Position: Craft Money Tree - Blogging - It Is Time To Start Making Money Blogging Online Day Two: Adding Your Theme and Plugins

It Is Time To Start Making Money Blogging Online Day Two: Adding Your Theme and Plugins

Posted by Clarky Wang on Wednesday,August 12th 2009 In : Blogging Tags : Blogging Tips, Find a Theme, Installing WordPress Plugins, List Building, WordPress

Hi, everybody, this is the second day of mini course“It Is Time To Start Making Money Blogging Online”: Adding Your Theme and Plugins.

Hopefully by now you have bought your domain from GoDaddy.com, hosted it and installed Wordpress just like I said in It Is Time To Start Making Money Blogging Online Day One: Installing Wordpress and Start Blogging. Today I will share with you how to make your blog look so good and user friendly!

1. Finding a Theme For Your Blog

When you saw craftmoneytree.com you probably smiled and thought, WOW and then thought to yourself, just if I could create a blog like that! WOW I am just kidding, this theme is a free, no big deal. But when you fill stuff into it, it will be alive!

I don’t recommend that you spend dollars on theme before you haven’t started making money blogging. Of course you could purchase one, that would make your blog looks more professional, but don’t forget one thing: CONTENT is King of a site! Nothing is more important than CONTENT.

Once you have chosen your theme, uploading is really simple. Upload the file to your FTP folder marked Themes which is in the Wp-Content folder. Their is two ways to upload a theme, using FTP or web uploading.

I don’t feel like FTP, they often will charge you, so I’d rather use web uploading. This way is to upload via your hosting control panel. Login to your cpanel and click File Manager and go to the folder Themes which is in Public HTML and then WP-Content. Next, click upload which is in the top navigation and upload the zip file of your theme, once it is uploaded, unzip it. that is all!

Once you have done this, login into your Wordpress Admin and click “Appearance” then you will see your new theme there, click it and a preview will open up and then in the top right corner is a button saying “Activate”, click it and your theme will now work!

2. Wordpress Changes

One major thing I see a lot of new blogger’s do is not make their website URL’s search engine friendly which is the easiest source of traffic. If you look at your first blog post URL it will be Domain.com/?p=1 when you really want it to say Domain.com/how-to-make-your-links-seo-friendly. You want your URL’s and blog post titles to be what you expect people to be searching in Google, not something that always sounds good, a mix of both usually goes down well!

To make your links search engine friendly like I just said, go to your Wordpress Admin and click Settings and then Permalinks on the left side. Change the settings to Custom Structure and use the code /%postname%/ – This will now make your blog post link’s SEO friendly. Like my posts’ URL is http://www.craftmoneytree.com/year/month/postsname.html, when you see this, you may think that wow, this is really very cool! But it is really easy to do so when you are using Wordpress.

Another important SEO change is your page title and description, I personally use a FREE plugin to do this called All in One SEO Pack but as you guys are just starting, you may just want to edit these details from your Wordpress Admin by clicking General under Settings. It is really important to choose the right page title, if you look at craftmoneytree.com you will see the title is "Make Money Online Blogging, Internet Marketing blog by Clarky Wang" – it explained what is this blog, and contained main keywords in it, that is very important to SEO.

You also have a Blogroll on your blog, this is a great way to start building links and traffic to your website. Find 5 to 10 blog’s just like yours and ask them to link to your site and you will do the same for them. You can add or edit your blogroll by clicking Links in the sidebar of your Wordpress Admin.

If you are interested in learning more about Search Engine Optimization then you probably could read these posts:

3. Manage Your RSS Feeds

A RSS Feed is basically a reminder for regular readers to alert them when you have a new blog post, this is one of the most important parts of a blog. I use Google Feedburner to manage my feed updates, sign up and create a code and update your RSS link to the feedburner one. Feedburner also have a email update script that you can use, when you are logged in at Feedburner.com click Publicize and then Email Subscriptions, they will give you some code and then you can add it as a widget on your blog.

To edit your RSS widget is really simple, login to your Wordpress Admin again and click Appearance and then Widgets, then click on RSS and paste your email code in and then save the changes. Your readers will now be able to subscribe for updates, when you add a new post and they will get a email or RSS message alerting them to check your blog out.

4. Build Your List

Ask any Problogger what their biggest blogging mistake was and they should start building a list sooner! Creating a list is so powerful and a great way to make money online. Say you had 100 people visit your site a day, you want to get around 10 of them to sign up for your list, that means you can promote your website and products to them in future.

What I do is create a auto responder series which automatically sends them a email every day or week to encourage them to work harder and make more money online – then I will promote them a product or two. Don’t be scared to promote products to them from day two, after all you only want people who are willing to spend money on your list.

If you don’t know how to do this, I personally recommend you use one autoresponder, like Aweber and Getresponse which both have a great service!

Tomorrow will be a big day, so make sure you have everything ready and I will share my secrets with you . Have a good day!