If you host your own Wordpress blog, it is important to make sure you have the latest security updates installed and also to make sure you maintain a fairly tidy backend. The reason is simple: performance and data integrity.

For a few plugins that can help with this, check out this article. Outside of the automatic update and backup (very cool), these plugins do not do anything I would consider critical, but they are nice for keeping stuff you have to manually do to a minimum.

Regardless, this is a nice resource for finding a few plugins you might find useful.

If you are looking to deploy a professional looking website quickly, then the way to go is using an established template based web platform such as Joomla or Wordpress (just to name a few). The reason is simple, these platforms have established developers and graphic designers which produce high quality, ready to use templates. Plugging one of these into your site is simple and instantly gives your site an attractive look.

Of course, there are lots of good free templates available, but you get what you pay for. Another thing to keep in mind is there are lots more people which use free templates compared to those who use a template they purchased. While you aren’t guaranteed to have a unique template (unless you custom develop it), going with a purchased template most likely means there are significantly less people using it.

Additionally, you could develop your own template, but for obvious reasons this isn’t the quickest way to get your site up… unless you are the one developing professional templates that is.

Whenever a platform is widely used, it is a big target for attacks. Take Windows, it is by far the most widely used OS so it makes sense there are more attacks on it than anything else. The same holds true for browsers and web platforms. So for those of you who use the popular WordPress platform for your blog, security should be a consideration.

To help with this, you can check out the Maximum Security plugin for WordPress.

Maximum Security for Wordpress is packed with strong protection that makes your site extremely secure. It guards against intrusion; tracks a plethora of events; blocks malicious content that could harm your readers and your search engine ranking; and includes a strong Web application firewall along with a full blown intrusion prevention system[.]

You can read the full list of features here. Any version of WordPress later than 2.5 is supported so even though this plugin is still in beta, it is worth taking a look at.

If you have a blog, you have probably gathered that posting consistently and predictably is very important for maintaining your reader base. To help accomplish this, one thing you can do is schedule your posts to publish at a specific time. Even though you may enter several different posts at once, they will not become available on your site until the time you set.

This is exactly what I do for these tips. Since only 1 tip runs a day, I enter several tips at once and simply schedule them to run on subsequent days. Doing this means I don’t have to remember to log in an enter a tip everyday and saves me lots of time.

OK, this is a bit of a technical post, but one which will come in handy for somebody down the road. Windows Live Writer is, so far, the best blog client I have found for either Mac or Windows. If you are running Windows and are a blogger, I highly recommend you download Live Writer. It is a freebie.

Continued

On Day 6, I talked about using social media as the spokes of a wheel and at the center of that wheel is your blog.The fact that I made a blog the hub of the wheel should tell you that, yes, the blog is important. Even if your business centers around an online ecommerce store, you should still have a blog.

Why?

As I also said in Day 6, anonymity and impersonal business are a thing of the past. In fact, it is common for small businesses to try to look bigger than they really are online. They’ll use the word “we” when they mean the word “I”. They’ll have multiple department email addresses when there are only one or two people on the staff. They’ll use corporate “lingo” on their website, thinking it makes then look professional when, in reality, it makes them look dumb.

Today, business is about the individual. You are an individual and you are in business. Your customer is an individual and they have a need or desire to be filled. Even if your operation is larger than a one-man operation, you should be accessible and personable and REAL.

With a blog, you can do that and you also have a solid line of communication to your customer. You can post news stories tailored to your market. You can use your blog to get feedback on your products and services (by way of blog comments).

Blog software, too, is set up for interactivity. When you post a story in our blog, your blog software will automatically “ping” any other sites you link to in your post as well as sites which you specify (such as Pingomatic). This serves to notify others of what you’re doing on our blog as well as to notify search engines of your new post – automatically. Search engines like Google LOVE blogs so strategic use of your blog can get your site and brand into search engines.

So, my advice:

1. If you do not yet have a blog, start one. I recommend using Wordpress for your blog. Also, I highly recommend you use your own hosting, not Wordpress.com. You want to you use OWN domain name, not a domain of some freely available personal blogging service.
2. Post often.
3. Make your posts valuable to your potential customer and reader. Do not worry about giving away too much information. It is the free stuff which is going to bring people in the door. If you hold back too much so that you can charge them for it later, you’re not going to have many takers.
4. Like spokes to the wheel, use your social media profiles to drive traffic to your blog.
5. Use the blog to drive traffic to your sales letter or online store. If you are running a service business, make your contact information clearly visible on your blog.

Happy blogging.

There is an old saying: “If you build it, they will come”. Well, that is just plain NOT TRUE when it comes to a website. It takes work to get people to your website. The good news is that a blog is an ideal platform for promoting and, just by having a blog, you’re already on your way. In this video, I’ll give you 10 tips to start driving readers to your blog.

Video Length: 17:28

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Simply put: You’re going to want some plug-ins on your blog. A plug-in is your way to extend the functionality of Wordpress beyond that it can do “out of the box”. Plug-ins are what make Wordpress such an awesome platform to run your website on. In this video, I’ll show you how to install a plug-in. I will also present you 10 plug-ins that you should definitely check out.

Video Length: 23:13

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

OK, time to get a bit more technical. In order to customize your Wordpress theme, you will need to understand enough PHP to do a few basic things. Wordpress (and the themes it uses) are entirely based on the PHP scripting language. In this video, I will show you some basic PHP – concentrating on those concepts you’ll need most often in your Wordpress themes.

Video Length: 20:14

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

In order to make any changes to your Wordpress theme, you’re going to need to understand the basic structure of your theme. In this video, I will show you how your theme is put together and which file goes to what.

Video Length: 10:42

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Permalinks are the structure of the web addresses used to access pages and posts on your blog. It is usually best to modify these from the default for search engine purposes. In this video, I’ll show you how to do that.

Video Length: 8:18

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

In this video, I will walk you through the various settings and configuration options available to you in Wordpress.

Video Length: 17:17

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

When you make a blog post, you will be organizing them using categories and tags. There is a difference between a category and a tag. In this video, I’ll explain the difference and show you why you might want to use both.

Video Length: 10:48

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Now that we have Wordpress installed and a theme set up, it is time to start actually using Wordpress. In this video, I’ll give you the basics.

Video Length: 14:14

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Your Wordpress theme is going to be the design of your website. There are LOADS of free and very nice Wordpress themes available for your new blog, but you need to know how to install them to your blog. In this video, I will show you were to find a theme for your site and how to install it to your blog.

Video Length: 10:36

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.