Internet Writing :: Inklit.com

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Stop in the middle.

So far in our Twenty-One Days to a Better Blog Series (Intro, Table of Contents), we’ve been talking about elements of your blog that you usually work on when your blog is still young, such as what platform it will be running on. We also talked about how your domain name, title, tagline, and theme will work together to let your reader know right away that your blog is one that they’ll want to read.

In this article I want to walk you through three more things that I always do when a blog is just a little infant, before I start happily typing away. Together with the tasks we’ve already talked about, these tasks make up a kind of launch checklist for a new blog. Even if you’re new to these three tasks, getting through them should only take a couple of hours.

Override the Default PermaLink Structure

When you blog, you have a blog home page as well as pages that represent categories, archives of past blogs, and individual posts. The links to the individual posts are called PermaLinks. As the name suggests, you don’t want to be changing how these work late in the game.

By default, Wordpress PermaLinks are “dynamic” URLs that are not very descriptive, and will look something like http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123. To change this, go into the “Settings” tab of the Wordpress control panel, and select “PermaLinks”. Generally, I check the “Day and Name” radio button, which will give you a structure that includes the name in the URL of the post, thus (for example): http://www.yourdomain.com/2008/04/14/my-first-post. Such a “static” URL makes more sense both to a human reader and a search engine, though admittedly it loses brevity compared to the dynamic version.

Burn a Feed Using FeedBurner

Another task that you’ll want to do early on is to “burn” a feed using FeedBurner. FeedBurner, now owned by Google, is a popular site that helps you do things like tracking statistics for your RSS feed. It also helps you make your feed available to people using different readers. I’ve found FeedBurner very easy to use, so you should be able to follow the directions there to get your feed burned relatively easily.

Once you have your FeedBurner feed published, if you’re running Wordpress I recommend installing the Feedburner Wordpress Plugin. In brief, what this plugin does is it redirects people who find the default Wordpress theme to your FeedBurner feed, so that your FeedBurner statistics better reflect everyone who’s visiting your blog.

The reason I consider using FeedBurner to be an “early in the life of a blog” task is that many blog directories want to have a URL of a feed to work with, so I like to point them to the FeedBurner version of the feed from the beginning.

Turn On Spam Filtering

Dealing with Comment SPAM manually is a pain, and I have had excellent luck on Wordpress with either SpamKarma2 or Akismet. I think that of the two, Akismet is a better choice going forward, since it is slightly easier to configure correctly. In fact, there’s not much to it beyond activating the plugin and entering a Wordpress API Key (which you can get more information about here).

Related Posts:

Twenty-One Days To a Better Blog Table of Contents

In this post, we continue the discussion of some of the most basic elements of a good blog that we began in our article, Blogging Basics: Platform, Hosting, Domain.

Once you’ve got your blog up and running by finding a place to host it and pointing a domain to it, you’re now ready to focus on several key elements that will help a new visitor decide in about fifteen seconds or less whether or not to spend any time and attention on your blog.

No pressure, though! (No really, no pressure — you can always make a change later).

Collectively, the the theme, logo, title, and tagline of your blog make up your visitor’s first impression of what your blog is about and whether your blog is interesting to them.

Let’s take each element in turn.

Theme

Your Wordpress Theme is a skin or template that defines the look and feel of your blog. There are thousands of free themes available. Some of the top sites for browsing Wordpress themes include:

• The Wordpress Theme Viewer
• Wordpress Themes
• The Wordpress Theme Park

In addition to the free themes, there are many, many vendors selling premium themes or services customizing the theme for you. Customizing a theme requires some basic PHP / HTML skills that you may not have, so you may prefer to have a Wordpress expert assist you with changes you may need to make. If that’s the case, you may consider hiring someone to take an existing, “standard” theme and extend it for you (I have done this sort of work for clients myself and it has worked out well).

Although you may need someone to help you with your theme design (initially and from time to time), I believe the need for a unique look and feel can be overrated. Although I customize my own blog themes heavily (because I can), this is not something I would probably invest heavily in if I couldn’t do it myself. To be sure, you want to pick out an existing theme that’s not the Wordpress default theme or something equally hackneyed. Beyond that, your theme should be simple, based on a white background, and have a layout that supports what you want to do . For example, if you’re selling ads, you’ll need to think about where they’ll go. My philosophy is that a bad theme may drive a user away, but a great theme isn’t going to keep them there more than a few minutes if your content is awful. Get something halfway decent looking, and start writing!

Blog Title and Tagline

On the General Options page of your Wordpress blog, the two first choices you’ll make are the Blog Title and Tagline. Your Blog Title is the name of your blog, and is the text that will show up in the title bar of your home page. You can think of this as either your main brand or your main keyword combination that you would like to appear in the search engines. (I mean it when I say main keyword combination — pick a phrase that tells both a human reader and a search engine what your blog is about. This should not be a Sears catalog of possible keywords).

Your tagline allows you to embellish this basic title with more information about what your blog is about.

Here are some basic guidelines to follow when you pick your title and tagline:

• Keep it simple. Can a reader look at it and tell you what your blog is about within five seconds or less? If they can’t, then your title or tagline are too confusing. Use concise, concrete language.
• Match your blog. Your title and tagline should match what your blog’s really doing, and what you’re trying to sell. For example, most of my posts so far have been Pro Blogging or Online Publishing, but I still have “Freelancing” in the tagline because a potential client may want to hire a “Freelance Writer”, not an “Online Publisher”.
• Consider including your domain. Not everyone will subscribe the first time they visit, so having your URL (which should also be descriptive) somewhere in the title may help a visitor remember how to get back to you.
• Don’t apologize. The default Wordpress tagline is “Just another Wordpress Blog”. Not only should you change this, you should change it so it no longer has the word “Just” in it. Your blog tagline should not be “Just the ramblings of a geek”, for example. Why would I read that? If you change it to “All the things a geek needs to read” — now that’s something people will read. Well, geeky people, anyway — but that’s not a bad population for a blog to target!
• Change is not the end of the world. Did you start out trying to be the definitive source for everything automotive, but then ended up spending 90% of your time writing about Hybrid engines? Go ahead and modify your tagline and title to match what you’re really doing. Although you shouldn’t change them capriciously, your title and tagline are as much subject to periodic review and improvement as any other element of your blog.

Logo or Title?

By default, most themes will display your title and tagline for you without further customization. One of the custom options your theme developer might discuss with you, however, is the ability to put an image logo in place of — or in addition to — the title on the page itself, while still showing the title in the title bar of your main page. Either choice is fine. SEO purists will insist on having the <h1> with the title of the blog on the page, but a well designed logo that reiterates your domain name may be a better choice from a branding perspective.

Related:

Twenty-One Days To a Better Blog Table of Contents

Day one of our series about Building a Better Blog in Twenty-One Days was an introduction to what we’d be working on.

Most of my readers — maybe 90% — can go ahead and skip over today’s “Day Two” installment about blogging platform, web hosting, and domain name. That’s fine. Go out and have a cigarette if you want. I won’t be offended. This is like the deceptively easy first day of review in math class before the hard work begins.

For those of you who haven’t yet started a blog and are wondering where to begin, however, I’m going to just dive right in and share my religion with you.

Your Blog Should Be Running On WordPress

There, I’ve said it.

If you’ve already launched your blog on Blogger or TypePad, and you’re happy with it, that’s great. Most of the rest of the series will be non-Wordpress-specific, so you should stay with us in spite of this dogmatic beginning.

However, if you haven’t already started a blog, then your blog needs to be running on Wordpress. Here’s why:

• If you have a budget of no money at all, and you’re just experimenting and start writing and have some fun, you can get a free Wordpress.com blog. I have one, just for the fun of it. Here it is. If your work takes off and you need to export it later, you can do so.
• If you’re in the middle of your blogging journey, and want more control over the code you run on your Wordpress blog, you can get a free copy of the open source Wordpress product and run it on any one of a zillion low cost web hosts for about $7.00 per month. Here’s a list of some of these hosts.
• As a former software developer, I appreciate the fact that with a huge number of third party software plugins, Wordpress does about 99% of what I ever needed it to do. The other 1% I can code myself. Yes, their upgrades can be a bit quirky sometimes, but for the most part Wordpress is incredibly good software.

You Need Your Own Domain Name

At about $10 per year or less through Godaddy.com, having your own domain name is one of the cheapest things someone on the Internet is going to insist you break down and buy. Your domain is your first attempt to give your visitor an idea about what your blog is going to be about, so picking a good name helps you with the goal we set for ourselves at the outset of being clear. A good domain name should:

• Relate to what the site’s about.
• Be as short as possible.
• Be as clear as possible.
• Not infringe on any copyright / trademark or the like.

I thought InkLit.com was a cute name and a bit of a paradox for an Internet Writing site. It’s also nice and short, but it’s not especially descriptive.

“ProBlogger.com” is great — it’s short, and tells you what the site is about.

“Writing-Journey.com”: very nice, but Bob needed the hyphen because the unhyphenated form was taken. I have “Sacramento-Home.com” on another site for the same reason.

A lot of really good domain names will be taken, but there are still some tasty nuggets to be found. I just registered “TechReview360.com” the other day. You can use the domain search tool available at Godaddy to research what’s available.

If you’re at this stage with your blog, you may want to think about your domain name in connection with our next post in the series about some of the other basic elements of your blog.

Twenty-One Days To a Better Blog Table of Contents

What does having a better blog mean to you? Does it mean a big four or five-digit subscriber count? How about a steady stream of people who start commenting on your posts almost as soon as they hit your site? Do you want more page views because more page views means more advertising revenue, or are you content with capturing a smaller, focused niche in the search engines to help you sell your product or service? Do you want to convert more of your visitors to closed sales, or are you simply trying to reach a larger audience with your message?

Whatever your exact goals, I want to welcome you to this new article series, Twenty-One Days to a Better Blog.

Today is day one. That means of course that we’ll have twenty more posts in the series. However, by way of warning up front, I may take a day or two off as we go along, especially on weekends. Also, I may write a post from time to time that’s not part of the series. All in all, however, I think you’ll find that navigating around in the series will be pretty easy. (In fact, if you’re curious, I’ll share with you how to set up such a series when we get to the day entitled “Write an Article Series”.)

We’ll also be writing about a number of different things you can try on your blog. Some of these you may only need to do once, and they may take you a lot less time than a day. So don’t be surprised if you still have to write your blog and work on some of these after the twenty-one days are up. Nevertheless, I’m going to try to structure this in such a way that if you try out the suggestions I write about, your blog should be better at the end of twenty-one days than it was at the beginning, and so that you can continue to improve from there.

What Do We Mean By “Better?”

I asked you the questions above about what you think a better blog is, and now it’s fair at the outset of the series that I share with you a little bit about my background, what I mean by a “better” blog, and where I intend to end up. Also I want to lay out some of the territory we’ll be exploring so you have a way to think about the rest of the posts in the series.

Let’s start with the background first. For many years now, I’ve been blogging in a small niche (real estate in the Sacramento area). In fact, I was the founder and am still the co-author of the oldest real estate blog in Sacramento. In that blog, I haven’t focused much on building my subscriber audience, since most people care about real estate when they’re about to buy or sell a house, and the subset of those who care about a particular geographical area is fairly small. Because of this, my focus was on reaching people when they were searching for real estate, and having a following was less important to me.

In contrast, when I started Inklit, I realized that the topic of “Internet Writing” had a much larger potential audience, so building a subscriber base was one of the first things I wrote about. And sure enough, this month-old blog already has more than half the subscribers of my almost five-year-old real estate blog.

The reason I bring this up is that I’m going to give a definition of better, but I want to stress at the outset that not every blogger is the same — and even for a single blogger, the definition is going to vary according to what project you’re working on. So as you stay cooped up with me for the next twenty days, I want you to be thinking about how — and whether — this definition applies to you. The other reason I bring this up is to set the tone as fellow traveler on this journey with you — in fact, as often as possible, I’ll be demonstrating the techniques I’ll be writing about here so you can get an idea of what I mean.

A Blog is Better If…

1. It makes more money. Feel free to ignore this if your blog is strictly personal and you don’t care about making money. If you do care about making money, then more is generally considered a better quantity of money than less. (Check with a Harvard MBA on that, but I’m pretty sure).
2. It is clear. I recently wrote about the debate between the specialists and generalists, and in that post, I argued that the specialists won. People like to subscribe to resources that they think will educate or entertain them in a certain way. So having unity of theme is one way for a blog to be clear. Other elements of clarity include a clean and easy to understand layout, simple navigation elements, and outstanding writing. In the case of elements that will lead a visitor to buy from you, ease of ordering also feeds back into item 1, making more money. The same is true for other things you might want a visitor to do, like subscribing. See the next point.
3. It has more readers. Even if you don’t care about how much money you make, you still want someone to read you — otherwise your haikus or whatever would be in a notebook in your desk. If you do care about making money, then, depending on your business model, you may need a lot of people reading you to make any money at all. Even the most jaded SEO practitioner — more concerned with how computers view their writing than people how people do — want readers because readers might link to them! We can measure readers in a number of ways, unique visitors, page views, subscriber counts, etc.

How Are We Going To Get There?

As I look over the list of topics we’ll be digging into, it occurs to me that they fall into two broad groups or categories, the “me, myself, and my keyboard” group, and the “get by with a little help from my friends” group. That is to say, there are tasks you could in principle do all by yourself (though for some people who are less technical, some of the technical tasks may require some help from your web guy). Then there are tasks which by their nature mean you need others to help you, so we’re going to be learning about building a sphere of influence and social networking. You can think of this as “writing” or “development” tasks versus “marketing” or “promotion” tasks. There are some tasks, though, that straddle both worlds, where community and content come together.

If you think about it, our definition of a “better” blog breaks down the same way. You can make your blog more clear, and it will be clear whether you read it or a million people do. But you can’t get to a million readers or a million dollars without the involvement of other people.

Join Us For The Rest Of The Series

If you’re not already a subscriber, I would like to invite you to subscribe to this blog (in a reader or by email) too get the whole series as it comes out.

Also, if you enjoy the series, please do me a favor and give it some consideration in your favorite social networking / social bookmarking applications using the “Share This” button.

Twenty-One Days To a Better Blog Table of Contents

credit: sunshinecity

I am very pleased to announce that — subject to someone beating him by June 10th according to the original contest rules — Bob Younce of The Writing Journey is the winner of our ad contest. Bob wins the 125 x 125 pixel banner ad at the right for six months, for the traffic and subscribers that came as a result of his submission of my site to StumbleUpon, and for otherwise making an effort to promote the contest.

I say that Bob won subject to the original rules because according to the way the contest was originally framed, I reserved the right to post the winning ad on June 10th if I hadn’t gotten to my goal of 101 subscribers by today, April 10th. As of today I’m up to 67 subscribers, so I’m officially two thirds of the way there.

However, you could still win this contest if you are some well known blog A-lister and you wrote a glowing review about me and pointed people to the original contest rules and the Eleven Steps article.

So all of you A-Listers who are hanging on my every word, now’s your chance to win a foot race against Bob Younce!  I’ll bet you can’t do it.

Honorable Mention

Jim Cronin of the Real Estate Tomato gets an honorable mention as the early favorite in the contest, after publishing a guest post of mine.

Thank you to everyone else who participated as well by inviting me to do a guest post or promoting me on FaceBook or the like.

What’s Next?

Starting tomorrow we’ll have a brand new series, 21 Days to a Better Blog. Watch for it.

Son of Freelance Face-Off

Recently Chris Knight over at EZineArticles took notice of my original Freelance Face-Off between Associated Content and EZineArticles.  Michelle Devon had this to say about Freelance Face-Off classic:

Hummm, I write for both AC and EzineArticles, and I see them as two completely different animals and wouldn’t have ever thought to compare them, because they are so radically different.

What’s that you say?  Apples and oranges?  Man, that’s it.  The rhetorical gauntlet has been thrown down, and you know how I get in the presence of a down thrown gauntlet of a rhetorical nature.

I Got Your Apples and Oranges Right Here

No, seriously, Michelle, it’s all good, especially since our conversation made me think to compare those true apples and oranges, CatalystBlogger and Twitter.

CatalystBlogger is Jennifer Williamson’s excellent Freelance Writing Blog that I recommended elsewhere.  Its main characteristic is thoughtful, clear writing about interesting Freelancing topics.

Twitter is the social networking debutante du jour.  Love me, she cries, for I am still young and interesting.  Its main characteristic is that you have 140 characters to get your message across, which everyone is doing, incessantly.

So What’s The Relationship?

I wouldn’t have thought to compare CatalystBlogger and Twitter, except that today I was working on an article series that was going to mention Twitter, and I happened to check my traffic logs. 

Here’s an interesting section from them:

I say I “happened to check” my traffic logs, but I’ll let you in on a little secret.  That’s like an alcoholic saying “I happened to be enjoying a beer.” 

I can’t stop checking my traffic logs.  I need professional help.

Twelve Hits From Twitter Versus Thirteen From CatalystBlogger?

Are you serious? 

As good as Jennifer Williamson’s blog is, no one would dispute that Twitter has gotten more attention.  In terms of Google references, Twitter is approximately 1,000 times more popular than CatalystBlogger.  Yet in terms of recognition for Inklit, my participation on Twitter has gotten me not only nothing particularly worth reading, but one less web site hit than Jennifer’s blog.

Being Visible Is Not Being Interesting

There’s a difference between being visible and being interesting.  Twitter is visible.  CatalystBlogger is interesting.

The reason I got more traffic from Jennifer’s blog than I got from Twitter even though Twitter is 1,000 times more visible is that the people reading Jennifer’s blog are looking for something interesting to read, so they click through to my blog (only to discover that I’m not as interesting as Jennifer — but what the heck, I get the benefit).

In contrast to Jennifer’s readers, the people on Twitter are interested in being visible, and telling people they’re in the shower now, or what have you.

“Twit.”  That should have been a warning.

Present company included.

Is There a Moral Here?

Here are several of them.  I’m running a special.

• Being around people who are interesting is worthwhile.
• Commenting on other people’s blogs can be a more effective traffic building “technique” than hanging around on Twitter.
• Be interesting, and visibility will follow.
• Tweeting is for the birds.
• Friendship doesn’t abide your 140 character limit.
• There will be a new debutante in six months.

photo credit: joshuamckenty

If you’re a dedicated blogger and someone who has more than one interest in life, sooner or later you may be haunted by the issue of how many blogs you should have. That’s the position I find myself in now. To give you an idea of how much I’m wrestling with this issue, today at lunch I was doing a balance sheet of the pros and cons of using an existing blog and widening it to several topics, versus spinning off yet another blog that I’m not sure I have time for.

Because that’s so on my mind these days, I was very interested in this discussion on Suzie Cheel’s blog, which is about the pros and cons of having a narrowly focused, single-topic blog versus having a wide ranging blog with many topics.

The Battle of the Bloggers

A lot of folks weighed in on Suzie’s blog, and I was hoping some of my readers might also want to discuss it here. One of the first things I did in going over it was look at who was arguing for and against specialization, and how well that model seems to be serving them. On the specialist side of the argument was ProBlogger author Darren Rowse (In fact, I learned about the discussion because Darren linked to it). Taking the generalist approach was an author that Suzie Cheel cited in her original post, John Pozadzides. John believes strongly enough in the case for blog generalization that the tag line of his blog is “Specialization is for Insects”, part of a Heinlein quote that John gives in more detail in his About Page.

Digging into the numbers for both authors, I noticed that John had about 3,700 pages indexed by Google and 1,045 Feedburner subscribers as of today. He also posted a figure of an average of 15,000 to 20,000 page views daily. The ratio of page views to subscribers in his case is approximately 17:1, which is about what it is on Inklit, where I have 1,072 page views daily and 57 subscribers.

Comparing Darren’s numbers to John’s, what struck me immediately is that Darren had less than twice as many pages indexed by Google (5,260), yet he had about forty-two times as many subscribers. I don’t know Darren’s page view numbers, but I estimate them at something over a half million daily.

That’s Not The Result I Wanted

I love that Heinlein quote about specialization. I really wanted to have a blog about everything — in fact, as of yesterday, I had decided that that’s was where I was heading, and this morning I was taking the first steps in that direction, and was pretty much prepared to make the frightening announcement that Inklit was about to be devoured by my growing Borg Collective!

Have no fear. I am a specialist again. This is a blog about Writing on the Internet. Pay no attention to those digressions about Wordpress Plugins.

Readers, What Do You Think?

Comments? Do you specialize? If you generalize, do you do it in more than one place?

credit: The Moonstone Archive

When I wrote my 101 Subscribers in 30 Days post, Minnesota Investment Property specialist Scott Ficek was good enough to comment on on the post and recommend the “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin, so I could get a nice-sized subscriber base like the one shown at right.

So, thank you to Scott and I hope he’s right that this plugin works well, lest I have my clothes sold off by pregnant teenage chain smokers.

(No, that’s not a bid to go after some of the wrong kind of traffic, but I’ll bet I get it anyway.)

While I appreciate Scott’s participation and suggestion, I must admit that I almost didn’t make it past the name on this plugin.

I realize that people who need someone to follow are stoned in love with the bald one, but many of us could care less what Seth Godin would do. I would have called it the “New Visitor Welcome Plugin” or the “Convert New Visitors to Subscribers” plugin. That way when people are wondering how to convert new visitors, they’d find the plugin. But that’s just me. I appreciate Richard Miller writing it, and if you’re going to contribute good code to the community I guess you can pick whatever name you want. Meantime those of us who’ve largely forsaken programming for writing can just shut up about it and link to the plugin, already, by way of saying thank you.

Thanks and a hat tip again to Scott.

credit: smokegirl_rebekah

Happy Friday.

I don’t usually go for confessional blogs myself, so I usually try not to write like mine is one. You know the genre. They usually have a tagline that starts with “Just”, to qualify their author’s efforts. “Just my thoughts on the war”, for example, or “Just the ramblings of a chain smoking pregnant teenager living with her boyfriend behind a music store in Taiwan”.

However, sometimes I live up to my own standards so poorly that I would make a great Republican. So this is just a happy Friday post, depending on the kindness of strangers, living behind the music store. It is just a confessional post, with the following confessions:

• I love how easy it is to self publish online, because it means there are lots of opportunities.
• I hate how easy it is to self publish online, because it means that every chain smoking pregnant teenager living with her boyfriend behind a music store in Taiwan is in competition with me.
• I also hate how easy it is to publish online because I can get confused about which of my projects are important. Given the terrible, self-imposed imperative to become awesomely popular and the number of chain smoking pregnant teenagers I’m competing with, I feel like I have to come up with a definitive domain / topic / killer app within the next few days or I’ll die penniless, with my young nemeses selling my clothes for cigarette money.

Now you know why I hate confessional blogs.

In the interest of replacing this funk with some creative work, I’m going to shift gears now and work on one of those projects. If you see any teens catching up with me, for God’s sake, won’t you please let them know how bad smoking is for the baby?