How Am I Planning For The Case Study?
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Do you have a plan?
I have sat down and wrote a plan for the case study blog - the photographer blog. I think it is important to set out some goals for the new blog to give me something to work to and a structure to follow. Which will be helpful and keep me focused on the topic and the audience I am wanting to reach. It’s no good if the blog just starts wandering around with no real substance or way forward, it will never get anywhere and never have any readers.
As I have said before I am a member of the Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program, and I am using it’s ideas and principles as part of the planning and action of the case study blog. This will be interesting as it’s the first time I have tried them on a blog from it’s launch, this blog was already up and running when I joined the program. I am looking forward to seeing the results. The only thing is I have to deliver by doing the work on time in the first place, so lets hope I can keep up!
Where’s the case study blog up to?
At the moment I have been installing and configuring the plugins for the blog. It’s nearly ready to go and I will be detailing more on the launch in a future post. I thought I would take a look at what I have been planning behind the scenes for the blog pre-launch, to give you an idea of how it is taking shape.
- I decided on the writing style for the blog.
- I decided on the aim of the blog and who I am writing it for.
- I looked at the future, and goals for the blog and where I want it to go.
- I have wrote the about page and looked at who I am wanting to reach.
- I am preparing 10 articles pre-launch to publish over the first two weeks.
- I have another 10 - 20 post ideas and titles to work on in the mean time.
- I am drawing up a list for traffic generation to implement once the blog has some posts on it.
- I am finalizing the blog design and structure.
This gives an idea of my thinking behind what I am doing with the photographer blog, and the work that is going into the planning before I launch the blog. It may seem like lots of lists at the moment, but all this planning beforehand will pay off in the long run once it launches and I have a to do list the length of my arm to complete. It will buy me the time I need to give the blog itself my full attention and hopefully get it off to a good start, without losing too much sleep in the process and getting too stressed out.
My aim is to plan ahead more with the posts for this blog so I know what I am doing more in advance. I will let you know how it all goes and how well it worked as I go along.
Thanks
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:Blog Mastermind, the photographer blog
Hot Links - Episode 6!
This week in Hot Links:
Skelliewag is a fairly new blog that has achieved a lot of growth in a small space of time, and has a really interesting article explaining how she did it: How to get 1,050 subscribers in 3 months.
I looked at plugins in my last post, 10 Essential Wordpress Plugins. If you would like to find alternatives or to see what else is available, then you may like to take a look at the Wordpress plugin database.
There is a lot of information around at the moment about selling and buying blogs. I have recently started reading a blog called Blogtrepreneur, which has just announced that he is selling the blog. I have never followed the process of selling/buying a blog live before, and I think it will be interesting to see how it goes. Take a look at: Blogtrepreneur is for sale!
Thanks
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:Blogtrepreneur, Skelliewag, Wordpress Plugin Database10 Essential Wordpress Plugins
This is a list of the plugins (in no particular order) I use on my blogs and what I think are essential plugins for any Wordpress blog. All the plugins come with installation and configuration instructions once downloaded and the file unzipped:
1. SEO Title Tag
This plugin allows you to edit the post title that appears at the top of the internet browser when the blog is visited, which helps with on page SEO. And it integrates with Wordpress 2.3.
2. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
This plugin generates a physical sitemap for the blog which can be fully customised. Making searching the blog for a specific section easy, and updates itself every time the blog is modified or posted to. It will also help with on page SEO.
3. Google (XML) sitemap
This plugin works with Google Webmaster Tools and creates a sitemap for your blog by crawling it (it will then do it regularly) and is more for the search engine ‘bots’ than humans!
4. Google Analytic
This plugin lets you easily add the Google Analytic’s statistic package tracking code to your blog. You need to sign up with Google Analytic’s for an account and then you can get the script and paste it into the plugin. A great statistic’s package.
5. Wordpress Database Backup
This plugin lets you schedule backup’s for your blog and save them to your computer. If your blog has a problem, then all will not be lost!
6. Akismet
This plugin is a great time saver. I only started using it a couple of months ago and already it has stopped over 450 spam comments. You just need an API key to activate it, and to do this just sign up for a wordpress.com account and that will give you an API key.
7. Related posts
Great for increasing page views, and offering your readers even more useful content by listing related articles at the bottom of posts. It also lets archived articles be seen again easily.
8. Subscribe to comments
Helps foster a community by encouraging comments on your blog. By giving the option to have future comments emailed to the commentator, enticing them to return.
9. Share this
Puts a single icon at the bottom of posts giving the readers a list (once clicked), of social media sites to add your content to. This is great for uncluttering a blog, and getting rid of the mess of icons that can be at the end of posts.
10. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
Do you know how to upgrade wordpress through your host? I didn’t, but this plugin automatically upgrades wordpress to the latest version from wordpress.org, now that’s handy.
There are 100’s of plugins out there and this is just my opinion of the plugins I have tried, used and heard about. It’s my pick of the bunch.
If you would like to learn more about uploading plugins then you may like to read this article: How to Install Wordpress Themes and Plugins.
Thanks
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:Aksimet, Dagon Design, ilfilosofo, Net Concepts, Semiologic, share this, techie buzz, txfx.net, wasabi, XML sitemapsHow To Change A Wordpress Theme
Do you like my new theme for Build a Blog, it is very different to my last one, but I really like it and think it suits the blog very well. What do you think?
Why Did I Want To Change?
The main reason I wanted to change my theme was presentation. The above the fold area, the part of the blog that you immediately see when it loads was not presented well. Beforehand you could hardly see any of the blog itself, you could only just see the latest post, it was all header. Now it looks a lot better with more information to view before having to scroll, and it’s not so cluttered, making it look cleaner and easier to read.
Here are some before and after shots so you can see what I mean. 
You can see how much difference the new theme has made! There will no doubt be a few more tweaks I make along the way, but I don’t want to concentrate any more time on the overall design it will just be updating the information. I am very happy with it, though it may take a little while for me to get used to it looking like this, and recognise it as my blog! Read more
Site Search Tags:Brian Gardner, silhouette themeHot Links - Episode 5!
This week in hot links:
I have heard about the Blog Herald a lot over the last couple of months but I have never got around to visiting until now. I wish I had done it sooner because it is a really good news site for blogging, and has a group of contributors which gives it a nice mix of views and writing styles. It’s full of really useful articles from some very good bloggers, and definitely a site I will be visiting again.
I think forums are excellent places to ask for help and get to know bloggers in your niche or related ones. They also help you get yourself and your blog known, and a great place for interacting with other like minded people. I have joined the Authority Blogger forum recently and it’s been a great experience with a really nice bunch of people, who are friendly and always willing to help you out. Try this one out!
Last but not least a new blog I have come across - Sandy Naidu who blogs about internet marketing basics and more… a great educational blog.
Thanks
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:authority blogger forum, blog heraldHow To Find A Good Theme
First Decisions
I am up to that part of the case study when I need to find a theme for the photographer blog. Now I really enjoyed doing this I love design and it was great seeing all the different types.
Now there are lots of decisions to be made when deciding on a blog theme the first one being, am I going to pay for a professional design or am I going to look for a free theme. I’ll give you one guess which one I am going to pick….yes I am going for the free theme! There are some very good arguments for starting with a professional theme and how to get one, and you can listen to some of them here at a podcast by Yaro Starak talking to Darren Rowse about blog design.
But after considering what they had to say I have decided to go with a free theme to start with, and then progress to a professional theme a little later on. Although I realise there are always compromises to be made with a theme that is not designed to my specifications, and some free themes are better than others. But that decision was partly because of the quality of free themes I found, but I will go into that a little later I want to tell you what I was looking for first. Read more
Site Search Tags:Brian Gardner, free wordpress themes, performancing themes, wordpress theme viewerHot Links - Episode 4!
This week has been a bit challenging, my broadband connection has been down and getting it back up and running again was a little stressful. It’s amazing how lost we are without it, it was like my right arm had been cut off, I must come up with a back up plan in case it happens again!
I’ve still managed to come across some great articles though, here they are:
Problogger’s weekly video post is about using images in your blog post, I love images and it gave me some great ideas for my case study blog: Using images to take your post to a new level.
Daily Blog Tips has done a readers tips post full of great articles that I am slowly working through, but my favourite (because I have been looking for some) is 51, yes I have typed it right, 51 RSS buttons for your blog. Now if I can’t find one I like there then I just won’t find one anywhere. Next I’ll be moaning about too much choice!
Thanks
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:Blogger Journey, Daily Blog Tips, ProBloggerHow To Install Wordpress Onto An Addon Domain
This article is part of a case study following how I set up and run a new blog, about photography called the photographer blog, if you would like to find out more then please visit the case study category.
So I have registered my domain name for the case study blog - thephotographerblog.com and now it is time to install Wordpress onto it to get the blog started. This article shows the process I used to install Wordpress onto my existing hosting account, Bluehost. At the moment I have one blog on my hosting account (this blog) and I am going to add the photographer blog to it as an addon domain, and this shows step by step how I did it.
What do I do first?
Now I am still new to this hosting thing and I wasn’t even sure if I could have more than one blog on a hosting account, which shows how little I know about hosting. So the first thing I did was to email the Bluehost support team and ask some searching questions! They were very helpful and after a few emails asking more questions I had a good idea of what I was supposed to be doing. I found out that I could have more than one blog per hosting account, you just add the domain as an addon domain and it will be separate as a blog, but still ran via the root directory of the hosting account which in this case is build a blog, this blog. I can have a huge amount of addon domains on my account, which is really good value for money because I pay the same hosting fee as for one, so here’s to the start of an empire!
Once I had registered thephotographerblog.com domain which I did through Bluehost itself to make it easier for my first attempt. I had to select it as an addon domain because it was automatically parked on my account. If I had used another company to register the domain, I would have had to transfer the domain to my hosting account, which would have been another hassle and I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.
Then I had to point the addon domain at the dns servers so it can be found when the domain is entered or searched for. I did this by going to my list of domains in my domain manager and selecting it there.
Installing Wordpress
So the next step is to get Wordpress 2.3.1 installed onto the site so I can start setting the photographer blog up and get it running. Now this is where I came a little unstuck, so far I was doing ok, I had registered the domain and set it all up, and the options I had been given had been easy to choose the right one for, but now I was unsure of the next step. I had asked Bluehost for help before I started to get an idea of what was involved in the process. They had told me to use an addon domain and register it, then go to fantastico and upload wordpress. Now that all seems fairly simple but there is only one control panel per hosting account, so how do I get it to install on thephotographerblog.com and not on builda-blog.com the root directory? I am not one to jump straight in and give it a go unless I am sure, or try to find some option that looks right. Because I would no doubt make the wrong decision and mess everything up. I speak from experience shall we say! I suppose that is why it has taken me so long in the first place to set a blog up for photography, I am a little too cautious.
And what made matters worse my broadband connection has been down for a couple of days, so I have been sitting here stewing about it and not able to do anything. But finally everything is working again and I gave it a go, this is what I did:
- I went to my bluehost control panel
- I found the Fantastico deluxe icon
- Once in Fantastico program I found Wordpress on the left in the long list of available programs.
- Clicked on Wordpress and the right side of the screen populated.
- Clicked on the “new installation” link
I then had to fill in the form to tell it where to install Wordpress, giving the
username, password and domain name which I had chosen when setting the domain up. Fantastico then creates a folder automatically for Wordpress. I then followed the instructions on screen and finished the installation. It then gave me the admin url and other user information I needed about the site. And that’s it, the blog is up and running with the default Kubrick theme and welcome post (screenshot of the blog at the moment above), what a relief. Fantastic fantastico!
Final thoughts…
Once I had done it I thought what on earth were you worried about it was easy, but I had prepared beforehand and I had a good idea what I was looking for. I think anything new that I learn about blogs and blogging can be a bit nerve racking the first time I do it, simply because if I screw it up I know it will be a nightmare to fix! It’s that learning curve again….
Just to point out, this was done through my own hosting account in Bluehost and the process may vary from one hosting account to another. I hope this article has given an outline of how to start multiple blogs on Wordpress and a host, and is helpful to somebody in a similar situation to what I was. I look forward to the next step - Themes.
Click here to learn more about BLUEHOST.COM.
Thanks
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:Bluehost, Fantastico, thephotographerblog.com, WordpressHow To Choose A Domain Name
Where on earth do you start?
With more then 46 million active dot com domain names registered, it is getting harder and harder to find the right domain name. I have been looking for a domain name for the case study blog on photography. It’s not been as easy as I thought it would be, a little bit of knowledge isn’t always a good thing! I find I have been spending far too much time and effort getting caught up in trying to choose a domain, but finally I have done it, phew!
What was I looking for?
The hard part obviously was finding a domain that I liked and that wasn’t taken already. So I just had to buckle down and trawl through all my prospective names until I found one that was free, which took a good couple of days to do.
Now there were several elements that I wanted to incorporate into this domain name. This should have been an easy step to make and I made it harder than it had to be, by putting pressure on myself to find the ‘right one’. It became very frustrating just because I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted. I was looking to fit these factors into the domain:
- a keyword from the niche, this will help with SEO rankings
- a .com suffix for the domain, because it’s the most popular suffix
- a catchy name that is easily remembered
- a certain amount of branding so the topic of the blog is easily recognised
- try to avoid hyphens they’re not good and may affect traffic
Keywords or Branding
This was a pretty long wish list and maybe not realistic, but this was the first domain name I had really thought about. I think there will be some need for compromise. Saying all that the domain name is not the be all and end all of a blog or it’s rankings. It would be nice if these elements could be in it, but they are not essential. There are lots of very popular blogs whose domains do not have these factors eg doshdosh, this blog has become its own brand through highly valuable content on a regular basis. The domain is only one part of a blog, what is more important is the content I produce.
There are two main points that I looked at when choosing the domain name, keywords and branding. Did I want to brand myself or the blog. I thought of using my own name as a domain but all the main ones were taken. And when I put mandyjones[dot]com into my browser bar to see what kind of site it was, it actually redirects to an adult site! Other variations brought up Mandy Moore sites when I checked. So I changed my mind about using my name. And this is something to consider when choosing a domain, what are the variations to my domain like, and would I want my visitors to land there by accident?
So what did I choose?
I decided to go with branding the blog using keywords and a generic domain name for the niche. So that if in the future I wanted to expand my photography site then it can be easily done, like adding a photo gallery eg domain name/gallery.
So I sat down and wrote out what I wanted the blog to be about, and what my main keywords are going to be on the blog, and hopefully worked into the domain name, then started to check if they were free. I used the domain checker at my hosts site, Bluehost (I just kept backtracking when I found one). Unfortunately because I wanted a .com suffix it was very hard to find a name that wasn’t taken already. But eventually with a bit of fiddling around and compromise I came up with thephotographerblog.com, and that is the new case study photography blog domain name.
What do you think? How well did I do with what I wanted to incorporate? Let me know in the comments.
Thanks
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:Bluehost, branding, doshdosh, keywords, thephotographerblogHot Links - Episode 3!
Time again for this weeks hot links. This week I thought I would share some of the blogs and information I have come across while doing market research, particularly for keyword research for the photography case study blog.
There is a lot of software available to help with keyword research, as well as subscription sites (that can be expensive) that you can search for results on, two of the most well known are Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. The good news is that both also run free trials that you can use as often as you like, they give 30 and 10 results’ respectively, and are a good way of seeing how the tools work without having to spend any money.
I keep coming across dosh dosh while looking for information, a blog to help you make money online and it’s full of useful blogging information including this article that caught my eye: How to Find and Target Long Tail Keywords for More Search Engine Traffic that includes five ways to find and target your long tail keywords. Which is good follow up information that looks in more depth into long tail keywords, that I talked about in my last post.
With all this talk about keywords and working them into blog titles and posts, I started to think about brushing up on my copy writing skills. Because there is a lot of different elements to be thinking about while trying to write a blog post. My writing is constantly growing and evolving, as my experience increases with the constant blog posts I am writing. But it’s an ongoing process and there is always room for improvement. So the best blog I know of to brush up on copy writing and to learn more about writing is Copyblogger by Brian Clark.
I hope some of this information has been useful!
Thanks
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:copyblogger, doshdosh, Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker
