My first step into the blogging world was made in September 2007. I decided to set up a test blog site on wordpress.com. This blog was going to be nothing more than a way to dip my toes into the blogging world without getting drenched in water. There was really no risk, and even though setting up a blog on wordpress.com was free, I decided to purchase a $20.00 domain and redirection service to my new website for a period of 1 year. And so miWisdom.com was born.
Settling on a Theme for My New Blog
In terms of themes, miWisdom.com provides a few dozen themes that you can use for your blog. Selecting a theme is your first priority. I won’t go into much detail here, however, once you have decided what you are going to blog about, choose a theme that will compliment your topic in one way or another. You can choose from 1, 2 or 3 column themes in a variety of colors and styles. I initially chose a 3 column theme because I was very fond of the widgets I could use within the blog.
Your other option in terms of selecting your theme is whether you want to select a fluid theme or static theme. By fluid I mean a theme that expands according to the monitor size and resolution of your visitors. By static I mean a theme that stays at a consistent width no matter what size of monitor your visitors are using. Initially I went for the fluid theme, however today the miWisdom blog has got a static theme like my other two blogs. I discovered through experience that what looks great on my wide screen monitor within a fluid design, doesn’t always look great on a standard monitor. This is why today I utilize only static themes that will look the same on every computer monitor no matter what the size or resolution.
One final factor to consider when choosing the theme has all to do with branding. Wordpress.com doesn’t allow you as much flexibility in terms of branding your blog as a personally hosted blog with wordpress.org. However, there are themes that you can choose that allow you to pop in a banner image and change the colors accordingly to match the personal branding you had in mind. If you visit the miWisdom blog today you will see that I have selected the Mistylook theme which allows me to change the top banner with an image of my choosing.
When it comes to themes, there are advantages and disadvantages to each. The best thing to do is to write up some content and then test to see how it looks within different theme layouts. You can do this through the WordPress administration console under Presentation > Themes. Select the theme you want and preview it by clicking on the theme image.
Tracking Your RSS Subscribers with Feedburner
The best way to track your RSS subscribers is through a service known as Feedburner. Visit their website and sign up for an account. Once you have signed up, add your blog URL (address) to the list of sites you want to track. When you have completed this, you will receive a code that you must copy and paste into a text widget within your blog. Copy the text into the text widget and drag it into one of your sidebars. You will find your widgets within the Administration console under Presentation > Widgets. You should see something similar to the screen shot below. If you are unsure of what to do please comment below and I will provide you with further assistance.
Building Content that will Keep People’s Interest
Throughout my blogging research I learned that the very first thing that one must do when setting up a blog is to create about 5 to 10 solid posts that will keep people interested and encourage them to sign up to your RSS feed. There is no point in promoting your blog through different online channels if you don’t have at least a few solid articles that could potentially generate interest from your visitors. These posts don’t have to be long, however they must make some kind of emotional or intellectual connection with your visitors.
Within the first week of blogging I wrote about 20 posts. Although the posts weren’t very long, I however believed that I was creating value for my readers through being direct and straight to the point. I continued this trend of writing regular posts throughout the months of September and October.
The Mistakes I made with my Initial Post Copy Writing
Looking back at my original posts on miWisdom, I made a few critical errors in the way that the posts were organized.
- No Images – Initially I added no images into my posts. When I later began to include images, I discovered through a period of trial and error that the most popular posts were actually the ones with images. I know it sounds silly, but images add that cherry on top. In fact some of my image posts were of lesser quality in terms of actual content than some of my other posts, and yet they tended to garner more attention. Also it doesn’t really matter what kind of images you use, just make sure that they are royalty free and that you just don’t grab them off the internet, otherwise you could get into a little trouble. There are plenty of sites that offer royalty free images that you can use within your blog. Just type in Free Stock Photos into Google search and you will find a list of great websites with quality images listed under hundreds of categories. I personally use images and Clip Art from a box that I purchased specifically to create the IQ Matrix. It also came in useful for miWisdom posts.
- No Subheadings – For long posts subheadings become very important as they allow the eyes to quickly scan the content and pick up on key themes and ideas within the post. If I am reading a blog post and all I see is a few large chunky paragraphs without any subheadings or images; I will simply tune out and turn to another page.
- Little Use of Bullet Points – Bullet points help to distinguish ideas and allow the eyes to glaze over information much more easily. They are a natural complimentary tool to subheadings and should be used whenever possible to classify and organize your blog posts.
- No Bolding – By this I don’t mean not losing hair. Instead I mean Bolding Important Words to Get Your Ideas Across. Our eyes are trained to naturally identify things that are different and that standout within our environment. Words that are Bolded naturally standout and draw the reader’s attention to key ideas that you are presenting within your blog posts. However, keep in mind not to overdo the Bold. Focus on keywords that will get your point across in simple and effective ways.
You might ask why I don’t use any images in my posts for adamsicinski.com. To me, this blog is more information based chronicling my online experiences. I’m not really going to spend much time promoting this blog online or to the world, and therefore images come secondary. I will however use images if I feel that they will assist in explaining a topic that I will be discussing in future posts.
Within miWisdom I use images to create a theme for the post, and on IQ Matrix Blog I use images to tell a story, to educate and to inform. However, I will discuss the IQ Matrix website in greater depth and detail in many future posts.
The Next Steps Moving Forward
In my next post I will discuss some simple yet effective ways to generate and drive traffic to your wordpress.com blog through the WordPress Community, StumbleUpon and through Blog Directories. I will also point out a number of mistakes I made and the lessons I learned from these experiences.
