link to you to NOT use the nofollow tag. You want some of their pagerank to pass through the link, and you want Google to give you credit for it. Especially if the link is coming from a high quality, authoritative site.   Referring back to the site above which lists “do follow blogs,” if you post a comment on those sites, then the link back to your site does not include a nofollow tag and may help your site generate additional backlinks.  This is healthy and natural when it’s used responsibly because it encourages participation in the blogs.  In fact, this blog does not use nofollow tags because we want you to receive credit for participating. However the other side of that coin is that blogs which allow their comment links to be followed are typically more focused on weeding out the obvious spammers.

It can be abused though, so the one thing I would encourage you to NOT become is a comment spammer… which basically means posting worthless comments simply for the link back to your site.  Find sites that are similar to your site, or complement your topic and get engaged in the conversation.  It stands to reason that if the blog has similar content to you, then you probably share interests and your comments can be meaningful.  Not only will you generate natural links back to your site, but you may generate click through traffic from that site if people see you as posting quality content, and you may even make some friends.

Let me know what you think… how much time do you spend commenting on blogs? Has it affected your sites search engine rankings? How has it affected your networking among peers?

There are a tremendous number of themes available for you to install for free, and probably an equal number of themes for sale.  Don’t assume that just because a theme costs money, that it’s the better theme.  Depending on the needs of your blog, a free theme may fit just right.

I typically start out looking for a free theme over at the WordPress Theme Directory.  There are a number of themes available for free and you can search by many criteria. I’d recommend first browsing through a number of blogs to get a feel for what you like and don’t like. This will help you narrow down your search criteria.

How much design and coding experience you have may also play into the picture. If you are an avid coder, then you may look for something that is basic and can be built upon by you. If you have no experience at all, then you probably want something that is ready to go exactly how you want it out of the box. 

A third option would be to hire a developer to either design a custom theme for you, or modify an existing one.  This will probably be the more expensive option, but does offer the benefit of a fully customized theme.  A number of blog owners who like to change their themes periodically will take this route and then release their older themes either as paid themes or free themes with links back to their site.  Keep that in mind for marketing later.

Some things to consider when looking at themes:

• Ease of Navigation: Will your visitors be able to move around your blog easily
• Layout: Do you want three columns, two columns, a big header? What kind of information will you make available?
• Advertising: If you intend to monetize your blog, then be sure to evaluate where you intend to do this.

Also, don’t forget that content is the much more important overall than your theme.  It’s great that you have a flashy new theme with all the bells and whistles, but if you don’t have something that will keep your visitors coming back, then it’s wasted.  This may mean choosing an interim theme… something to get you by while you build your presence. 

As I stated above, there are hundreds or thousands of resources for themes. The easiest thing to do is a google search for Wordpress Themes, or if more appropriate “Free Wordpress Themes”.  Links to some sites I’ve used are below:

• Wordpress.org Theme Library
• SoloStream.com - This blog uses a solostream theme currently. Michael just released a new theme called WP-Vybe 1.0 which is very nice.
• RevolutionTheme.com
• TemplateMonster.com

This article will focus on actually installing Wordpress on your website. We’ll assume that you have your site up and running on your hosting account, and that you know all the appropriate usernames/passwords, etc. In the future, we may evaluate options other than wordpress, but for now, let’s keep it simple.  Ok… let’s get started.

There are three primary ways to install wordpress on your hosting account:

1. Use Fantastico in cPanel
2. Use the Install4Free service
3. Roll up the sleeves and do it yourself

While I prefer to do it myself because I feel it gives me a better understanding of exactly how everything is configured, options 1 and 2 are certainly easier.  That being said… installing it yourself is not by any stretch difficult.

Ok… Option 1: Using Fantastico

cPanel installs on HostGator (and most other hosts for that matter) include a great little feature called Fantastico. In case you are wondering, cPanel is the web-based control panel that you would use to manage your hosting account.  It’s where you can create email addresses, add databases, check stats, etc.  We’ll come back to it in a bit, but for now let’s focus on just one feature, Fantastico.

Fantastico allows you to install many scripts (including Wordpress) by answering a few questions and clicking a button. It’s fantastic-o. (I know, but I couldn’t help it.)  You will need to name your blog, and enter your email address, but beyond that, it takes care of the whole install, database included for you, and it’s included for free in your hosting account.  It really is that easy.

Option 2: If you happen to not have Fantastico available, and don’t feel confident enough to tackle the install yourself, there is a group of volunteers who offer free Wordpress installations.  They don’t guarantee that they will have time, or technically that they can even finish the job, but I think that’s more just them covering their bases… after all, it’s free.  You can find the service at http://install4free.wordpress.net/ I have never used their service, but they are linked to directly from the wordpress.org site, so I have to assume that they’ve been checked out to some degree and don’t have too many complaints.  If you do end up going this route, be sure to report back and let everyone know about your experience.

Option 3:  Finally, if you have just a little bit of experience with websites, then you’ll have no problem at all installing wordpress youreself.  The install takes less than 5 minutes and can be brokend down into four basic steps:

1. Create your database and databse user (make sure the user has full access to the database
2. Edit your wp-config.php file to include the database information. (This also requires that you rename the default file from wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php.)
3. Upload your files to your website. If the blog is going to be the main event at your site, then just upload them to the main root folder.  If you are going to have a different main site, then you may want to upload the files to a “blog” directory or something similar.
4. Run the install by accessing the site from your web browser.

That’s it!  Really! For more detailed instructions, please see the famous 5 minute install over at wordpress.org.

So now you should have a blog up and running.   Spend some time looking around in the Wordpress control panel.  Add some articles, delete some stuff.  Make some comments. You can’t mess it up easily, and even if you do, you now know how to reinstall it easily.  We’ll pick up next with a design element and talk about choosing and installing a theme for your blog.

1. Web Hosting
2. Installing Wordpress
3. Choosing a Theme
4. Installing Plugins

I’ll address each of these items over the next few days:

Web Hosting:

In general, most wordpress blogs will not be very resource intensive and can therefore be hosted on any shared hosting plan.  If you do not have any experience with web hosts, take some time to do a little research and ask friends and colleagues who they use.  There are a number of hosts which are fantastic, and there are also a number which are horrible.  If we assume that your blog is tremendously successful as we all hope they are, then the last thing you want is to have downtime or data loss because you were trying to save a few dollars.  In many cases, you can host your site for about the same cost as a couple cups of coffee at Starbucks and be perfectly ok.

This site is actually hosted on a dedicated server through a company called SoftLayer.  I have been extremely happy with Softlayer and because I run a number of sites and want complete control of my server, it makes sense.  It probably doesn’t make sense for most situations though. I also host sites through HostGator.com and have had a very good experience with them.
Something to understand about web hosting is that more expensive does not necessarily mean better… and more does not necessarily mean better either.  Here is what I mean. Most web hosting companies operate under the assumption that most of their customers will only use a small fraction of the resources made available to them in terms of disk space, bandwidth, and cpu resources.  Most customers have high expectations and assume that the smallest package can not be enough, so they upgrade before they have a good idea of what their needs are. It’s important to understand that choosing the right web hosting provider, is 100-times more important than the package you choose.  If you choose the right provider, they will work with you if you outgrow your existing package. Wordpress does not require very much in terms of features or space.
In the case of HostGator.com, the “Hatchling” plan (at $4.95/month) will work fine for any single blog.  You would only need to consider the “Baby” plan (at $7.95/month) if you wanted to have multiple websites or blogs, or if you needed SSL encryption, which is used for security in such cases as someone taking credit cards online.   Remember, start small and save the extra money for growing your site.
Once you have ordered your hosting plan you will be ready to install Wordpress. You will need an FTP program and text editor to do this, but we’ll cover that in the next post.  In the mean time, if you have an experience with web hosting that you would like to share, please do.