The job isn’t over when a blogger publishes a blog post. Indeed, for some it has only just begun. Many bloggers will try to maximize the exposure for each post through submitting the post to various social media sites. I will be talking about social media a lot but before that there are also a number of other ways I promote my site and posts.

Write eye-catching titles!

The most important thing about your blog post is the post’s title. Not only does it’s HTML mark-up mean it contains most important words on the page search engine-wise, but also it will be the point of reference on the various social media sites. So write a title that people will want to click on.

Make them short, snappy, descriptive, interesting and … put numbers in them(!) Strange, but true. People click on posts with numbers in the titles. My most popular post through social media was 10 things I wish I had known about web designing 10 years ago. This got 7,000 visitors through StumbleUpon in only a few days and the visitors continued for weeks to come.

Optimize your site for search engines

A well optimized blog will mean the blog post being indexed by Google within a few hours of publishing. Try Googling the title of your post the next day – it should usually come up on the first page!

RSS and ping!

Use FeedBurner to burn your feed so people can subscribe to it.

Use ping services to notify blog directories that you have published new content on your blog. WordPress is set up to automatically ping Pingomatic but you can add more blog directories to be pinged every time you publish – in the WordPress admin panel go Settings > Writing and at the bottom add directories in Update Services and Save Changes.

Other bloggers

Visit and comment on other blogs within your community and niche. I don’t mean you should promote individual posts in other blogs! Write constructive comments on other blogs and you’ll develop win-win relationships with other bloggers. If you’ve written a particularly good post, you could even email bloggers with good reputations and give them the link to it.

Discussion forums

Similar to above, participate in forums within your community and niche. There may even be a discussion where you could post a link to a specific blog post if it was absolutely pertinent. Otherwise, of course, put your blog link in your signature so it’s there every time you post on a forum.

Newsletter

Invite your users to subscribe to a mailing list and send newsletters to them regularly. This builds a community around you, develops a relationship between you and your readers and, if you inform them of some of your latest posts, it can drive more traffic to your site. Make sure each newsletter you write also contains valuable information that your readers would be interested in as well as links back to your best posts.

Email signature

Put your blog link in your email signature. You may also want to put a link to the RSS feed, a newsletter sign up page and even links to your profile pages on your favorite social media sites.

Social media

I left the biggie until last! All of the above are important for getting your blog posts noticed. But social media can send literally thousands of visitors in a way that will put all the other techniques into shade.

However, I would urge against spending too much time with social media and to treat it with respect and caution – engage with the community, don’t just shamelessly promote your posts all the time.

And, don’t forget to add social media buttons to your posts to make it easy for people to bookmark them on all the various sites.

Timing: I tend to do this in the morning UK time as this means the posts will gathering popularity in Europe and then America as the day progresses. I also think it’s best to do it on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Here’s what I do:

• Twitter: I was slow to get going on Twitter but I have got much traffic from a tweet! Encourage people to follow you by adding your Twitter link on your blog and email signature. Tweet your latest posts as well as other good material in your niche. Feel free to follow me on Twitter.
• LinkedIn: I look on LinkedIn as the thinking person’s Facebook. The key to LinkedIn is joining groups. You may join as many as 50 groups. So join groups in your niche and you can send your link to all of them at once as a discussion. Again, I would urge caution here. Make sure the post is relevant to the group and interact with the group personally as well. Used correctly this can bring in loads of targeted traffic. Feel free to connect with me at LinkedIn.
• General social bookmarking sites: I have profiles on and regularly post to: StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, DZone, Reddit and Delicious which are some of the biggest.
• Niche social bookmarking sites: These sites can often be a better bet than the big boys. It’s easier to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond so at the moment I post to WebBlend which then offers further links to CypherBox, FaqPal, ZaBox, DesignBump and DesignFloat amongst others. Posting to one and following the links to others means you don’t have to fill in all the post’s info multiple times which can get tedious.
• Other social media sites: Of course it doesn’t finish there. As there is also FriendFeed, Google Buzz and Facebook. But I think that’s enough for now.
• Form alliances with other bloggers: I get by with a little help from my friends. Sometimes it only takes a few votes to secure an prominent position on a social bookmarking site. So you can say to other bloggers in your niche, “if you think it’s worthy, please vote for my post at such-and-such a site” and send them the link to make it easy. I have created the Designers’ Social Media Partnership for this purpose – any newcomers are most welcome!

Conclusion

I’m sure every blogger has a little routine of what they do. I would love to hear what anyone else does!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

So you’re using WordPress and you are getting a nice amount of traffic, say a few hundred visitors a day. Maybe you love running many of the great plugins that add extra functionality for your visitors. There’s just one problem: your server is struggling with the load and your site isn’t just slow, it’s ssslllooowww!

Shared hosting maybe inexpensive but resources are limited and security can be compromised. Dedicated servers are very powerful, can require high levels of technical knowledge for customization and are extremely expensive.

VPS hosting can be the happy halfway house

Virtual private server (VPS) hosting could be a solution if you have outgrown your shared hosting and don’t need to move to a dedicated server. It is the best option for small to medium sized businesses. A site hosted on a VPS gets its own RAM and disk space, however, it shares the processing capacity (CPU) with other sites.

Remember, Google includes a site’s speed into it’s algorithm – so a faster running site is not only advantageous to your visitors but also may push you higher in the search engine results pages.

I contacted hundreds of WordPress experts to ask them about their experiences and recommendations. Speed, reliability, ease of use and quality of support are important factors when looking for a host and came up again and again when talking to the experts.

Here are the most recommended VPS hosts

Here I’m listing the VPS hosts that were recommended by the pool of WordPress experts. I include a short synopsis of the specs, usability and pricing for the entry level packages.

• A2 hosting Inexpensive and their support comes highly recommended. 128 MB RAM, 1 GB storage, 100GB bandwidth for $10.46/month. You can get cPanel with higher specs for $17.46/month.
• Dreamhost Reasonably priced, good support, fantastic recommendations. This is my choice! 300MB RAM, unlimited space and bandwidth. Dreamhost have their own award-winning user’s control panel. For $15/month.
• Wiredtree Expensive but good. Intel Dual Xeon (8 CPUs), 512MB RAM, 40GB RAID-10 storage, 1000GB bandwidth, 4 dedicated IPs and cPanel for the base price of $49/month.
• Linode Knowledge of the command line is helpful as they do not offer a GUI out of the box. 360MB RAM, 16GB storage, 200GB bandwidth for $19.95/month.
• Liquidweb Their VPS plans start at $60/month and include cPanel as well as root access, 384MB RAM, 20GB storage, 400GB bandwidth, 4 IP addresses.
• MediaTemple The (dv) starts at $50/month and uses Plesk as a control panel. The (ve) at $30/month is for more advanced web developers that may find a control panel a hinderance.
• Rackspace Their users had nothing but good things to say about Rackspace. Cloud Sites™ runs on a series of clusters so it has redundancy and protection built in. When you upload your site or web based application, multiple instances of it run so that even if an entire server goes down your site stays up and running. They have their own cloud control panel proprietary GUI to navigate you through the clouds. Cloud Sites™ start at $149/month.
• VPS.net By default everything is command line; cPanel is an extra $10 a month. 376MB RAM
, 10GB storage
,
 250GB bandwidth for 
£15/month per node. (I don’t know why they have the monthly price in pounds but the cPanel extra in dollars!) But again, their users were extremely complimentary.

To command line or to control panel?

A web host control panel (such a cPanel) provides a graphical interface designed to simplify the process of hosting a web site. It makes it easier to, for example, move files around, or set up or import MySQL databases necessary for WordPress. Alternatively you can type command lines through a Secure Shell (SSH). SSH is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged securely between two networked devices. Anything you can do via cPanel is also doable via SSH without the overhead of the HTML, imagery and web server processing so it is therefore quicker.

Personally, I find the WYSIWYG nature of the control panel more familiar and intuitive, however, I’ve been using SSH as well and it can sometimes be a better way of doing things.

Conclusion

Deciding on a VPS host for WordPress is no easy business. There are many things to consider. Above all make sure you pick a host that other WordPressers recommend. If you have any other recommendations or questions be sure to make them known in the comments section!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

As the internet becomes the preferred method of communication for businesses worldwide, the tool of creating and publishing the content is of increasing importance.

WordPress is used by millions to deliver news, messages and articles to the world. It has become not only the blogger’s weapon of choice but also a hugely popular Content Management System.

Learning how to use WordPress is easy. All you have to do is to login, add a new article and either write in WordPress, or copy and paste from your favorite word processor. But WordPress hosting is not for every web service. WordPress requires high standards from the web hosting provider which is why I took a lot of time to discover the best hosts. But first here’s a description of shared hosting and why it might be for you.

Shared Hosting

Shared web hosting is a service where many websites reside on one web server connected to the internet. It is generally the most economical option for hosting, as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance. However, being the cheapest package, it has its disadvantages. Firstly, it usually has a reduced level of security as you are sharing the server with several other websites. Shared hosting also has limited resources causing speed issues at both the back and front ends of your site.

Maybe you are just starting out as a blogger, or maybe you are using WordPress as a Content Management System for your new website. Maybe you are probably not expecting thousands or even hundreds of visitors a day. Does this sound like you? Then you need a shared host.

Recommended shared hosting for WordPress websites

During the course of my research I contacted hundreds of individuals through the WordPress LinkedIn group. Members of this group are high end webmasters with hundreds of sites on their books who have been around the block as far as web hosts are concerned – many of them were using 3 or 4 shared hosts for multiple sites. If you’re into LinkedIn and WordPress I would strongly recommend this group as I have found the advice and discussions there to be top notch!

The three most important factors we discussed in the survey were: speed, reliability and quality of support. We’ve all had the terrible experience of a website not behaving as it should and sometimes a timely and considered approach by the support team is worth a thousand dollars!

Here are the three hosts who came out as the best shared hosts for WordPress by WordPress professionals:

• JustHost. JustHost started providing high quality hosting services in 2008, so, compared to other hosting companies, JustHost is a new kid on the block. But nonetheless it scored high on our three hosting factors: speed, reliability and quality of support.
• Bluehost. The general consensus seems to be that Bluehost is inexpensive and has many powerful tools but support is maybe where it lacks the most. BlueHost is one of the 20 largest web hosts, collectively hosting well over 450000 domains with its sister company, HostMonster.
• Hostgator. The company was founded in 2002 by Chairman Brent Oxley, who started the company from his dorm room at university. With over two million domains, HostGator hosts approximately 1% of the world’s internet traffic. They came up many times in our survey as being a reliable host.

What not to do!

One hosting company’s name came up for all the wrong reasons so many times. The server sluggishness and all round poor performance at GoDaddy was mentioned again and again! So, by all means, register your domain name with GoDaddy, but don’t use them for hosting!

Conclusion

I learnt a huge amount from doing this survey. However, I decided to turn my back on shared hosting for this site and went for a Virtual Private Server (VPS). My next post will be about the best VPS hosts as recommended by WordPress professionals.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I got a call from a potential client the other day and he asked me a very simple question.

“Once you’ve created the website for me will you charge me every time I want to edit one of the pages?”

And, although this is not the first time I have heard this question, it still amazes me every time I hear it. Some web agencies create websites which their client has absolutely no ability to change once completed. This isn’t standard practice in the industry but it does happen.

If you have a website, it is never a question of if you want to change it; it’s always a question of when you want to change it.

Get your website set up with a Content Management System that is easy to use

A Content Management System (CMS) is software, implemented as a web application, that manages web sites. It should have an intuitive user interface that makes navigating to the page and changing it as easy as updating a text document on your computer.

There’s many great CMSs that enable you to create, edit and delete pages at will and, there’s even better news, a lot of them are free!

WordPress

WordPress is a fantastic web publishing platform which focuses on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. And, as it is open source, it’s free. “Free and priceless at the same time”. As you can see from the screenshot below there is a WYSIWYG interface which can be mastered easily.

I have written extensively about the setting up WordPress and creating and editing web pages using the WordPress UI.

WordPress is actually blogging software that is fast being used as the most simple and robust CMS. If you just want pages, with sub-pages, and maybe even sub-sub-pages that will be created and deleted along the way then WordPress can be set up to do that for you. Your web designer will not have to be involved at all. And, if you’re interested in improving your site’s position in search engines and you’d like to publish more than just web pages, then add a blog to your site. WordPress will do that easily!

I appreciate that many of my visitors will know this already but I felt I had to state the basics of WordPress as it’s potential as a CMS is so awesome people should know about it. As does that potential client I mentioned earlier, who’s now a client!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Blogs are, in my opinion, the easiest and best way to get stuff on the web.

With a blog you can publish constantly updated information about yourself, your company or your interests to the world. And what makes it even better is that this information is chronologically ordered and categorized for search engines almost automatically.

Your blog posts should be delivered in the most beautiful and readable way to get the most out of this fantastic medium.

Here are some design essentials you can use to improve the look of your blog and your blog posts.

Body text size and line spacing

The body text is the text you are reading at the moment – a normal paragraph within an article. It’s the meat and drink of the blog so it has to be readable. Having said that it’s amazing how many websites have their body text too small. Some people will not read text below a certain size.

I’m going to stick my neck out now and say that the font size of body text on a website should never be smaller than 15 pixels or 1 em in size. Furthermore the line height (the line spacing or leading) should always be 25% larger than the font size or more. So if the font size of your body text is 15 pixels; your line height should be 19 pixels or more. If the font size of your body text is 1 em; your line height should be 1.25 em or more.

If you are not familiar with the terms pixels, ems, font size, line height, etc., or don’t know how to change them read on.

The file that controls the size of the body text on your blog is the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file. If you are are a WordPress user it will most likely be in your theme folder and called “style.css”.

You can identify the font size and the location of this CSS file as well as previewing the changes using your browser. If you’re using Chrome or Internet Explorer you can view Developer Tools. And if you’re using Firefox you can use the Firebug extension.

While using these tools’ cursor (it can be an arrow or a magnifying glass), click on the element that concerns you and then the styles and style sheet that is affecting it will show up in the Developer Tools or Firebug panel. So, if you click on a body text paragraph you may see that it is controlled by the body element in your main CSS file.

Above you can see in a screen shot from the Firebug panel in Firefox that the font size of the body text is 12 pixels and the line height is 20 pixels. You can actually change the values in this panel and the browser will render the changes live. This is a great way to learn CSS and mess around with different design elements. You can also see that the file controlling these styles is called “style.css”, hover over the file name in this panel and the web address of the CSS file will show as a tool tip.

Paragraph spacing

Paragraphs on the web should have a space between them. It should be around half the line height. So, if your line height is 20 pixels, you should add a 10 pixel gap between paragraphs. This is usually done with either padding or margin on the <p> tag. Here is a sample CSS code that adds a 10 pixel gap to the end of each paragraph:

p { margin-bottom: 10px }

Include sub-headings in your blog posts

If you are writing a post with more than a few hundred words then you should use subheadings. They improve the post for your readers as they break up and order the text and they are also good for SEO. Here is the HTML code for the above subheading:

<h3>Include sub-headings in your blog posts</h3>

As my normal blog title is wrapped inside <h2> tags my subhead text is therefore wrapped inside <h3> tags. This shows the hierarchy of headings – the subheading isn’t as important as the heading. Some blog post titles are <h1> in which case the subheadings should be <h2>.

As above, use Firebug for Firefox and the Developer Tools in Internet Explorer and Chrome to identify the title tag and then set up an <h2> tag or <h3> tag in your stylesheet accordingly. Here is the CSS for my titles and subheadings:

h2 { font-size: 23px; line-height:27px; color: #4c5464; }
h3 { font-size: 18px; line-height:22px; color: #243f76; }

Make your text scannable

Remember your visitors will typically spend a few seconds on your website so it is necessary to make them feel at ease and entrap them. So far we have talked about good body text typography, paragraph spacing and subheadings to do this. But you can also add bold text, italics, bullets, numbered lists, links, etc. to break up otherwise dull lines of text. These highlighted words jump out and may interest your readers. It also looks nicer.

Insert images

Blog posts are incredibly boring without images or video. Use them. Here is an article I wrote on how to add images to WordPress posts.

Conclusion

I wrote more about the technicalities of writing and designing a WordPress post here.

Font size, line height, paragraph spacing, subheads, images and other typographical elements can all be used to improve legibility and aesthetics in your blog posts. Have I forgotten something? Can you suggest other ways to improve the design of blog posts?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

When writing a WordPress post it is extremely important to make it as visually appealing as possible. Visitors are much more likely to spend a bit of time on the page if it has a nice image and the text is laid out in a pleasing way.

Images are important in terms of SEO. If they are uploaded with correct and keyword-rich names and alt texts they can pull in a valuable amount of targetted traffic from image searches.

Adding an image with text above and below

Click the first icon top left after the words “Upload/Insert”, if you hover over the tooltip will be “Add an Image”. In the resulting dialog box you can click “Select Files” to get the image from your computer. (I would choose the Browser uploader rather than the Flash uploader). Once the image is uploaded you will see another dialog box with the image’s thumbnail displayed.

It will usually be a large image (of, say, 400 pixels or more wide) that you will want to put on it’s own after a paragraph of text. Make sure you have hit Return (once in Visual mode; twice in HTML mode) before clicking the Add an Image icon. And, after uploading, in the Adding Image dialog box, under Alignment, click “Center” (alternatively you can select the image and click the centered text button after inserting).

Adding an image with text flowing around

If you have a smaller image of, maybe, 200 pixels width, you may want to insert it into a paragraph with the text flowing around it. If so, make sure your cursor is blinking next to the word at the beginning of the paragraph you want the image to go in when you click the add image icon. And whilst in the Add an Image dialog box click, under Alignment click “Left” or “Right”.

Your image should always have a descriptive file name with no spaces and a .jpg, .gif or .png at the end. For the image here, left, I would use the file name “brown-bear-in-woods.jpg”. Upper and lower case letters are irrelevant here so it is best stick to lowercase and use hyphens to separate the words. Spaces will be converted to hyphens after uploading via WordPress. And, hyphens are better than underscores.

Alt text

Always try to write an Alternate text for the image. This is how you would describe the image to a blind person. So, in our example the Alternate text would be “European Brown Bear walking through the forests of Finland”. Remember, this is crawled by the search engines so put keywords in where appropriate! The Alternate text is in the Adding Image dialog box which appears after an image is uploaded.

Image size

One last thing to consider when uploading images is their size. If you want the image to be the same size as it is on your computer click Full Size under Size. If you want the image to be a different size you can choose Thumbnail, Medium or Large. You can change these sizes in Settings > Media.

Finally…

If you want to write a caption you may.

Lastly, click “Insert into Post”. If you’ve made a mistake you can always click the image in the Visual editor and click on the “mountain” icon, then click “Advanced Settings” and here you can change some of the above variables. Otherwise, delete the image and start again.

Image is not displaying to the left or right correctly or the caption does not appear close enough to image

Put this code in your theme’s CSS:

.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

.alignleft {
float: left;
}

.alignright {
float: right;
}

.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
/* optional rounded corners for browsers that support it */
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}

It says in the WordPress Codex that “Each theme should have these or similar styles in its style.css file to be able to display images and captions properly”. But I can tell you many themes don’t has this code in there. Probably because theme designers like to style images and captions themselves and don’t realise that WordPress can do it for you.

This concludes my post on inserting images to a WordPress post. If anybody has anything to add or thinks I have missed anything please comment away!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I worked for quite a while on the design stages with the client. We went through 14 visuals for the home page before I started to work on coding the WordPress theme. Here is one of the last of them:

jQuery and the power of blogging

One of the most exciting parts of the website for me was creating an image slider with jQuery. The client was particularly keen on having clickable sliding panels like the ones that can be seen at BarackObama.com. So how was I going to find out how to do that?

The answer was already on my own website in the shape of a comment by Jaitra Gillespie on a post about JavaScript I’d written a while ago. In it he posted a link to a jQuery coda slider that had a particularly good accompanying tutorial and screencast. This is what I used for the panels beneath the top navigation.

If you click the above image to go to the website you’ll see that not only do the buttons beneath the panels operate them but also the links in the text below.

I’m grateful to both Remy Sharp for the excellent tutorial and Jaitra Gillespie for putting me on to it.

Designing and developing the website with WordPress

After I did the theme and the image slider there were still other things to do.

I used NextGEN gallery for the image gallery. There was a slight conflict between the JavaScript calls in the head for the jQuery coda slider and the NextGEN plugin which caused the Shutter and Thickbox image presentation effect not to work. I moved the (and therefore the NextGEN JavaScript calls) to after the jQuery JavaScript calls in the head and this seemed to get it to work.

I created different categories in the blog section, one being “Latest News”, and had the 10 most recent posts of that category listed in the sidebar. I also added a contact form with Contact Form 7 plugin, a chat room, various static pages and a site-wide social bookmarking and networking link.

What do you think?

Have you ever used WordPress as a CMS to create a site? Have you ever used jQuery to create a coda slider? What do you think of the way I did it?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

The plugin was created by Alex Rabe who studied all photo and picture plugins for WordPress, he thought that some of them were really good and well designed, but missed a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple photos, galleries and albums.

Here is a sample gallery I’ve done quickly using the NextGEN Gallery plugin.

Here’s how you do it:

Download the plugin and, after un-zipping and uploading to my wp-content/plugins folder on my server, I activated the plugin in the WordPress CMS. For more explanation about WordPress and loading plugins consult the excellent WordPress documentation.

php.ini

I found that I had to edit my php.ini in order to get the plugin to work properly. php.ini is a text file that sits on your server (in this case on the root) that sets global variables such as memory usage. I have found that allocating more memory to PHP on the server useful to get WordPress working at reasonable speeds. That is why I have memory_limit = 64M in my php.ini. Here are the other commands I put in my php.ini to get this plugin to work.

file_uploads = On
upload_max_filesize = 20M
post_max_size = 25M
max_execution_time = 600
max_input_time = 600
safe_mode = 0

Setting up a gallery

On the left hand side of your WordPress navigation right at the bottom you will now see a section called “Gallery”, click on the triangle next to that and from the options that slide down click “Add Gallery / Images” and give a name to your gallery. Now, to upload images, click the last tab on this page entitled “Upload Images”, click “Browse” and locate the image on your computer. Very important: make sure flash based upload is not enabled! I found the plugin would not work properly otherwise. Choose the gallery you have just created and click the “Upload Images” button. I also used the “Upload Zip” method and I was really impressed with how it worked. You can upload potentially hundreds of images in one go and the plug-in will do the rest! Awesome!

Managing the gallery

At the bottom of the left hand WordPress navigation again, click “Manage Gallery” underneath “Gallery”, choose the gallery you have just created and here you can alter the title and alt tags for the images. This is not only very important for SEO purposes but also sets the text when the thumbnails are hovered over and captions when the bigger images are displayed. Once done, click “Save Changes”.

Adding gallery to a WordPress post or page

Easy! Simply add [nggallery id=1] while editing the post or page. The gallery id number can be seen on the Gallery Overview page. The first one you do will be number 1.

Options

I left the plugin options roughly as default but there are a few important things to consider. On the first page of the options I would leave “wp-content/gallery/” as the default path for all galleries. I would uncheck “Activate PicLens/CoolIris support” as not many people have PicLens or CoolIris installed and it creates an unsightly link above your gallery.

You can set the size of the images and the thumbnails here as well as setting a watermark onto the images.

The “Effects” option is very important. It sets the effect that displays the image when the thumbnail is clicked. Shutter and Thickbox will work if selected as these are installed with the plugin however you can use your own. I used “ShadowBox” which is similar to Lightbox and is nicer than the two that are bundled with it.

My photos

Check out the gallery I made with this amazing plugin.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is a format used to publish frequently updated content from the web on the web. The RSS feed is your posts’ content without any of your website’s style so it will contain just the titles, body text and image paths of your posts. So you better make your image paths absolute not relative!

The benefit of RSS is the aggregation of your favorite websites from multiple sources in one place. RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator”, which can be on your browser or on your desktop.

How to set up a Feedburner feed

Google has bought FeedBurner, so you need to sign in to Google and then go to Feedburner and look for where it says something like “Burn a feed right this instant”. WordPress blogs already come with a feed so you can enter either your blog’s URL (eg: http://www.my-blog.com) or your blog’s feed (eg: http://www.my-blog.com/feed, http://www.my-blog.com/?feed=rss2), check a box if you are a podcaster and hit “Next”.

You will next be greeted with a page where you can change your feed title and feed address. Once you are satisfied with those hit “Next” again. After this there are further Feedburner options to choose from – most of which I ignore, it’s FeedBurner’s email subscription that rocks but I’ll come to that later!

Install the FeedBurner plugin

For the best results using FeedBurner with your self-hosted WordPress site, the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin is recommended. It will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.my-blog.com/feed/ or http://www.my-blog.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

WordPress settings

Feedburner can only handle feeds under 512K. In WordPress, make sure your feed doesn’t exceed this in the administration area, by going Settings > Reading, “For each article in a feed, show” – you can choose “Summary” although I like to have “Full text” and don’t put more than 50 in “Syndication feeds show the most recent” if you write long posts.

What is email subscription and how can you set it up?

Email subscription to your blog allows those who have signed up for it to receive your blog posts in their inbox. You can use Aweber to do this but I’ll show you how to do it for free with FeedBurner.

With your feed selected click the “Publicize” tab, then click “Email Subscriptions” on the left, making sure “Feedburner” is selected, and click “Activate”. This will then present you with some HTML code in the box which you will need to copy and paste somewhere in your website.

Once signed up a subscriber will receive your posts as emails shortly after they are published. Google/FeedBurner handles all the backend work – subscribers verify themselves by email and have the option of unsubscribing at the bottom of every email they receive.

Design your posts so they look great as an email

Underneath the “Email Subscriptions” link in FeedBurner whilst in the “Publicize” tab there is another link entitled “Email Branding”. Do spend some time on this page formatting text, headings and links – you can specify the font, size and color. You can also add your logo and specify the title of the email.

Advertise the RSS feed and email subscription on your website

On my website I advertise the RSS feed with the familiar RSS icon which is linked to my FeedBurner feed. And I use the familiar email icon which takes you to the page where you can subscribe to my posts by email. I’ve also got some general information about feeds on this page so that my readers can decide which is the best way for them to subscribe to my blog.

What’s the benefit of RSS and email subscription?

They are both fantastic marketing tools. RSS brings in traffic as it is, for some people, an easy way of reading a site’s content. Email subscription can work like a weekly newsletter to your subscribers with a link back to your site. A subscriber is always worth more than a visitor because, more often than not they will return to your site again and again. The added advantage of the email subscribers is that you have the list of their email address’s although I wouldn’t advocate sending them much in the way of extra mail.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Constantly updated quality content is the mainstay of any website or blog. I have already described how to set up a WordPress.org blog and what to write about when you have one. Here’s the “how to” for those new-ish to WordPress…

There are three things to remember when you are writing:

1. Make your text scannable! That means, by what ever means – using bold text, titles, italics, bullets, links, etc – break up otherwise dull looking text. Remember your visitors will typically spend a few seconds on your website so it is necessary to entrap them. These words and phrases that jump out may interest the reader. It also looks nicer.
2. SEO. Include your keywords in the title of your post or page, in the <h3> tags or subtitles or in bold. Keywords are descriptors of the page or the site. But you may want to emphasize the ones with which you want to be found by search engine. So I may want to put graphic designer in my headings more often than not as I mainly want to be found on Google for people searching for graphic designers. However, only include words that are relevant to the article.
3. Save. As soon as you start writing click the “Save Draft” button. And click this intermittently through the writing process. Also, click the “Preview” button (you can do this straight after even if it hasn’t finished saving the draft) from time to time and see how your post looks. This opens it in a different window of your browser (or tab if you are using them) and if you keep this window open it will update every time you hit “Preview”. Don’t worry, the unfinished post or page is invisible to your website’s visitors until you click the “Publish” button! WordPress does have an autosave function but I find this the best method.

Getting started: What is the difference between a WordPress page and a WordPress post?

Both WordPress pages and posts create webpages! However a WordPress page is for static content (typically the “About Us” or “Contact” page) and a WordPress post is for adding content to your blog, something that is dated and belongs to a certain category.

The process of writing a new post or page in WordPress 2.7 and above starts in the dashboard (the dashboard is the welcome screen which displays when you add “wp-admin” after your blog’s URL in the browser’s address bar). Look for where it says Post or Page in the left hand column. Under these headings, click “Add New” (you may need to click the small arrow when you hover the mouse over to the right of where it says Post or Page).

Adding the title of your post or page

OK, this may be pretty obvious. The box at the top of the “Add New Post” or “Add New Page” screen (just below where it says “Add New Post” or “Add New Page”) is for the title. Remember this title is very important for SEO terms so cram it full of keywords.

If you have your permalinks set to %postname% (as is highly recommended) the permalink will be displayed beneath the post title. WordPress is quite good at generating these pretty permalinks. However, if you’ve taken a while to write the title you may find that not all of the words are in the permalink. In this case you can type in all the words you want, separated by hyphens.

Writing – what all those buttons mean above your WordPress text editor?

Writing a WordPress post can be like writing in a word processing package. Well, nearly, but not quite…

There are two tabs above the text editor – Visual and HTML. If you are a beginner with HTML I would advise you to start to flick between the two. If you know about HTML you’ll probably stay on the HTML tab all the time.

The following bulleted list is my explanation of the buttons along the top of the Visual editor and their results in HTML.

• Bold: Fairly simple one to start with. It emboldens the text in Visual mode and wraps <strong> tags around it in HTML mode.
• Italic: You guessed it. This italicizes the text in Visual mode and wraps <em> tags around it in HTML mode.
• Strikethrough: This strikesthrough the text in Visual mode and wraps <del> tags around it in HTML mode, it usually means that the word was in the original version of the text but is to be discounted now. (No, I’ve never used it before.)
• Unordered list or bullet points: Click to add a bullet and then hit return for subsequent bullets. Hit return twice to end bullets. In HTML mode, click <li> when each individual bullet point is highlighted, then select all bullets plus <li> tags and click <ul>.
• Ordered list or numbered points: Much like above. Click to add number 1 and then hit return for the following numbers. Hit return twice to finish the numbered list. In HTML mode, click <li> when each individual numbered phrase is highlighted, then select all phrases plus <li> tags and click <ol>.
• Blockquote: This defines the selected text as a block quotation. It is indented and most themes will put in a colored background. It is a very good way of breaking up text and I must confess I don’t always use it for a quotation but also as a method of differentiating a block of text from the main article.
• Align left, center and right: Pretty obvious really. Adds style="text-align: left;", style="text-align: center;" or style="text-align: right;" into whatever element the cursor is blinking in.
• Insert link: This is very useful in both modes. Once the text you want to anchor the hyperlink is selected and this button is clicked a window will pop up with a handy (or not so handy) http:// already there. Put the whole link into this box (for example http://www.google.com/) and in the HTML mode you will see <a href="http://www.google.com/"> at the beginning of the anchor text and </a> at the end.
• Unlink: Select the colored underlined text in Visual mode and click this and it’ll get rid of the link.
• More: This breaks a post into “teaser” and content sections. Insert this tag after a few sentences of your post and on your blog’s home page you’ll see only those first few sentences followed by a hyperlink (more...), which when clicked displays the rest of the post’s content.
• Spellcheck: I tend to rely on Firefox’s spellchecker so I don’t know how good this one is.
• Fullscreen mode: Does what it says on the tin.
• Kitchensink: When clicked this will bring a whole second line of formatting options. Click here for further explanation of the kitchensink.

This is only a brief description of using the text editor in Visual mode. Remember to constantly flick between Visual and HTML tabs and you will learn a bit about HTML. One thing you will see is that most HTML tags consist of two tags – a start tag and an end tag. The end tag is identified by a forward slash (/) before the tag name (look out for this in your HTML editor).

Indeed, instead of selecting the text and clicking the button to apply whatever text style you want, you can position your cursor before the text, click the style button once, then move it to the end of the text that you want styling and click the same button again and the end result will be the same. It’s a case of opening and closing a tag.

Insertion of the <p> tag

If you hit the return key on your keyboard in the Visual text editor you will get a new paragraph. So it will wrap the previous text in <p> tags.

In the HTML editor, one hit of the return key will give you a line break or <br/> tag. (A slightly different type of tag, it stands on it’s own, is “self-closing” and therefore requires no start or end tag). Two hits of the return key in the HTML text editor will give you the new paragraph <p> tags just like one hit does in the Visual editor.

Any more hits of the return key won’t give you any more line breaks so don’t try it!

Insertion of the <h3> tag

Remember our important points to think of while writing a WordPress page or post? Breaking text up and SEO? The <h3> tag encompasses both of these in a big way.

In most WordPress themes, the title of your post is wrapped within <h2> tags which conveys to search engines that it is important text. Similarly, you can break up your text with subheadings or <h3> tags which conveys to search engines that it isn’t as important as <h2> text but is important nonetheless.

So I find these tags very important. But they don’t exist in the Visual editor so you’ll have to use the HTML editor to insert a subheading in your post or page!

Insertion of code into the HTML text editor

You can add any HTML code you like into the HTML text editor which is very useful. I’ve often added tables and divs. One word of warning when doing this: remember the <p> tags!

Say you want to put ordinary text inside a <td> tag. You will have to hit your carriage return twice to get the <p> tags to appear. In this case it is probably easier to add the <p> tags in the editor.

How to insert images manually into a WordPress post or page

OK. WordPress has great new options for inserting images, audio and video into your post. But I’m old-school and I want to show you how to do it the HTML way.

There are two main ways to put an image into a post. One way (see above) is to make the image straddle the whole width of the text. To be able to get the image to fit snuggly into the box you are writing you need to know the width in pixels of the <div> that contains the post text. Go to Appearance > Editor in the WordPress dashboard and click on <style.css> to find this out. In my theme the <div> that contains the text and headlines is called “entry”.

Once you have done this you need to re-size your image to that pixel width using photo editing software such as Photoshop and upload it using an FTP client to your website, preferably into a directory called “images”. Once that is done you can enter this code into the HTML text editor:

<img src="http://your-site.com/images/image.jpg" alt=""/>

Remember to add two returns above and below it in the HTML text editor. Also, don’t forget to write good keyword rich and descriptive file names and alt text for the image.

The other method is to add a less wide image to the left or the right of the main body of text and have the text wrap around it. In this case you don’t want to add any returns after the code as you want the text to run adjacent to it. Simply insert this into the beginning of a paragraph to insert an image on the left hand side of the text:

<img src="http://your-site.com/images/image.jpg" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;" alt=""/>

And here is the code for inserting an image on the right hand side of the text:

<img src="http://your-site.com/images/image.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px;" alt=""/>

Conclusion – OMG this post has been so long and you’ve got to the end of it!

I’m sorry that went on for a bit longer than I thought it would. Just goes to show you there’s more to writing a WordPress page or post than just … writing!

If anyone has anything to add to this, as always, please do so in the comments below. I’m bound to have left some important things out and probably made a mistake or two – intentional, of course!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This is the fifth in the series where I explain how an individual or small or medium sized organization can get themselves noticed in the big bad world.

Other installments explained how to set up a web site from scratch, how to install WordPress and what to write on your site.

Before we commence a couple of definitions – SEO or Search Engine Optimization: is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via organic search results. Keywords: (1) descriptors that capture the essence of a topic or (2) the words you type into a search engine in order to find stuff.

WordPress is pretty well structured for SEO anyway but there are a number of things you can do to improve it’s performance thus winning you more visitors, collaborators and clients.

Get the right URLs

By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them (for example: http://www.your-site.com/?p=N). It’s not good and it’s not pretty. In the WordPress admin panel go Settings > Permalinks. What format is the best to choose? I would go for /%postname%/. This is best because the URLs to articles should never change and it gets keyword rich page titles in there separated by hyphens (for example: http://www.your-site.com/keyword-rich-post/). But, remember, don’t stuff any area with your keywords. Just use them naturally.

Title tags

The most important part of a web page in terms of SEO is the title. Optimize what goes in between and on the top of your browser window. So the name of your WordPress blog to include the keywords that you want people to find you with when they enter them into a search engine. Do this in Settings > General > Blog Title in WordPress’s administration panel. My title is Freelance Graphic Designer London. That’s sort of what I am and I want to attract people who type those words into a search engine to me.

Search engines put more weight on the early words so it is better to have your page title (and then category) to come before your site title. There are many ways of doing this. I would recommend that you use the HeadSpace plugin to do this. Mac users beware that HeadSpace does not work correctly with Firefox, so try Safari.

Categories

WordPress offers excellent categorization of your content. Make sure the category titles are keyword-rich. Write enticing descriptions of your categories in Posts > Categories. Use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field.

Heading tags

Generally keywords are better off appearing within <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags than within <p> tags. The <h2> tags are the title of your post or page so put keywords in there. Within your posts and pages you can add subheadings (<h3> tags) which can also contain keywords.

Images

When including an image in the content of your website be sure to name it correctly. So make it “computer-screen.jpg” rather than “image01.jpg”. Also always put an <alt> tag description of about four words explaining what the image looks like. By all means put keywords in there if they are relevant but (as always with keywords) don’t force it. I get about as much traffic from Google image search as I do from ordinary organic Google search just from doing this.

Sitemap and robots.txt

Creating an XML sitemap is often considered a boost to your SEO. It is a widely adopted search engine standard that helps search engine robots crawl your site. It was created by Google and adopted by Yahoo!, Microsoft and others in the search engine industry. You can do this very easily with the Google sitemap generator plugin for WordPress.

So you’ve created an XML sitemap so now what do you do? If you haven’t already, log on to Google Webmaster Tools add your site and submit your sitemap.

You need to add a reference to it in your robots.txt so robots other than Googlebot will know of its presence.

Search engines will look in your root domain for a special file named “robots.txt” (http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt). The file tells the robot (spider) which files it may spider and where your sitemap is. Here is mine:

User-agent: * Sitemap: http://robcubbon.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /wp-


I have disallowed the robots from directories that have either no relevant content or duplicate content.

Embolden words

Words within <strong> tags carry more weight in SEO terms (as well as visually) than words within <p> tags.

Meta tags

The meta tags provide structured metadata about a web page and exist in the <head> section. They are generally considered to be obsolete but the description tag does appear on the SERPS and therefore should be generated separately for each page. Keyword tags maybe totally ignored but HeadSpace makes creating them very easy so you may as well.

Write your .htaccess

You can choose whether your site should be a www or non-www site. Your site with and without a www could appear to be two sites with the exact same content. Search engines don’t like seeing content copied. You can divert your www url to your non-www url or vice versa by entering a small bit of code into the .htaccess document on the root of your server.

Follow standards

Make sure HTML and CSS code is standards compliant.

Further reading

Here are a couple of pages I have found to be very useful for SEO and WordPress:

• SEO for WordPress – The Complete Guide by Jim Westergren
• WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk

These are only a few things I can think of in order to make a WordPress site optimized for search engines. If anyone knows anymore white hat techniques for SEO – let me know.

Apologies to my English brethren, forefathers and Shakespeare, I’m using American spellings from now on. Most of my visitors are American and with the pound down so low I’d be especially pleased to attract American clients! (As I am pleased to attract a client from anywhere!)

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

So you’ve got your WordPress blog set up and you are just starting to write – what you do?

Words are, in my opinion, the most important thing on a website. This is because the search engine robots that crawl the web every day can pretty much “read” what you’ve written, but they can’t look at your website and think “mmm, nice graphics!”

For me, there’s two things to think about when writing. One is keywords; the other is making sure you’re writing stuff that people are going to want to read.

Keywords in your content

Keywords are what people type into a search engine (Google, for example) in order to find websites. Now there are good and bad ways to introduce keywords into your website text for SEO purposes, but I’ll come to that in my next post. For the time being, if you are a designer for example, you should write about – guess what? – design.

But it’s not as simple as that. It’s virtually impossible to be found on the internet with just one keyword so you should think of your second most important keyword; for me it’s probably “graphic”. Your third most important keyword; for me, “freelance”. The fourth; “London”. And so on. Don’t sweat about choosing these you can always change them.

Use these keywords in the title and body of your articles with the most important being the most frequent. But, there is only one way to do this – naturally.

Write about the subject as you would normally, don’t struggle to add the keywords as many times as possible or even once more than is necessary. For one thing, search engines will penalise you for keyword repetition; for another, it will make your site very unpleasant reading for your visitors.

How would you rather read about a subject you’re interested in – in an ad or an article? It’s so much better to read the considered thoughts of an expert in a field rather than the hurried ramblings of someone who just wants to make money.

Here’s how you make money:

Write content that people will want to read

Write intelligently and lucidly about what you know most about.

Remember, you are an expert, we all are. You’ve spent your life doing something – it doesn’t matter what it is – that something is useful to somebody. This to me is the crux of what internet marketing is all about.

When you write about your specialities you will naturally attract to your website those who are your best customers. Let me explain, I do graphic design and marketing, now graphic design and marketing are huge fields, it would be nuts for me to market myself in this area and leave it at that. So I specialise – every organisation does. Web information about a niche area will draw in like-minded people and perfect clients through Long Tail keywords.

So I’ve written tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator, blog posts about delivering advertising messages with graphics, articles about web and print production. Other articles have been solely responsible for melanding certain jobs. The subjects of these have been: interactive and rich media PDFs; pop art; creating countries’ map outlines and flags; WordPress for website creation. Quite a mixed bag. But if someone wants to ask me to do something I’m always grateful for the work!

When you are writing about what you know best, keep checking your facts. Constantly ask yourself when you write something if you really are sure about it. Very often in our professional careers it’s easy to believe certain things by hearsay or rumour. Use the internet and any other resource to back up your assertions thoroughly before you publish your post.

So when writing about your specialities, do you spill the beans and reveal all your trade secrets or do you hold back on certain information hoping to retain the power of knowledge from your competitors? I would always favour the former rather than the latter.

I would encourage anyone to put as much detail into their descriptive articles as possible. I’m sure it won’t harm your business to reveal the correct and best practices that you use. Transparency in governments is considered to be ethical so I would encourage anyone to be open as possible in their own organisation.

Your potential clients won’t have the time or the inclination to use this information to do the job themselves and this priceless insight will win you kudos for your generosity. (And, of course, valuable information on the internet will be linked to raising the profile of your site and have it appear higher in search engines’ results, more to come on SEO in the next post.)

I have benefited immeasurably for the community of designers and marketers who have explained techniques and solved problems in websites, blogs and forums. It’s only fair that I give back to the community.

For me this is kind of business karma. Take Matt Mullenweg, for example, the founding developer of WordPress – the most popular and best blogging software that has empowered millions of ordinary people to publish in a beautiful way for free. Matt is listed in Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web, is in Inc.com’s 30 under 30 – America’s Coolest Young Entrepreneurs and his company Automattic Inc is 123rd in TechCrunch.com’s list of Startups Best Positioned To Weather A Downturn. My point is that Matt’s initial and ongoing commitment to open source software – giving out good stuff for free – has helped him in his brilliant career.

So I would advise virtually anyone to get a WordPress site and start writing on the cutting edge of what they know best. The advantages you will see in your community, your networking and your client list will far outweigh the effort.

And in the area of the style of writing, here are ten tips for writing a blog post.

Some say write for a month when starting and then publish for the first time. Some say write every week once you’ve got going. Some say make every post no longer than 350 words.

I say … write!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

In the previous post in my How to market yourself series, I described how to set up a website on a host’s server. Here I will tell you how to set up a WordPress blog on that server. Read my introduction to this self-marketing series here.

OK, so this information exists elsewhere on the internet, so why am I writing this post? Because WordPress is the best way I know to market yourself on the internet so this post is hugely important for this reason.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a robust and feature-full web publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. WordPress, as it says on it’s homepage, is both free and priceless at the same time.

This is about a WordPress.org blog. What’s the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com? WordPress.org is where you can download WordPress to use on your own hosting service and have your own specific website address (this is what I’m recommending). WordPress.com hosts WordPress blogs and therefore puts WordPress.com in your website address and gives you generally less control over your website, for example, the number and kind of adverts and affiliate links are restricted.

WordPress is the best Content Management System for simple “shop window on the world” websites for small and medium sized companies, in my opinion.

What’s good about WordPress?

It’s free. It’s easy to use. There is excellent support documentation and forums because, literally, millions use it. It’s database driven so you can transport it to another CMS if you really want to. Anyone can edit the site (with a username and password) from anywhere in the world. There are many different themes designed that you can dress it up in.

You can add loads of functionality to your website very easily, for example, search, sitemap, RSS feeds, comment forms, contact forms, galleries, etc. Believe me, I could go on.

Still not convinced? Have a look at these websites that use it: StyleWatch at People.com, Martha Stewart, PlayStation’s US blog, Stephen Fry and NY Times blogs.

So here’s the nitty-gritty.

How to install WordPress on your host server

Of course, there is great information on how to install WordPress on the WordPress site. But here’s what you do.

First download and un-zip the current version of WordPress.

Then, create a database and a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it. For those with cPanel go to MySQL Databases and do this. Write down the database name and the MySQL username and password. Finally add the user to the database.

Go to your version of WordPress you had just downloaded and in the folder named “wordpress” look for a file named “wp-config-sample.php”. Open it in your favourite text editor (eg. TextEdit for Mac; NotePad for PC), making sure you are editing in plain text, and look for these three lines at the top.

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘username’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password’); // …and password

Fill in the words you chose for your database name, username and password where it says 'wordpress', 'username' and 'password' in lowercase, keeping the inverted commas. Look back at your MySQL Databases page and make sure you have the database name and username exactly as it is there (there maybe prefixes added). Once you are happy with this Save As… “wp-config.php” back in the WordPress directory on your computer.

Now you have to decide whether you want WordPress to power your entire site or just a blog within the site. If you want your whole site to be a WordPress site then upload the contents of the “wordpress” folder but not the folder on the root directory of your host server. The root directory is sometimes called “public_html” or “html_docs”. If, however, you already have a site but just want to add WordPress as a blog then upload the whole “wordpress” folder to the root directory. You may want to re-name the directory “blog” so that the URL of the blog is forward slash blog after your website address.

Lastly, once the uploading is complete, simply go to http://www.mydomain.com/wp-admin/install.php if your whole website is WordPress, or http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/wp-admin/install.php if you put WordPress inside a sub-directory. (Replace “mydomain.com” with your own domain name and “subdirectory” with the name of the sub-directory you created, “blog” in our example).

Once at this page follow the prompts. You will be ask for your email address and website title, you can change these later. You will also be asked if you want to appear in search engines. I would check that option unless you want to view your website in isolation!

You will soon be emailed a password to access administration panels – keep a copy of this safe.

And now the fun really begins!

That was the famous 5 minute installation which took me at least half an hour the first time I did it and even now takes at least 10 minutes! Setting up WordPress on your host server is a task that prepares you for the process of owning and maintaining and constantly updated professional-looking website!

Picture credit: Francis Chouquet WordPress Designer

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This is the second post in my How to market yourself series, a personal account of the best marketing techniques you can employ for yourself or your business. Read my introduction to this self-marketing series here.

There are three things you need to do when setting up your website.

1. Decide on your website address (URL)
2. Register it
3. Find a web host

How to decide on your web address

Many people spend hours thinking up a catchy URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or website address. The most important SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) point is to include some keywords (separated by hyphens). Your URL doesn’t have to be your name or your company name so why not increase your chances of being found in searches before you’ve even written a web page? So, if you are a web designer, why not try web-designer dot com? (OK, it’s already gone, but you know what I mean).

You can test out domain names at any domain name registrar. Which brings me on to the next thing you have to do.

Register your website’s address

Once you have decided on the name of your website it is necessary to register it. I use GoDaddy. There doesn’t seem to be a much cheaper option and GoDaddy are the market leaders. You can also try 123-Reg, particularly if you’re based in the UK and want a .co.uk domain.

One thing I would suggest is not to use your domain name registrar as your host. I like to keep the two operations separate because if you have a problem with one it is easier to move.

Cost: You’re looking at around $10 a year. When you register a domain name, your contact details are included in a publicly available database known as the Whois database which can lead to spamming. You can spend slightly more to hide these details.

An important SEO point: Search engines prefer if the domain is registered for a longer time into the future so that you don’t look like a fly-by-night website. For this reason, it’s better to register for five years rather than the minimum one year.

How to choose a web host?

The web hosting industry is highly competitive with seemingly hundreds of companies offering similar packages. Here are some of the things you need to take into account.

A great way to market yourself and get search engines to include you in their search results is to blog. The blogging software I’ll be recommending in this series of articles is WordPress.

The minimum specifications for the hosting of a WordPress blog are PHP 4.3 or greater, MySQL 4.0 or greater and the mod_rewrite Apache module. PHP is scripting language; MySQL is a database server. These are fairly standard specifications and will be offered by most quality web hosts but make sure you check! WordPress recommends a few hosts here.

Other than that here are some more important points to look out for:

1. Disk space. Once you have a host you will find it useful for a number of things not just your website. It is another bit of computer space to use. You can use it as your own personal FTP site for storing information. If you think you need this facility go for a web host that’s offering tons of disk space.
2. Monthly transfer / Bandwidth. This refers to how much your website is accessed. For example, if your website consists of one page of 1MB (very unlikely) and is visited by ten people a month, you would need more than 10MB of monthly transfer to facilitate this. Of course most website pages are less than 100K so, unless you are expecting huge amounts of visitors, 10GB/month will be enough at first and your web host will be able to offer you more as your website increases in popularity. Keep your eye on it though. How?
3. A control panel. cPanel is the most advanced web hosting control panel in the industry, designed to simplify administration of a website and I would recommend choosing a host that offers it. Through the cPanel you can set up and read email, manage and edit your website’s files, monitor your website’s traffic (making sure you don’t exceed any bandwidth or space restrictions), and loads of other things including backing up a MySQL database which is essential for good WordPress maintenance. cPanel sometimes comes bundled with Fantastico which is a set of scripts which automate the installation of, but not always the update of, CMSs such as SMF, phpBB, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress and over 50 others, although I would not install WordPress this way.
4. The validity of your web host. I would only choose a web host that had a professional looking website. Also, I would definitely insist on 24/7 email support, personally I wouldn’t mind if it didn’t have phone support.

Cost: You’re looking at around 8$/month for a decent shared hosting package. Shared hosting is fine if you are only going to have one website and you’re just starting out.

An important SEO point: The most important point for search engine marketing is the location of your website. If, for example, you are interested in the UK market you should use a UK based web host. However, if for example, you are a UK company wanting to market your services internationally, then I would choose a US host.

Recommended web hosts for WordPress users

I’ve researched this by asking WordPress professionals in forums and LinkedIn groups about the most reliable shared hosting and the following three companies came up with the most votes:

• Justhost
• Bluehost
• Hostgator

So, I’ve got a web address and a host, now what do I do?

Your new host should give you 4 useful pieces of information so that you can set up a website.

1. IP address. An IP address is a unique number that every computer connected to the internet is assigned. It consists of 4 numbers separated by dots. This is the IP address of your server’s computer, not your personal computer.
2. Your username.
3. A password. These first 3 are necessary for uploading files to the server.
4. Domain Name Servers/System/Service (DNS). A very important link between your domain name and IP address.

If, as I suggest, you register your domain name with a company other than your host you will need to return to your domain name registrar’s website and and fill in the name servers (usually one primary and one secondary) you got from your host.

That done, wait 24 hours (usually much less) and you can create your new website.

Next, use your favourite FTP client (eg. Cyberduck for Mac; Filezilla for PC) and, with the IP address, username and password, you can log on to your host. You may find quite a few directories. Look for one called “public_html” or similar. This is where your website should go.

Use your favourite text editor (eg. TextEdit for Mac; Notepad for PC) and make a new plain text document, write a message in it and save it as “index.html”. Upload the “index.html” file. Now if you type in your domain name in a browser it will display your message.

Congratulations, you have just created a website!

As always, I welcome comments, especially to notify me of anything I’ve missed!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I have successfully been on the first page in Google for freelance graphic designer for a few months now and I’m quite pleased with this.

Marketing yourself is one of the most important things any professional or company will do. For this reason I’m going to write a number of articles about self-marketing, what I mean by it and how I do it.

I’m not going to go on about crafting a mission statement, identifying expertise and clients and creating a robust consistent identity. I’m sure everyone spends a lot of time on that and it’s specific to each organisation. What I wish to tell you about the details of how I think you can run a successful website and company in these challenging times.

Search Engine Optimisation

The first thing to remember with SEO is that you can’t cheat the system. What I mean is that there is no easy course of action that will make your website first on Google after having entered certain keywords.

However, if you have content specific to those keywords and it is proven to be, so other websites link to you in a certain way, then quality targetted traffic will come your way from the search engines.

A WordPress blog is well designed and structured already for search engine optimisation and this is my preferred method of creating and updating content for visitors, clients and search engines alike.

But SEO doesn’t start and finish with a blog. There are many things you can do before, during and after creating your blog that will mean success or failure with the search engines.

General Marketing

Once that is all explained I will go on to other things you can do to promote yourself and your organisation. By general marketing I mean promotion. I’ll leave the price, place, product, process and physical evidence to you!

I will explain how to design and produce HTML emails, flyers, business stationery, etc.

How do I get on the first page of Google’s search results?

I’d guess that there’s probably a million pages on the internet dedicated to answering this question. Come to think of it, there’s probably more than a million people in the world working in this area (SEO). I’m prepared to admit I’m prone to exaggeration but if someone would like to put me right on this then I’ll stand corrected!

It’s the 64 million dollar question but it has a simple answer although it’s a solution that involves hard work and eats up time.

Here is my answer: create a website with lots of constantly updated, quality, relevant content with lots of inbound links from other quality, relevant websites.

Now, this needs further explanation (for example, you my well ask: how many is “lots”?) and people may disagree with the “constantly updated” bit, but that is essentially it – as far as I’m concerned.

What now?

So, I will try to post the next installment in this series of How to market yourself soon where I will explain what to do in order to set up your website or WordPress blog.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I have just set up a quit smoking blog for my stop smoking website.

The blog is powered by WordPress – who else? – and I chose the ShadedGrey theme which is made by Web Hosting Bluebook.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.