With the Jetpack plugin for WordPress, you can add email subscription to your blog today. By using the Jetpack plugin, this automatically uses the power of WordPress.com to manage your email distribution features, such as confirming the email address, opt-out and other spam related tasks. Did I mention this plugin was Free? Great, you can get started on this today.

A brief overview of features this will give you, all for free and available today:

• Subscribe box on your blog that will send an email to users as soon as you make a new post.
• Asks users to confirm their email address before being added to your subscription list.
• The email users receive is the full article from your blog and is not personalised to the user
• It offers no way to send emails to the users, without making a new post
• It cannot send automatic emails after a number of days. (ie: day 1 email, day 3 email, day 6 emails.. like a mini-series)

If you want to take your email marketing to another level, then you may want to consider a product like Aweber, which lets you add more advanced features such as:

• Send personalised (Hi Liz.. etc) emails to each person with a more personal message, directing them to the blog posts. (Automate the insertion of the readers first name into the emails)
• The option to include only a sample of the post in the email, as there is no further reading when you read the post in your email. (no recent/related posts, no category links, no facebook plugin.. etc)
• Send an automatic email to welcome each new user, customised to each individual signup type.
• The mini-series of emails I described above which can be a great way to drip feed information when promoting products – especially your own.
• More benefits of Aweber are available at : http://docs.aweber-static.com/email-marketing-guides/aweber-overview.pdf

You can get started today with Aweber for just $1 and around $200 gets your a full years subscription. Less than $1 per day and you have a world class email campaign manager ready to meet your needs. More information on Aweber is available here: www.aweber.com

As you are building your online business your email list becomes one of your most important assets and you need to be able to capitalise on this to ensure your success.

• Akismet
  Filters out the spam comments automatically – this saves you a lot of time and effort if you have comments enabled.
• All in One SEO Pack
  Helps you manage the SEO on your site and posts/pages.
• Backuper
  Automatically sends an email containing a backup of your data. I have this configured to send me a database backup each week, but I would recommend that you configure at least one full backup every 3-6 months.
• BWP Google XML Sitemaps
  Generates XML sitemaps.
• Contextual Related Posts
  Links related posts from your blog at the end of each post, giving the users more options once they have finished reading your post.
• Google Analytics for WordPress
  Lets you easily integrate your Google Analytic code into your blog
• Jetpack by WordPress.com
  Many features that help you share your blog, including subscriptions, contact forms and sharing buttons
• Primary Feedburner
  Serves your blog feed from Google Feedburner, which gives you extended subscription and reporting options
• WP Super Cache
  Speeds up the load time on individual pages, which becomes very important when your traffic increases

This list is constantly being updated as versions change and new plugins become available.

If you need help installing or configuring any of these plugins, just leave me a note in the comments below.

SEO is not a process that is done once and can be forgotten, it must be considered every time you add, change or remove content on your site. You should also be regularly reviewing your SEO and seeing if it can be improved. As the market (your readers, customers and competitors) change, so must your your site optimisation.

Before making any changes though, you need to do some research on what search terms you want to target, or be ranked highly for. There are many factors in determining this, including the number of searches per month and the level of competition you have.

For example, it might be very easy to get ranked high for a term like ‘Callan Browne SEO‘, as this page might be the only one on the entire web that has that phrase on it, but what value does that really provide? A quick Google search for the term SEO retrieves almost 1 Billion results. Talk about competition!

What you should be looking to target with your SEO are phrases that you can talk directly to with your content. Again with the example of SEO above, if I change the search to ‘Why is SEO important’, or ‘How to get started with SEO’, I get considerably less results (10% and 5% of the original request in this case).

Another example could be ‘Yoga‘, which currently returns about 2 Billion results, whereas searching for ‘Yoga warm up‘ returns just over 10 Million and ‘Yoga warmup‘ is less than 1 million. SEO is about targeting these niche areas and getting your page ranked up the top, Ideally on the first or second page. It is also possible to get ranked for common grammar or spelling errors.

Where to get started?

Getting started with SEO can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t need to be and can be broken down into several stages. The dynamic nature of a blog also makes it easy to target a number of niche areas within a given subject with good results.

The first task we want to do is identify the areas that we want to target and find out what the market is already doing. Start by writing down some of the keywords that your site is all about in bullet point form. Don’t forget to use your Vision to consider your target audience. At this point you should also ensure that the keywords match your vision, as the clearer you are about the blogs purpose, the better your SEO will be (Failing to plan is planning to fail)

If I again go back to the Yoga example, we might end up with a list like this:

• Yoga
• Getting started with Yoga
• Unite the mind, the body, and the spirit
• Improve flexibility
• Yoga Benefits
• Yoga Classes
• Yoga Techniques
• Yoga Stretching

Keep the list short and precise. You should update your blog vision to include these keywords and keep them somewhere easy to read and review them. You should be referring back to and building on your vision to ensure you stay on track for success.

Establish a baseline

Establishing a baseline will enable you to define the ‘as-is’ and give you a clear understand of what can be improved. Without this you could end up going backwards. You can get a clear understanding of your baseline by looking where you current traffic is coming from.

If you haven’t already got Google Analytics installed on your site, please stop reading now and install it! It only takes a few minutes and will start collecting important data straight away. I use a plugin called ‘Google Analytics for WordPress‘ to make it easy to link my account and WordPress blog together.

Google Analytics can show us what terms have been used to direct traffic to your site, as is shown here (click on the image to enlarge)

Now you can see what terms have resulted in traffic being sent to your site. Why not search for a few of those terms now and see if you can find your site. Are you at the top? on the first page? the 3rd? Do you want to be at the top?

Building on the Keywords with content

If you have multiple posts on a reoccurring topic (such as Yoga), you will continue to optimise your site for the topic, but this is best done by having content that relates to the subject in niche areas. It’s much easier to target search phrases with individual posts then having the overall site targeting the shorter keywords. For example, if we have post topics on the following:

• Getting started with Yoga in Melbourne
• Yoga warm-up exercises
• Health benefits of Yoga
• Improve you flexibility with Yoga

All the posts are working towards the common theme of Yoga, but at the same time you are targeting the niche areas within the selected topic.

Stay tuned for part 2, where we look at unique content, user comments and the ‘heading’ tags

Take this example from a friend’s site: An image has been purchased from a stock photo site and the name of the image is: ‘canstockphoto8681265.jpg’. The image has been uploaded to a blog post and the default title was used. What do we see when we hover our mouse over the image? You guessed it, the filename, as can be seen here:

This is coming directly from the source code of the image, which looks like this for the above example:

<img title="canstockphoto8681265" src="canstockphoto8681265-300x300.jpg" alt="" />

Notice how the ‘Title’ reads ‘canstockphoto8681265′, which is exactly what we see when we move the mouse over the image.

What is also interesting is what we see on Google for this result:

So the title tag that the image was given is now being indexed by Google and displayed as part of the search results.

The alt tag also plays an important part of your SEO and generally the first area that search engines look to determine what the image is about, so it’s important to set both the alt tag and the title tag for all of your images.

Setting both these tags using your WordPress admin screen is quite straightforward and can be done by following these steps:

1. Go to the edit page of the post which contains the image you wish to modify
2. Click on the image and then click the ‘edit image’ icon, which pops up. This is the left icon in this screenshot:
   
3. In the box that is displayed next, you can see options for both the Alternate (alt) text and the title, as is shown here:
   
4. Once you have updated your title and alternate text, click the update button and save your post. The changes will now be live on your site

For the most part, these 2 tags will be very similiar, if not the same. There is some further reading on the difference between the 2 tags and how to use them safely here.

• A clear vision of what your site is all about, including:
  • Who is your target audience?
  • What is their age range, demographic, sex, location and language spoken of your readers?
  • What ‘problem’ are you trying to solve for your readers?
  • What are you goals from the site in 6 weeks, 6 months, 18 months?
  • How much time and effort are you willing to put in to meet those goals?
  • Make a plan and stick to it!
• Smart Plugins  – Plugins are great and will make your life easier, but you do not need every single one. I’ve created a list of the must have plugins here
• User Friendly Experience - If I cannot find my way around your site, or if it’s difficult to use, I won’t spend much time there. Think about the user experience, including:
  • Your blog should be clean and easy to navigate. Think about what the users can see and how to help them find what they are looking for
  • How your page looks in all common Web Browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari (you may also want to consider multiple versions)
  • How users interact with forms – If a field is mandatory, don’t let them leave the page without first asking for it. Client side validation goes a long way to the user experience
  • How does your site look on an iPhone or Android Phone? What about on a tablet?
  • Page loading time. A lot of users are using mobile broadband and sometimes congested networks. Be mindful of this and don’t forget to optimise your images!
• Content and Language that is targeted to your readers
• Feedback on who your visitors are, where they are coming from and what they are reading - This can be achieved using Google Analytics, among other products
  
• Somewhere to test new content or changes- I always recommend that people create an identical blog used just for testing. This can be either on the internet or your local computer, whatever works best for you. Some benefits of this include
  • Testing new and updated plugins or themes
  • Ensuring new versions of WordPress are compatible with existing plugins and themes (there were 10 versions of wordpress released in 2011)
  • Testing integration between other services, such as Facebook or Twitter
  • Seeing how your site will work with lots of content. This is really important when your site is quite new, as you cannot expect to know what the site will look like when you have a number of categories and posts.
• Social Interaction – Again I’ll go into more detail about this in a seperate post
• Reliable Hosting – There is no point building a blog if it’s not available for people to read
• Regular Backups – Don’t let all your hard work go to waste. Backup your site content, themes, plugins and database at regular intervals. Regular bloggers should be backing up at least weekly. (You can automate this with a Plugin)

Let me know what you think of this article by leaving me a comment below and stay tuned for the next instalment.

The first money I ever made online was from Google Adsense and the ads being displayed on a couple of very small sites I had up at the time.

Adsense ads can be added almost anywhere on your site and how the ads to appear will be important to your success.

If you put to many ads on the site, or they appear to be overcrowding the content, then you can’t expect your readers to keep coming back to your site, only to view ads. At the same time, if you put them so far out of sight then nobody will ever click them.

Finding the balance is important and start small! Why not start with some small ads in your sidebar (there are widgets that will do this for you). This won’t have an impact on the content you’ve spent time creating, but it will be right where your readers are looking when they have finished with your article.

There are other companies that offer you the ability to display ads and generate content, some are even more lucrative than Adsense. I encourage you to try them, but I would avoid any ads that auto-play video and audio. I personally find if there is an ad on a site making noise, it’s easier to close the page then stop the video playing.

The solution? I created this short piece of code to detect the request coming from Facebook and then add an image of the YouTube video to the end of the post.

To achieve the results, I added this code to the functions.php of the current theme:

function is_fb() {
    // is the link coming from facebook's spider?
    if( (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'facebookexternalhit')) || (isset($_GET['facebooktest'])) ) {
        return true;
    }
    return false;
}

function addYTimage($content) {
    // look through content for links to youtube videos
    if (strpos($content,'youtube.co')) {
        // get the youtube video id
        preg_match('#(\.be/|/embed/|/v/|/watch\?v=)([A-Za-z0-9_-]{5,11})#', $content, $matches);
        if(isset($matches[2]) && $matches[2] != ''){
            //found a link, set up the image url
            $str = "\n<br />\n<img src=\"http://img.youtube.com/vi/".$matches[2]."/0.jpg\" alt='Youtube image' />\n<br />\n";
            return $str;    
        }    
    }
}

function addYTimageforFB($content) {
    if (is_fb()) {
        // request has come from facebook, add the youtube image to the end of the post.
        $content .= addYTimage($content);
    }
    return $content;
}
add_filter('the_content','addYTimageforFB',15);

The code should also detect a number of methods of embedded the videos.

Note: You can also add ‘?facebooktest’ to the end of your link to test this code and see the results in your browser.

Our banks know how important this is and do not allow any communication that is unsecured or unencrypted between you and the internet banking sites, so why not use this same level of security when you are using other sites?

This extra level of security becomes practically important when you are using a shared internet connection, such as those at cafés and other places that have a number of users on the same wireless or wired network.

Facebook and Twitter both support encryption already, but it is not enabled by default which leavs your account open to being compromised. I strongly recommended that you go into Facebook and Twitter settings NOW and enable the secure browsing option. You can do this by following these instructions:

Twitter:
In your account settings (https://twitter.com/settings/account) enable the option that reads ‘Always use HTTPS’

Facebook:
In your account settings, under security (https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=security) enable the checkbox that reads ‘Secure Browsing – Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) when possible’

You can tell if the site you are visiting is using a secure, encrypted link by looking for HTTPS: at the start of the URL, or internet address, as shown here:

As with anything, there is always a downsite and when you are browsing pages securly, the sites will load slightly slower, but typically this is not slow enough to actually notice any change in performance.

Are you still thinking that you don’t need this extra (Free) security? Then consider that without it, everything on your Facebook and Twitter pages could be potentially accessed by anybody around the world. That includes all your private messages and account settings. Now you understand why I’m encouraging you action this as soon as possible.

Not all sites need this level of security, and some of you will have noticed that not even this site uses encryption, but that is because everything on this site is available to the public. I do not store any private or personal information on this site that I wish to keep confidential.

1. Displaying Google Ads using Google Adsense
2. Email Marketing, starting with a free gift in exchange for email details
3. Advertising products for sale, which could be your own products or affiliated to others peoples products to get you started
4. Paypal donations
5. Membership Program – This is the key to generating reoccurring income on your site

Note 22/4/2012: This content is currently under development and will be available shortly. Please contact me if you have any questions