WordPress is a great blogging tool – there is no doubt about that. But there are settings that you should change every time you set up a new installation. Here are the customisations I always make, and why you need to make them also.

Remember that some of these customisations are for security, as well as making sure that your blog looks its best and is attractive to visitors. Both of these are essential. You do not want anyone to successfully attack your blog, nor do you want visitors to take one look at it and walk away. So read the list and add your own ideas via the comments!

1 – Admin User
The new version of WordPress prompts you to change the password, but ideally you should delete the admin id! Full details on my blog, but basically it makes it harder for hackers to guess the logon details.

So go into user maintenance and create a new user id. Some pointers:

• allocate a user name that is easy to remember, difficult to guess
• allocate a nickname that is different to the user name
• give this new user name full admin permissions
• once you have created it, go back in and select to display the name publicly as the nickname, not the username – this prevents us giving away what it has been changed to

Then logo off, log back on as the new username and use that to delete the admin user.

You are now 1 step closer to a safer WordPress.

Step 2 – Describe Your Blog
Go to settings, then general and give your blog a title and a tag line. People will almost certainly see these when they visit your site and ‘just another WordPress blog’ doesn’t sell your blog to them!

Step 3 – Activate Akismet
This used to be a standalone pluggin, but it is no a part of the basic installation so it is easy to forget it. Go to your list of pluggins, activate Akismet and then follow the instructions to obtain an API key if you don’t already have one and enter it.

Just do it! No questions, this is compulsory, else you will have a blog full of spam comments! Akismet is the pluggin tool that will delete all of these spam comments and clean up your site for you. When it detects spam, it squirrels it away to safety for you to review and then deletes it automatically a little later.

But please, do not show off publicaly how many spam comments have been caught, else spammers will use your blog to test how to get around Akismet…

Step 4 – Remove Unnecessary Weight
Whilst you are in pluggins, delete Hello Dolly. Go to pages and delete the about us page (or re-write it so that it is relevant) and go to the posts page and either delete or rewrite the initial post. Also delete the first ‘this is a comment’ comment.

Step 5 – Make It Look More Personal
Browse WordPress under extend then themes and find a theme that you like the looks of, or search for free wordpress themes and download a couple of suitable themes that way.

Once you find a few that you like, download and unzip them then load them to your blog and through the appearance menu, have a play with the themes and see which one suits your needs the best.

Step 6 – Update Your Pings
Pings tell a whole variety of important websites that you have updated your blog, so use pings for the best exposure. All that you need to do is to go to settings and then writing and add a list of ping services to the relevant box.

Where do you get a list of suitable services? Well, thanks to Vladimir Prelovac who maintains a list over on his website – http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-ping-list.

Step 7 – No Pingbacks
Whilst it is good to know who is linking back, if you are writing articles in the future and these are pointing back at your individual pages (good practice), then you will get your comments filled with Pingbacks – I know! Go to settings, then discussion and turn off pingbacks.

Step 8 – Pluggins
Finally, it is time to start adding those essential pluggins, but this list has gone on for long enough so we will save that for another day!

Keith Lunt

You want visitors to visit your site and to visit again. You invest a great deal of effort in getting those visitors onto your website in the first place, so do not let that effort go to waste by not attracting these visitors back time after time. Here are 3 blogging tips to keep them coming back!

Blogging Tip 1 – Have A Good Looking Site
Simple, but a fact. If your blog is not visually appealing, then visitors are not going to keep coming back. Why? Well, because they will not like what they see!

Make sure that you choose a theme that looks good and matches your subject. Not too many flashing features that will distract and use only subtle adverts. When you add adverts, just keep it to one or two advert positions and concentrate on the most highly productive of your advertising schemes. Putting too many on one page will make visitors think you are not interested in them, just their money and will also hide those well performing adverts.

Also, choose a theme that includes good navigation, else modify the theme to improve the navigation. If it is easy to find your best writing on the site and most relevant posts then visitors will read more in a single visit. The more they read, the more chance there is that they will decide that your have some value in your blog and will return at a later date.

Blogging Tip 2 – Make It Easy For Them To Follow Your Updates
Does your blog offer an easy to find RSS feed? Do you have a page that explains how to use an RSS feed? Just because they are reading your blog does not mean that they know how to use RSS. If you do not want to give a full description, at least link to a page on another site where they can find out what to do. By being the first site to nurse them through this process they might just go for it with you!

What if they do not want to use RSS? Then provide them with an email newsletter option and every week send out an email to your list of subscribers. List in this newsletter your latest posts. This is better than a RSS feed to you as in the email you can also add an advert or two.

Also, to keep your visitors up to date with what you are doing post a list of latest posts on Twitter and advise that they follow your Twitter updates. This can be done automatically with a variety of available pluggins.

Blogging Tip 3 – Keep Up Dating
One thing above all else will make sure that people are coming back to your blog – something new to read. If you do not keep posting new content, then why should they come back? What drive is there to make them want to return to read something else? Give them something new to read and make sure that they know about it.

Aim to write at least a few times per week, but spread out the writing. There is little point in posting three new posts on Monday morning if you then do not post again until the following morning. If you do get through all of your writing in one session, just save some of the material as drafts and come back later in the week to publish it!

Is WordPress really the best you can use for blogging? Why, and when is another option better?

Well, for a start, I have to say that most of the time the best blogging platform is definitely WordPress. I will look later at when I think that other platforms are better than WordPress, but why is it the best? Why do I use WordPress nearly every time I create a blog, either for myself or for my website design customers?

Well, for a start, it is free! What could be better than a fantastic tool, available for immediate download without any need to register, that is totally free? Well, a lot. And WordPress, in my view, has it all and more.

I am talking here about the self-hosted version of WordPress, where you go to wordpress.org, download the latest version, buy some hosting space and upload all of the files to your website via FTP. OK, that sounds complicated and is how my hosts have me doing it, but that does not always have to be the case.

With a lot of hosts there are quick install options to quickly and easily install the latest version of WordPress. My hosts do not offer this, presumably because they are trying to sell their own blogging tool. Their paid for tool offers no way near the functions of WordPress!

What makes it beat the competition, hands down? Well, its size certainly helps. Because it is free and excellent, loads of people use it. A few of these people want customisation and, therefore, write their own pluggins. These are small applications that are easy to install and perform a basic function, such as extra search engine optimisation or a contact form.

A lot of these pluggins are free to install and use, and add a great deal of functionality to your blog. Only by using WordPress can you benefit from these.

Also, there are many free themes available to select from. These are basically templates that you can download, install and use for your blog. Without any design skills you can be showing off an excellent blog that looks great, does what you want it to do and offers a load of extra features.

But, when is WordPress not the best tool? Well, for some people buying hosting space is out of the question and unnecessary. If your interest isn’t money making, say you just want to record the run up to an event or make a personal diary, then a free tool such a blogger without the huge array of styles and extra applciations might be all that you need.

Also, there are communities of blogs here and there. WordPress.com is one such community and I have a blog, although very rarely used, that exists in a running community. These are great for personal blogs, such as my running blog which is supposed to record training and my charity fund raising. The community aspect means that other members of the community can quickly find your blog and you have an inbuilt audience.

But, for most people, whether wanting to earn a small income or blog for their main business, then WordPress is the ultimate in blogging tools.

Keith Lunt

What are the first, elemental steps in starting a blog and getting online? It should be easy, but you want to be driving hundreds of visitors to your blog each week if it is going to be successful. Here are our first 8 steps into setting up a successful blog.

Step 1 ) Decide What To Blog About
It might seem a daft point to mention, but it sets the scene for the entire blog. Maybe you just want to start blogging and are not sure what to blog about? Maybe you have a specific area to talk about. Whichever, decide on the theme you are going to blog about and work from there. Work out what the aim of your blog will be.

Step 2 ) Decide What Tool To Use
Are you afraid of anything technical or eager to get your hands dirty? Decide whether installing self-hosted WordPress is for you or whether you need an easier option. If you want to host a WordPress blog, then look for a suitable website host to work with.

Step 3 ) Choose A Name
Now that you know what you are blogging about and the system to use, choose a name. Even if you are using a system such as Blogger, it is well worth picking your own website domain name to use with it. It can be far easier to remember and return to a simple URL than a longer one, plus if you are getting into paid advertising, your own URL can be worth a lot more.

Step 4 ) Get Going
Download WordPress and install it or sign up to Blogger or your chosen system. Whichever you are most comfortable with. Follow the basic set-up instructions you can find relevant to the system you are using.

Step 5 ) Start Posting
You are almost there – you can now place your first blog post and finally be classed as a blogger! Make that first post, but before you hit the post button, take a chance to read through the post a couple of times and make sure it is correctly written.

Over the next few days and weeks you are going to start posting a lot more. Don’t let it put you off that you are probably making posts that no human will read yet, time will come!

Step 6 ) Read Other Blogs
Browse other bloggers’ work in the same or similar fields. See how they post and what they are talking about. Which of their posts have attracted the most comments? Are they about subjects that you can also talk about and maybe get your own share of the traffic?

Step 7 ) Join In With Other Blogs
When you read a post that interests you, write a meaningful comment. Not just ‘Nice post, thanks’ type comments and don’t put in any links to the posts. Write something in the comment that will flatter the blog owner and will interest them and their readers. If the comment is good enough they and their readers might click on your name to visit your website and hopefully leave a comment in return!

Step 8 ) Show Off Your Talents
Now that you have content and a few readers, start trying to improve the search engine ranking. Select your best posts, rewrite them and submit them to the top article directories. This should send you a few more visitors, as well as improving the number of inbound links and Page Rank.

There are other changes you might like to make along with these first steps to setting up a blog, such as checking the security settings. If you want to now more about starting blogging, call into our blog!

Keith Lunt

If you are blogging then you might want to cover the cost of your efforts. You might even want to make an income from your work. What are the best ways of doing this?

There are several ways for the new blogger to earn an income from their website. Some are easier than others and some need a lot more work than others. But if you are wanting to turn your blogging passion into a small, or maybe a not so small, income, here are my favourite ways of earning an income.

Affiliate Marketing
This started off originally through website owners who had regular readers teaming up with companies that needed traffic. The website owners linked to the businesses and generated sales and eventually this became affiliate marketing of what it is today.

In short, as a blogger you can recommend and refer to products that a merchant is promoting. Through signing up to suitable schemes the visitors that you send are tracked and if these make purchases you share in a percentage of the sale. You can place text links in the body of your posts, banners in the side bars and a mixture in your newsletter. It is up to you to tell your visitors about the products and get the sales.

But how to get started? Simply look for a few products that are related to your blog and find who is selling them. If that company advertises an affiliate scheme you are sorted, else run a general search for the company name and the word affiliate. You will be surprised what you can find!

Pay Per Click
The next popular method once installed takes no extra effort and that is pay per click (PPC) schemes such as Google Adsense. With PPC you just display the code within your theme, either embedded in the post or in the side bars, then as long as you are getting website traffic there is not much more to do. Just maybe experiment with the colours and positions of your PPC units.

Very simple and easy to run and if you have a lot of traffic on a high value niche, it can be a great earner. All that you need to do to generate a good income is maintain your blog.

Sponsored Posting
There are a few marketing companies around that can provide you with opportunities to sponsor your posts or include paid for links in the posts. They will keep you up to date with the latest regulations, but in short companies make opportunities available to you for writing posts. You write this post in your own words so that it fits into your blog and as long as everything is correct you become eligible for payment.

Obviously, each payment is related to a small amount of work writing a post, so the amount you earn is limited by the amount of time you can spend, but with some schemes there is a lot of money on offer.

Ebook
Lastly, if you are able to put together a blog of thoughts, why not put some of these thoughts together into a coherent ebook? If readers enjoy your ramblings they might equally enjoy a book of them. There is a bit of work here actually creating a shop function, but on WordPress there is a plugin for this that makes the work so much easier!

Getting your blog noticed is the first step in making it worth while. But if you are struggling to get some traffic and the search engines are sending absolutely no-one, what can you do to start seeing visitors?

If you are just starting out with blogging, what are you going to do to make sure that you get your blog noticed? There are several tricks that you can be trying to get the first few visitors over to your blog and reading what you are saying and exactly what you do will depend on the type of blog.

For example, if you are a personal blog, then techniques that are more intimate and friendly are suitable. Whereas if your blog is running as part of a serious business, then you might have cash to invest in the blog traffic and need to use some more professional techniques.

Get Writing
The first thing to try, whether you are blogging for personal enjoyment or as part of a business, is to write up some of your best posts as articles and distribute them to the top article directories. Go for article directories that have genuine readers and some will start to see your articles and then call into your blog. I like EzineArticles for this.

Even if each article only produces a handful of visitors, if you can write a couple of articles per day the amount of visitors quickly builds up over the course of a week and there are also search engine benefits.

Pay Per Click
If you are desperate to get hits quickly, then maybe look into paid advertising such as Google’s Adsense. This is great for getting noticed quickly, but for a personal blog it could end up as quite an expensive scheme for insufficient reward, so I would recommend this is kept to the professional bloggers.

Guest Post On Other Sites
Rewrite your best posts. Review them and improve them and do it again! Make them the best possible posts you can and then ask some large traffic sites who accept guests writers if they will publish the articles you are sending to them. If they do, then their readers will see your best possible work and may be interested in reading more of what you have written and so follow your links back.

Write An Ebook
Usually an Ebook is a way of earning an income by selling it, but this doesn’t actually have to be the case. If your ebook makes a few references to your blog, for example where to get recent and updated information, then people reading the Ebook might become blog visitors.

To do this, take a few of your best posts and string them together into a small book, rewriting as much as necessary to make it coherent. Remember that you want the information contained in the Ebook to entice whoever reads it to visit your site.

Then you just have to distribute your work! You can mention it in forums and make it available to download from your blog, thus the people visit your blog to get it. But you can also tell everyone that they can distribute it for free. There are also various websites about that distribute free Ebooks, contact a few of these and see if they will include your book.

To learn more about getting a blog noticed, sign up to our newsletter and we will send you a free copy of our new Ebook – how to start my blog – which helps you in all stages from setting it up, securing it, getting new readers and turning it into a profit. It is an absolute must for new bloggers.

Written by Keith Lunt, experienced blogger.

How can you increase the value of your blog to get the maximum income through sponsored posting? What do you need to do to get lots of high value offers, rather than just a handful of cheap bids?

If you want to become involved in sponsored posts as a way to monetise your blog, when are the successful keys? You will have to ‘sell’ your blog to advertisers, without being able to make direct contact with them. They will review a few statistics about your site and maybe visit it. So it is vital that your blog is well prepared and ready for these advertisers.

Although some schemes have slightly different criteria to other schemes, these keys factors will place you well with almost any sponsored post system If you can follow these, you should be able to make a reasonable income, but beware that it should not be looked at as a get rich system. Yes, some advertisers are paying hundreds of dollars to bloggers, but these are few and far between and your blog has to be spot on.

So what might an advertiser be looking at when deciding whether to make you an offer for a sponsored post on your blog?

1 ) A decent Google Page Rank and plenty of incoming links.
Try some article writing and see if you can have some of your best work included as guest posts on other peoples’ blogs. By building up incoming links you Page Rank will improve and directly increase the value of your blog.

2 ) Build a following.
Advertisers measure traffic to a blog through the Alexa ranking and being able to demonstrate a good RSS and newsletter circulation list will show that their expensive add will be reaching an audience.

3 ) Use your own domain name.
Don’t use a blogger name or other provider’s name – register your own URL and a lot more advertisers will be interested in your.

4 ) Write often.
If you only post sponsored posts, then a lot of the better advertisers, those that bother to look at your blog because they are paying well, will know that their advert will at best be hidden amongst many others and at worst just posted on an blog only intended to earn money.

5 ) Be selective.
You can’t write often enough if you are accepting loads of paid opportunities. If you accept 4 paid opportunities per day, some systems would demand that you then write another 8 posts! Two own for every paid is a lot of writing if you are accepting a lot of paid opportunities.

Also, if you are just accepting every offer then a lot of them will be irrelevant to the subject of your blog. Casinos on a site about blogging might just stand out as a sponsored post. Not a problem if it is only once in a while, but if you post several together and often, you will also lose readers.

6 ) Write well.
When you do complete a paid post, make sure that it is well written and looks good. The advertiser is paying for it and they want it to look good, so do a good job for them and if the system has a rating system they might give you a good mark.

7 ) Be realistic.
Don’t expect hundreds of high paying opportunities. If your blog doesn’t have lots of followers expect less. As you build up a reputation, you can start to charge more.

To learn more about setting up a blog for a profit, sign up to our newsletter and we will send you a free copy of our new Ebook – how to start my blog – which helps you in all stages from setting it up, securing it, getting new readers and turning it into a profit. It is an absolute must for new bloggers.

Written by Keith Lunt, experienced blogger.

By directing visitors around your blog you can increase visitor retention. But how do you steer them and where do you steer them? Read on!

Steering visitors around your blog is an essential trick that will help to increase the success of your blog. Look at is as guiding your visitors to where you want them to go to increase your targets.

The Aim Of Flowing Your Visitors
To increase the value and success of your blog you need readers every day and lots of them! This is basically acheived through making sure visitors that arrive to read a post go on to read a second post and so on.

Once your visitor has read a few posts they become interested in you and what you have to say. They will hopefully then take an interest in the products that you want to promote and maybe even start to follow your new posts and come back.

Therefore, the aim is rather than a visitor finding your blog and reading a single post before leaving, you want them to read a handful of pages and then commit to returning. A single visitor creating one page view becomes a loyal reader creating loads of page views.

Create The Flow
So how do you do this? Well, not for a start by listing most recent posts as your main navigation! This information is neither use nor ornament and I recommend that you replace your recent posts links with a most popular posts link instead. New visitors are not bothered about your most recent work, but if you can showcase your best writing then they might take an interest and start reading these.

If they get to the bottom of your post then give them something else to read. Try one of the many excellent related posts plugins available. If they have enjoyed reading your article about widgets and you have more similar articles on offer, then make sure they can find them. Do not leave them hunting for the information that they do not know exists.

Where To Flow Your Visitors To
After they have read a few posts and established for themselves that you are worthwhile reading, give them a way of finding you easily again. RSS links are scattered about the page, but make sure that they are mentioned in key areas – such as clearly at the bottom of the article. Present your RSS feed in the same style as the body of the article and they might just read it automatically. Separate it by a horizontal line and in different text and they probably will totally ignore it.

Many people know how to use RSS, but what about those that do not? For these people there is no harm running an email newsletter. With these you also get the opportunity to include further information that they might not see, such as latest offers. Offer Facebook and Twiter as well as alternative ways of following your latest information.

All of these methods need to be presented to your readers at the right time – just when they want to use them. Make sure that they are clear on the page when they have read the post, when they are most open to following you.

Can you honestly expect when you start a blog that you can turn it into an income? Is it unrealisting to expect a profit, or can everyone be earning a profit tomorrow with a blog? Lets have a look.

I have seen many people talking in forums, desperate to find out when their blog will start earning an income. Many times these people are desperate to earn an income for whatever reason and expect that by starting a blog, they instantly have a right to advertisers paying them large amounts of money for advertising. Can you ever start a blog and honestly expect to turn it into a profit?

The Bloggers’ Costs
Well, to start off with, what is it going to cost you to start a blog? Many of these unfortunates start with free tools such as Blogger, so the costs are minimal. But what about people with better intentions? Many will at least register a URL, for about $20, some might even self-host WordPress, maybe taking the annual costs up to $100.

So at most, without paid advertising, a blog has to have an income of $2 / week to break even. Anything above that is a profit.

How Can You Earn From A Blog?
Next, how can you make money out of a blog? Well, Google Adsense is always a winner, as are affiliate commissions from services such as ClickBank. But most of the desperates are trying sponsored posts, which can, with a good blog, turn huge returns. I have seen opportunities where the advertiser is offering hundreds of dollars for a single 200 word post, for a suitablly qualified blog. Even basic posts can sell for 50c – $2 per time.

What Is Required To Make An Income?
These schemes will require one of two elements, if not both, to earn an income. First, for Adsense and affiliate commissions, you need genuine blog visitors arriving onto your website, reading your content and clicking onto your adds.

For sponsored posts, some advertisers and schemes want high traffic volumes whilst others are more interested in the Page Rank of your blog. Some will require a combination of both.

So basically, for a brand new blog with no Page Rank and no visitors, it is probably worth almost nothing and that is probably exactly what you will earn at this point.

How Can You Achieve These?
But both of these aspects can be worked upon. If you write frequently for a few months, I’d say 4 or 5 months at the most, and match this writing with article writing, then with time and patience you will see an improvement in your Page Rank, which generally updates about every 3 months.

You probably need a Page Rank of at least 2 to start earning a decent income from opportunities where Page Rank is important. But get to 4 or 5 and the price of the opportunities really does go sky high! A rank of 2 should be achievable by the next update or two, if you set your mind to it and worked hard for 4 or 5 months.

Likewise, for traffic based income, once you have posted a handful of articles then aside from the link building, some guest posting and other tricks can start to build the required visitors.

Is A Profit Achievable?
So can you expect a profit from a blog? Well, start it today and expect a profit tomorrow and you will be let down. But set to the work, concentrate on what needs to be done for a few months and you can start to make a small income. Keep at the work and you should ultimately turn it into a larger income. But it does take a lot of effort to get there.

To learn more about the stages of setting up a blog for a profit, sign up to our newsletter and we will send you a free copy of our new Ebook – how to start my blog – which helps you in all stages from setting it up, securing it, getting new readers and turning it into a profit. It is an absolute must for new bloggers.

Written by Keith Lunt, experienced blogger.

Fed up with the difficult and expensive methods of driving traffic to your blog? Do you want some alternative methods of traffic generation? Have a go at these.

Everyone is full of the ‘normal’ ways of getting traffic to your blog – expensive PPC adverts, banner adverts that probably result in very few visitors, popunders that people and so on. Maybe you are no search engine optimisation expert and hate writing articles and dread the idea of taking part in other people’s blogs. But getting traffic is still possible, if maybe at a lower rate than the traditional methods.

Why ‘Alternative?’

First, we are looking at alternative ways. Why are they alternative? Simple because they will work for some people, but not for everyone. They might not cost much, but then the returns are probably not going to drive huge volumes of traffic for every site. But because they don’t drive enough traffic to satisfy the needs of the big players, they are not that popular and not well established. That why they are alternative. They are not the most popular on the market. They are the hippy ways of marketing your site.

Use Your Car
So, do you drive a car? If so, do you advertise your blog here? You can arrange for a local printer to give you the stickers necessary to print your website address along the rear bumper. Then, when you are stuck in traffic or parked in public, you are advertising your blog.

Or if your car is parked in a public car park whilst you go to work, print a simple advert of your website addres on a sheet of A4 and put it in the window facing people walking past. A simple idea, but people’s curiosity will get the better of them and they will read the poster. You are not going to get thousands of visitors, but that is why it is an alternative method!

Business Cards
There are plenty of printers on the internet offering to print some free or low cost business cards for us. So why not order a batch and see what can be done? Stick them on the windows of cars in a car park or hand them out to passers by, if you have the patience. Do be careful though, there is a difference between handing them out and littering!

Crazy Videos
Do you have a video camera, or a video function on your phone? Then make a short film of yourself or your friends doing something outrageous. One of my customers made a film of a friend, painted in luminous paint, playing the drums in the dark. At the end of the video mention your blog address.

Then load the video to youtube and similar sites and start telling people about the daft video you have uploaded. Hopefully they will then show your video to other people and spread the word, so they will all see your advert.

Sporting Ideas
Finally, do you take part in any sports? Running, team sports or whatever? Could you print your blog address on the back of your top so that everyone sees it when you are out and about?

These are all ‘small’ ideas. But they don’t cost much and that is what makes them great alternative ideas.

Keith Lunt