BloggingAmigos

So you’ve bought a domain name, installed your Wordpress blog, and now you’re wondering what to do. Well, look no further because I’m about to tell you the things you should be thinking about.

Whenever I play around with technology I usually do a little research, play around with it, and then jump in headfirst. Over the past few years of blogging, there are a few things I’ve learned that would have been better being setup from the very beginning.

#1 Statistics
“What’s that?” you say. “Stats? I hated that class!” Well, you won’t have to get out your calculator or calculate any r values. What we’re talking about here is finding out if people are coming to your blog, what posts are popular, what are people searching for to find your blog, what links were clicked to get to your blog, etc, etc.

Feeling a little bit better about this topic? I thought you would. I have tried out about 5-10 different stats packages, that are free, for blogging. They have all been a little bit different and offer some different types of information. One thing to point out is if you have multiple stats packages installed, you’re probably going to get different numbers for the amount of hits (both total and unique), referring links, time on site, etc. The reason for this is because it depends on how long it waits before counting a hit from the same IP as another unique hit. It also depends on the timezone it’s working off of, and many other technicalities. This is why I would suggest only using only one to avoid confusion.

One reason to set up your statistics immediately is that every day that goes by without a tool installed is another day you have no idea what kind of traffic your blog is seeing. I’m currently using Google Analytics and am really enjoying it. The biggest advantage to using this free tool is that you’re not limited to only seeing the most X recent hits. Most of the other free tools I’ve used have only allowed me to see the last 100 or 200 hits. This is great, but it cripples you from seeing any trends over time. The only thing I miss about Google Analytics is that even though I’m able to see a lot of different types of information, they aren’t sorted by specific hits. I can’t see that a particular person came to my site from a referring link, went to 8 pages, spent 3min on my site and then left. So you might want to consider what types of information you’re wanting to receive and how they’re sorted before picking a certain stats tool.

#2 RSS Feed
If you’re not familiar with what an RSS feed is, then you should look it up on Wikipedia or something. These aren’t so much the wave of the future, but the wave of the now. Almost every blog and website you go to will offer some type or types of RSS feeds to their users. These are then setup on RSS readers so somebody can see if new content has been posted without having to go visit their favorite site(s). This may not sound like a big deal if you check one or two sites a day, however, if 35 of your friends are infrequent bloggers and you’d like to keep up with all their blogs…that’s when an RSS reader starts to sound like a good idea.

Wordpress has automatic RSS generation features built right into it. The only drawback is you don’t get to choose how it looks or what’s included, you can’t see stats on who’s subscribed, etc. A good, free tool I’ve been using for all of my feeds is FeedBurner. FeedBurner was recently bought by Google so I don’t think there’s any danger of it disappearing any time soon. With this service you can add bells and whistles to your feed, customize it for podcasts, modify description and title, see how many people are subscribed, etc. There’s a lot of cool functionality which I will be discussing in a later post. There are also some very handy plugins that allow you to redirect your built-in Wordpress feed to use FeedBurner, which I will also be talking about in a later post.

#3 Ads
Advertisements are something I just started using and wish I had setup a long time ago. Some of my friends stay away from them because they see it as “whoring themselves out” or something that will “clutter up their site.’”This can very easily happen and is something to consider if and when choosing an ad service. I’ve been using Google Adsense for a few months now and highly recommend it. You’re able to choose the type, style and size of your ads. You’re able to blacklist specific ads from showing up. Most importantly, you’re also able to maybe make some money which could cover your domain name costs and maybe even your hosting costs.

#4 Spam
Spam is something I’m sure you seen in your mailbox. If you’re new to blogging, then you may not know that you can also get spam comments. Just like there are spam filters for mail, there are also spam filters for blog comments. Wordpress has some settings to help prevent this under Options…Discussion. You can prevent comments from showing immediately, blacklist people and even hold comments if they have too many links in them. This doesn’t always catch everything though.

One built-in plugin you’ll find is called Akismet. This is a pretty decent service that will try to catch some spam. The only catch is you have to have an API key to use it. You can easily get one of these free by creating an account at Wordpress.com. The only thing I don’t like about Akismet, and this might just be ignorance on my part, is that I’m not notified in any way if some suspected comments are being held for my approval. I have to login to my blog and check my Comments tab.

There are also many other free spam plugins you can check out and try. Always check out some of the specifications before you pick one. You’ll want to make sure you can manually “ok” a comment if it’s suspected of spam and that you’re able to manage the spam blocker/catcher in some way.

#5 Organization
I’m sure all of you have gotten tired of somebody telling you to clean up your room at some point in time. This is one of those things that may seem pointless to you and important to someone else at the exact same time. In the case of your blog, it’s good to consider your readers on this one because they’re the ones reading. If you’re creating a personal blog and don’t want anyone to read it, then maybe you can skip some organization. I would still recommend some categorizing or tagging of your posts regardless of what kind of readership you’re expecting.

There are two ways to organize your posts: categories and tags. The general rule of thumb is to use categorize for big and broad things and tags for more specific things. Both categories and tags make posts easier to find for you and your readers. It allows people to find more posts on similar topics or maybe continue reading the saga of a long and drawn-out story. The hard part is always deciding on your organization scheme. If you can figure this out beforehand, it’s usually less work. If you need to change things up later on, the amount of work really depends on how many posts you have to edit.

Another step in this organization process is to setup a plugin and/or widget to display your categories/tags for people to go directly to them. There are some built-in widgets to display categories and tags, but you might want to look for something specific once you start having a large amount of posts of varying types.

Wrapping it up
This pretty much covers what I consider to be the essentials. There are many, many other plugins and add-ons out there just begging you to play with them. Your template/theme is an aspect I didn’t mention. One reason is you can easily use one of the provided themes to get started. Another reason is this isn’t my area of expertise. Tara will be giving some advice and tips about these in the near future. If you have any questions or comments let us know.