Gloson Blog – Social Media, Blogging, and Tech Tips from a Kid

Last month, Peter Joseph made a guest post on my blog called How to Generate Blog Post Ideas in Seconds to help overcome blogger’s block – lack of ideas.

Well, I was motivated by that article and also wrote a post about another effective and easy way to overcome blogger’s block, that is, blogger’s writer’s block!

The post is called How to Get Blog Post Ideas – A very effective way to conquer blogger’s block!

It’s just been published on my friend Gerald Weber’s blog as a guest-post-entry for his SEO blogging contest.

If you want some blog post ideas, please read it!

Here is the excerpt of the post

Most of us have been trapped in blogger’s block before – very determined to write the next high-quality blog post to benefit your beloved readers! Woohoo! 

So you sit down and your fingers are ready to type! But after several minutes, you are still stuck on a blank page – you haven’t wrote anything at all. You can’t think of even a single idea! Aww man!

But your problem is now over! Here’s a very effective and little-known method to help you get blog post ideas in no time!

Link to full post:

How to Get Blog Ideas – A very effective way

I hope you’ll find it helpful. I will really appreciate it if you could support me by tweeting it, stumbling it, or leaving a comment. Thank you so very much!

Sponsors of the contest

Here are the awesome sponsors of Gerald’s contest.

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Other prizes: Non-Cash Sponsors
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Link-Assistant.Com SEO PowerSuite Enterprise (max. functionality license) $599 worth with a life-time Live! Plan subscription. SEO tools

Special thanks to the contest media partner: My Blog Guest. MyBlogGuest.com is the free guest post exchange community where users meet to exchange guest posts and network.

________________________________________

Some news

Meanwhile, on the 21-23 of September 2010 is UPSR (Primary School Evaluation Exam), the most feared exam among Primary 6 students.

I’m gonna spend more time studying so you wouldn’t see me online very much. I hope to get 5 A’s in the exam!

Also, I have a blog post for you after the exam, so stay tuned!

This guest post is written by Peter Joseph, a 15-year-old blogger from Australia.

Often when we blog, at times there may be moments when we have absolutely no ideas on what to blog about.

The worst thing we can do is leave our blogs dormant. If we have nothing to blog about that people want to read then we will quickly lose readers, subscribers and worst, the grip on our blog.

If you have no idea what you want to blog about next, here are the best tips to avoid this and come up with blog posts ideas in seconds.

Photo by JJay

Don’t think of blogging as a must do

One heavy mistake everyone seems to make is they think that blogging is a must do.

They have a requirement that you must write a blog post at specific times on specific days or you will fall short of the cycle.

Only write a new post when you come up with a decent idea. It is better to leave your blog blank for a few more days then publish a blog post that isn’t of good quality and can put your readers off.

Here’s how to come up with post ideas in seconds and completely remove this step.

Photo by Jonno Witts

Start with the topic

The first thing you need to do to start coming up with ideas is to define your topic.

What actually do you plan to write on, is it blogging? Something about cooking?

Generally to get this far, it isn’t too hard, take a look on your blog, what topics does it cover; this is generally what you should write about and focus on in speed idea thinking.

Once you’ve done this, you need to start thinking up the catch phrase.

Photo by Ezu

Find out the catchphrase

Forget any form of creativity; all the catchphrase is, is a jumble of words which you are going to use to formulate your ideas.

Catch phrases can generally be very simple. Just make sure you remember to pull it back to your topic; just come up with anything at all.

Right now, for a catch phrase at this very instant, the thing I came up with as I write this is “blogging in a line”.

Now this might not sound like much at the moment but there are various different topics that could come around this catch phrase.

The next thing you need to do is formulate your catch phrase and come up with ideas around it.

Photo by ethangibbs808

Formulate everything around your catchphrase

Using my blogging in a line example, the next thing you need to do is formulate everything around your catch phrase.

What comes to mind when you think of “blogging in a line?”

To me, I think kof the importance of having multiple blog posts and moving them down into various parts, also making your posts flow concurrently so that everything works together.

What comes to mind with your catch phrase? Look at each of the different words in the sentence and then the whole sentence and ideas will quickly come to your head.

Photo by woodleywonderworks

Conclusion

After doing the tips above you will slowly realize how quickly coming up with blog post ideas is. No longer will you ever have to stress about meeting a post deadline with nothing to deliver.

Just remember now, all you have to do is think up a topic, find a catch phrase, formulate topics around it and you already have a perfect idea.

The idea behind this post took me around is seconds to think up, idea generate at that speed and you will save heaps of tine.

Only downside is. Now you have too many ideas and not enough time to write them all down.

This guest post is written by Onibalusi Bamidele, a 16-year-old entrepreneur.

More and more blogs are being created everyday. Since we have hundreds of millions of bloggers with more evolving everyday, there’s competition and only the best will survive.

To be successful, you need to know some things you can implement to make your blog a success. Below are 8 great and very important things every blogger must know.

1. Great Design Matters

With more blogs being added everyday, many blogs begin to look alike, and so you should stand out from the other blogs.

One of the most important things in an online presence is a great user experience, which design is part of.

If you have a unique and attractive design that gives a good user experience, it’ll be easy to promote your blog and gain loyal readers.

In blogging, many judge by design. No matter how great your content is, if they see a bad design, they conclude that your content is also bad without even reading.

Also, many skim blog posts. A very readable typography helps to encourage readers to read it instead of skimming it.

Photo: silkegb

2. Research and Write Valuable Content

With more blogs being added everyday, it is very important to make your blog stand out, not only by design but also by valuable content.

Many blog about “general blogging tips”. This might get you search engine traffic. But it also determines your blog’s growth and what kind of readers you gain.

When you write valuable content, your readers share your content with their friends, on their blogs, social media, etc.

Photo: Paul Watson

3. It Takes Being Creative

Many new bloggers say they’ve been blogging for some time, but are not seeing results. It’s very important to know that in blogging, you need to add your own spice of creavtivity to be successful. So, be creative.

You can be creative in so many ways:

• coming up with an topic nobody else had came up with
• the style of your writing
• the angle of your post
• how you promote your post

- It is all about doing something unusual, a little going out of the box.

Photo: Mrs Magic

4. Goals are Important

One very common thing I notice among bloggers is they lack goals. Many of them don’t set goals and wait for things to happen, and this continues to fuel their laziness.

One of the most important things you can do for yourself (not only in blogging, but in life in general) is to plan your future.

You should not just wait for things to happen but have a way you want it to happen.

It’s also important to set achievable goals using a time-frame. It’ll be unrealistic for a new blogger to say “I want 10,000 daily visitors in my first month!” An example of a good and realistic goal is, “I want to get 300 subscribers this month.”

And even though you might not achieve your goals, they would drive you toward working harder to take your blog to the next level.

Photo: Rigmarole

5. SEO Matters

Many bloggers obviously don’t know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and funny enough, some are not even ready to.

SEO is very important, so invest your time into learning a good deal about it. You might also want to hire an SEO expert if you’re not ready to learn it.

One SEO tip is get a good and fast wordpress theme because a clean code is easy for the bots to easily and properly crawl your blog.

Then you’ll get better page rankings and overall traffic (Also, Google’s ranking is now partly based on site loading speed).

Here’s a blog post I wrote on wordpress seo to get you started.

Photo: Danard Vincente

6. Promotion is a Must

It surprises me that my 1-month traffic surpasses the traffic of 4 months of a blogger who blogged for months before I knew what blogging was.

No matter how valuable your content is, you will still need to do some PUSH in order to get the desired traction.

You don’t just sit down, do nothing, and expect people to flock to your blog. Even if you think your content will go viral, you’ll still need some readers to give it a push before it does.

The number of readers you have can determine how successful you are. Traffic is a must. For more tips, please get my free ebook on how to get lots of free traffic.

Photo: roland

7. It Begins With Your Headline

Having personally suffered from this, I’ve also seen many bloggers with great content but nobody to read it. I figured out one of their major problems is: their headline sucks.

Yeah! No matter how great your content is, you should have a great headline to back it up.

So if you have a truly great content, you should make sure it goes viral by giving it the right and magnetic headline.

Spending a few minutes tweaking your headline might be what makes the difference. I’ve seen a fairly new blog go popular on StumbleUpon because it has a powerful headline.

So, never underestimate the power of an headline.

Photo: UnstablePixel

8. Networking is the Key

Yeah! Networking is very important to the success of any blogger.

Two or more can achieve far more than one. Networking with bloggers in your niche is very important to your success.

You can network with other bloggers by commenting on their blogs, writing for them (like what I’m doing here), and meeting on social media sites, like Twitter, Facebook, Sphinn Stumbleupon, Digg, etc.

Photo: Matt Hamm

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So, you’ve got a brand new wordpress blog!

Now what?

This post will tell you what you need to do after you start your wordpress blog.

If you already have a wordpress blog, you can still do these things if you haven’t done them yet .

So, here is my checklist of the 17 important things to do after starting your wordpress blog! Enjoy!

(Psst…If you’re thinking about why you should start a blog, >> 22 Reasons for You to Blog
And if you don’t use wordpress, click here to read about why you should use wordpress).

1. Decide whether you want to ‘www’ or not

If you have noticed, some blogs, like http://mashable.com/, don’t use the ‘www’ in their address. And some blogs, like http://www.techcrunch.com/, use the ‘www’.

So if you type http://www.mashable.com, it will redirect to http://mashable.com, and vice versa.

One advantage of having a www is your blog address will look more formal.

And if you don’t use the ‘www’, your address would be shorter.

To decide, go to yourblog.com/wp-admin/options-general.php and change both the ‘WordPress address’ and ‘Blog address’ to http://www.yourblog.com, or vice versa.

WWW Image by bull3t

2. Set up a feed so people can subscribe to your blog

If you are wondering what a blog feed is, it is a slimmed-down version of a blog that is created to be easily syndicated. You can subscribe to it using email or an RSS reader. A feed is represented by the orange RSS icon.

Many people prefer to get updates of your new blog posts through this easy way.

You can set one up at feedburner (Here’s how mine looks like). It’s free and easy! Just type in your blog address and click Burn Feed .

After that, set up email subscriptions, which enables your readers to subscribe by email. Go to Publicize >> Email Subscriptions in order to activate it and get the form.

Not setting up email subscriptions is a big mistake when it comes to getting subscribers to your blog because most people don’t know about RSS readers. Also, about 50% of my blog subscribers subscribe by email, so email subscriptions is a must!

After that, put the form and the RSS icon on your blog and link it to your feed at feedburner so people can subscribe.

3. Install Feedburner Feedsmith

Feedburner Feedsmith is a plugin that detects all ways to access your original wordpress feed and redirects them to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/yourfeed.

This plugin is needed for feedburner to track every possible subscriber to your blog by redirecting those who access http://www.yourblog.com/feed to feedburner. So, click here to install this plugin!

4. Subscribe to your own feed via RSS and email

It’s important to subscribe to your own feed, because it lets you see what your subscribers see, and when something is not right with your feed, you’ll notice. Besides, it boosts your subscriber count by 1 too . Hehe.

You can either use an RSS reader or email to subscribe to your feed, but it is best if you subscribe to both of them.

If you have a google account (which you most probably do – if you use Gmail, you have one), you can go to Google Reader. After logging in, click ‘Add a subscription’ and type in your blog address there.

5. Get your blog a favicon

A favicon is the icon you see next to your browser address bar and in your browser bookmarks. Gloson Blog’s favicon is .

It helps you brand your blog and also helps people locate your site more easily in their bookmarks.

To do this,

1. Create a square image and upload it to http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/ to generate a favicon.

2. Download it and upload the .ico file it using an FTP client to /wp-content/themes/yourthemefilename.

3. Go to the wordpress administration area and then go to Appearance >> Editor.

4. Click on “header.php” to edit it.

5. Add this code on the line just before </head>:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="wp-content/themes/yourthemefilename/favicon.ico" type="image/ico" />

(Be sure to replace ‘yourthemefilename’ with your theme file name )

6. Press Ctrl + F5 (Clear cache and reload) on your homepage. You should see it now!

6. Change the permalink structure

A permalink is the address of a blog post. This post’s permalink is http://www.glosonblog.com/17-important-things-to-do-after-starting-your-wordpress-blog/.

By default, the permalink structure is like this: http://yourblog.com/?p=123.

Instead of the post ID, I suggest changing it to http://yourblog.com/your-post-title in order to gain SEO benefits. Also, if  a visitor looks at it, he will know what the post is about before clicking it.

To do this, go to yourblog.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php and then, type in   “/%postname%/” in Custom Structure.

Don’t worry about broken links because the default structure will redirect itself to the new structure .

For example, this post’s old permalink structure is http://www.glosonblog.com/?p=1833. Click it and see what happens .

Link photo by cindy47452

7. Write Your About Me page

An ‘About Me’ page is essential for every blog. When your readers are interested in your content, they want to know who wrote it. That’s when they go to the ‘About Me’ page.

Basically, it is just a page that tells who you are, what is your blog about, interesting things about you, and of course, a picture of yourself.

It really helps your readers to know you and your blog better! (Here’s my ‘About Me’ page by the way.)

8. Set up a contact form

A contact form is an professional and easy way for your readers to contact you. It also protects your email address from spammers.

There are some wordpress plugins that allow you to put up a contact form. I recommend Contact Form 7, a very popular contact form plugin.

After installing it, make a new page called ‘Contact’ and insert the form into it. (Here’s how it looks like on this blog )

9. and don’t forget the archive page too!

An archive page (here’s mine) is where people can find all the posts on your blog, from the first post to the latest post.

An archive page is important because it lets people discover your older content easily (and generate more pageviews).

To make an archive page, I recommend SRG Clean Archives, the one I’m using now. It’s clean and displays all your posts neatly.

If you are looking for a more creative and fun archive plugin, you should try Snazzy Archives, and here’s how it looks like.

10. Find a free theme and tweak it to make it unique

or hire someone to design it or design one yourself .

A theme (design) is really important to a blog because it represents the blog’s brand. Because if content is king, the design is the shiny robe and crown.

So I recommend you to find a not-so-common theme that you like. Then tweak it and make it a little (or better, a lot) different than the original.

One way is to change the structure of the theme by going to the Theme Editor (yourblog.com/wp-admin/theme-editor.php) in wordpress.

Another easier way is to change the images of the theme. The images are located in the theme’s folder.

After editing the images (like changing its color or texture), you can overwrite them to your blog using an FTP client like Filezilla.
(In the directory /wp-content/themes/yourthemefilename/images)

Be sure to press Ctrl + F5 to clear the cache to see the new design.

11. Set up your ping list

A ping list is a list of services that will be pinged each time you post. The services will notify sites and directories that you have posted a new post, thus giving you more exposure.

To set up your pinglist, go to the Update Services section in yourblog.com/wp-admin/options-writing.php.

And paste the sites you want to send a ping to. Note that the more pings you list, the more server resources your host has to use. So you might get suspended on a shared hosting if you use too much server resources.

This is a short recommended list of pings.

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

12. Install Google Analytics (or any site stats counter you want)

Site statistics counters are important for you to monitor, analyze and study your blog’s traffic, so you can get to know your visitors better

I recommend Google Analytics, because it’s quite advanced and has lots of features. It’s free and all you need is a Google Account.

Google Analyticator, a wordpress plugin, allows you to easily add a Google Analytics tracking code.

Note: And please don’t become a stataholic! Write more posts!

13. Install WordPress DB Backup to schedule blog backups

WordPress Database Backup, a wordpress plugin, allows you to schedule blog backups (hourly, twice daily, daily, weekly) easily and have them automatically sent to you by email or stored in the server.

Backups are really important because if anything ever happens to your blog, you have the backup, your best defense.

14. Change the admin username

Most of the login usernames of wordpress blogs is ‘admin’. If your wordpress blog’s login username is ‘admin’, too, you should really change it to something that can’t be guessed easily because the default name makes hackers’ lives so much easier.

Changing it is super duper easy. Here are the steps to do it:

1. Go to the wordpress admin area.

2. Go to Users >> Add new

3. Fill in the details with a different username and give it administrator privileges.

4. Log out and log in with the new username.

5. Delete the ‘admin’ user.

6. When you do so, it will ask you whether you want to move the posts and links of ‘admin’ to another user or delete them. Attribute the posts to the new username you have just created.

Photo by Darwin Bell

15. Install the All-in-One-SEO Pack Plugin

All-in-One-SEO-Pack is a really popular wordpress plugin to do all the basic SEO things on your blog like page titles, post titles, meta tags, descriptions and those kinds of stuff. By default, the browser title of a wordpress blog post is:

Blog Title >> Blog Archive >> Post Title.

If you install All in One SEO, the structure will be changed to (or you can customize it):

Post Title | Blog Title

Which looks simply much better and shorter.

It also noindexes the date and category archives so that it won’t appear in search engine results pages and won’t receive duplicate content penalty.

16. Create your own 404 page

A 404 page is what your readers see when they go to a non-existing page on your blog. Like this: http://www.glosonblog.com/thispagedoesntexist.

By default, the page is just a ‘404 error – Page not Found’ 404 page that isn’t much help to your readers. Why not make it more helpful instead?

To do this, go to the wordpress admin area and then Appearance >> Editor. Click on 404.php to edit it.

Find the part of the code where it says <h2>404 Page Not Found</h2> or something like that. Then overwrite that line with this code (My version of a 404 page).

Be sure to make a backup of your old code before overwriting. It will probably work on most themes, but in some cases, it won’t, then you need to have a little bit of HTML knowledge in order to make it work.

<h2>404 Page Not Found</h2>
<p>Oopsie! The page you are looking for cannot be found! It might be renamed or removed. Please check your spelling or return to the homepage.</p>

<p>Or, you can also view our latest posts below. Hope you’ll enjoy them. Thanks! </p>

<p>
<h2>Latest Posts</h2></p>
<ul>
<?php
query_posts(‘posts_per_page=10′);
if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="Permalink for : <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
</ul>

Feel free to edit and customize the code! Do tell me if this code doesn’t work!

17. Write a post!

Still, without any content, a blog won’t be a blog.

So go on and write a post! Write a unique high-quality thought provoking post on a topic you are passionate about!

After that, promote it on twitter, facebook, stumbleupon, and so on and on. Ask your friends to read it too!

Photo by KatieKrueger
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So here are my 17 things to do after starting a wordpress blog checklist. Be sure to bookmark this post and read it when you start a new wordpress blog!

If you know of another thing to do after starting a wordpress blog, please tell me in the comments!

And if you have any questions, please drop me a comment and I’ll be very glad to answer it!