Wordpress is an amazing tool if you want to start up a content driven website without having the knowledge to code something on your own. Actually, even if you do know how to code it’s a simple, quick and easy way to manage a website.
Wordpress can be used in two ways,
1. You can setup a free blog at Wordpress.com which will give you a web address of http://yourblog.wordpress.com, which you can have any domain forwarded to. This will allow you to have free hosting for your blog if you don’t want to spend the money right away.
2. You can download the Wordpress software from Wordpress.org and install it on your own hosting server. This will give you full control over all aspects of your new site. This is the method that I would recommend.
Once you have the Wordpress site setup and ready to go, before writing any content at all, figure out how you want to go about getting traffic to your site. At this point you should not be focused on making money, it will only discourage you when you don’t. You should already have some idea about what the site will focus on, since I’m assuming you either bought a domain or registered a free blog based on the topic you will be writing about. This article is obviously focused on bringing organic traffic to your new website using SEO and a few effective plugins for Wordpress.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which is the method of bringing visitors to your site by targeting keywords so that people can find you via the search engine results pages (SERP). This is going to be our focus. We want to have as little up front costs as possible for this example.
First thing you should do is download an install some plugins for Wordpress.These are the ones I use, there are many of them out there that do similar things.
1. All-In-One-SEO Pack - This plugin is a must, if you install only one of these, install this one. What this plugin does is automatically generates meta tag descriptions, keywords and titles for all of your posts and pages. I had issues with some of my older sites where every time my website came up in the SERP they all had the same description, the meta description I had manually typed into the header.php of the site. That’s not what you want, you want all of your pages/posts to have different titles, descriptions and keywords, which is exactly what this plugin will do for you, all you have to do is remember to enter this information on each post before you publish it.
2. Google-Sitemap-Generator - A sitemap is basically a map of your site. It is an xml file that has links to all your pages that you submit to the search engines and they use it to crawl your site more efficiently. What this plugin will do is automatically generate your sitemap everytime you post something new and it will let the search engines know that you’ve made changes to the site and to send the spiders back. Between this and the first plugin I mentioned, as soon as I make a new post I’m already getting hits from people searching for those keywords. The new posts get indexed almost immediately by Google.
3. Sociable - This plugin is not necessary for SEO, but I always install it because it gives your readers a way to share what they’ve read on your site. You can see this plugin in action at the bottom of every one of our posts here. “Share and Enjoy” is what Sociable is doing. It allows you to select from a number of social networks and when people click on these icons it automatically takes them to that social network and fills in most of the information for them. This gives your readers the opportunity to promote your site for you. It takes 2 seconds to setup and can only help gain readers.
Once you have these 3 plugins installed it’s time to focus on your content. Everyone in the industry will tell you that “Content is King” and they are right, but not just any content, unique content. Don’t just steal articles from other websites and repost them on yours. For one, search engines will see duplicates and they don’t like those, especially if it happens alot. 2. Chances are you won’t rank higher than the original person that posted the article. If there is an article that you feel your readers need to read, take a snippet of it and post it as a quote on your site, but then write your thoughts and feelings about it. So don’t steal content and claim it as your own, that’s a big one.
Another big one is to post frequently, but don’t wear yourself thin too fast. I’m guilty of this myself on this very website. When we first started Internet Gangsters, we posted pretty much anything we could think of. So in like 2 days we had almost 10 posts and day 3 we couldn’t think of anything to write about and the site sat dormant for a while. If you want people to keep coming back to your site you need to update frequently. Now I’m not saying to write every single day, unless of course you have enough ideas that you can do that forever, but I would shoot for 3-5 good quality posts a week, but don’t let too many days go by without a new post, every other day is a good starting point (1-2 a day is ideal if you can manage).
Write content yourself. I know there are places where you can hire extremely cheap writers to help out, but you get what you pay for. I have a friend that is a writer for a living and she finds it absurd how little people charge to write articles online. If you’re going to pay people to write, be cautious because the content you could be getting could be stolen from somewhere else or just horrible quality.
So those are all good tips when getting started, but when it comes to actually digging in and writing articles here are a few tips that I’ve found helpful.
1. If you’re using the All-In-One-SEO plugin the first sentence of every post is what is going to be put into your meta tags as the description for that post if you don’t fill in the information in the options below that specific post, so make sure that you get the point of the article across in the very first sentence. It will also use your “tags” as meta keywords if you don’t fill those in as well. Try to incorporate some keywords that relate to the post in that first sentence as well.
2. Use keywords in the titles and throughout the post. You may think they are getting redundant after a while, but search engines like them. Just don’t go overboard, but be conscious of them as you type.And as for the titles of your posts, search engines like the header tags (<h1>, etc) that you should be using in your CSS for the titles, so this will help.
3. Just because you understand something doesn’t mean that your readers will so make sure you explain things if you think they could be confusing.
4. Use paragraphs and the “more” feature. Nobody likes to read a post that extends the entire length of your website and doesn’t use paragraphs. The more feature will add a “click to read more…” button at the bottom of your post so you can keep the homepage clear of really long articles. Paragraphs will make it easier for a person to read if an article is broken up a bit.
After you’ve written your content and you feel as though it’s unique and well written, use sociable. Nobody every said that you had to wait for your readers to submit your articles to social networking and bookmarking sites. I would recommend Digg and Reddit to start. These will get you some traffic, but if the articles are creative or unique it’s hard to keep these people coming back so make sure to keep up with the content.
To sum up, don’t think about making money at first, don’t get discouraged if nobody seems to be reading or comment, write frequently, write unique posts, focus on keywords. You should be able to pull in a couple hundred hits a day after a while, but don’t think that will make you much money. Focus on content and when you reach the thousands of visitors a day, then start thinking about possibly monetizing your site.
