Welcome to the conclusion of the “Creating A Blog” series brought to you by theNetFool.com. We’ve come a long way since week one, and now have everything fully functioning on our blogs. Heck, you should even have a few posts published… and by now, you should be starting to see some traffic flow into your website. Let’s work on organizing your content, your RSS feed and forming that all important blogging routine.

Being an efficient blogger is one of the most important moves that you will make in your blogging career. There are so many writers that have great blogs, but fail to do things regularly. Readers like some measure of consistency, so it is important to have all of your RSS feeds and post titles just as predictable as your blogging routine. By the end of this chapter, you’ll have the game-plan in hand to succeed. ;)

Organizing Your RSS Feeds
Chances are, if you are new to blogging, you just don’t understand where to begin with Really Simple Syndication (RSS). By default, the WordPress system will set you up with an RSS feed that is sloppily organized from the get-go into a few pages of content. We need to have this a lot more organized so that people can sign up to our feeds with ease. Remember, not everyone will want to sign up to receive your RSS in their email inboxes every morning, and not everyone will want things directed to an RSS reader. The key to getting the maximum amount of RSS subscribers, is giving them the most options.

Luckily for us, Google recently took over FeedBurner… meaning you get all of the most professional options completely free. If you haven’t already, get on over to FeedBurner and create an account. With this, you can add your blog’s feed to your account and have everything streamlined for you within minutes. You’ll get an easy to use “http://feeds.feedburner.com/thenetfool” access URL that opens up to a ton of unique subscriber options. Everything is tracked for you, and you can publicly show your readers how many subscribers you have at any given point in time with the “FeedCount” plugin among others available to you for free.

Go ahead activate whatever option you want through FeedBurner, as most of them are quite valuable. About 95% of successful bloggers are using FeedBurner to organize all of their subscribers. You can make a unique email feed subscriber option, add advertisements to your RSS feed for added revenue or even customize the format of the text that appears in each RSS feed item. :D

Organizing Your Post URLs and Titles
For the purposes of search engine optimization (SEO) and uniformity, it’s important to have your blog posts structured in the most effective way possible. Now that you have everything on your blog SEO’d with All-In-One SEO Pack, you may be looking for a way to simplify the URL of your individual postings. We don’t want to see any numbers or dates in the web address, so use “Permalinks” to get things set up correctly.

Lots of bloggers fail to address Permalinks as a useful tool to organizing your content. However, having your posts appear as “yourblog.com/post-title-here/” is very neat and easy for search engines to pick up. To do this, simply navigate to the “Settings” section of your administrator section and select the “Permalinks” tab. We want to use a custom structure of “/%postname%/” after our domain name. Alternatives are fine, but I feel that simply having the title there in the URL is the easiest method to use.

Once you have Permalinks configured, you can adjust the words that appear in the URL on each individual post. Right underneath the title of your posts in the editing screen, there will be a new “permalink” line where you can manually edit what appears. I recommend using five words or less, and adjusting it to include a simple term that would naturally be well-searched in Google. Use your own discretion, but having the Permalink appear as a common phrase is usually great for search engine rankings. ;)

Other than Permalinks, the title of your post itself is essential. Beyond having a nice looking url on each post, your titles should be unique and packed with keywords. Over time, you will see exactly what I mean by this as your blog starts to appear in search engines more often. Make sure that each post title is something dynamic that draws attention, while at the same time describing what the post is about. This should appear clean inside of your blog’s layout, meaning that you don’t want a title that is going to run off the page… and you don’t want a title that is too short to describe a post.

Tracking Your Stats
Now that you have everything working correctly, you’ll want to install a traffic-tracking script that will show you how many unique visitors you are getting every day (among other things). This is very important for advertising purposes and organization. You will want to know how well your blog is doing outside of subscribers alone, so it is important to see how many people are seeing your website each day, week and month so that you will know what you are doing right and wrong. Without a statistics measure, bloggers often miss out on potential traffic coming in because they simply don’t know what works and what doesn’t. Plus, advertisers like to see what kind of traffic you are getting for ordering ads from your website. :cool:

The best traffic tracker in my opinion is the new Google Analytics system. This is more reliable and has the most options possible for analyzing your traffic. Plus, you get an unlimited log size so you can see how you are doing over a long period of time… which is always nice. If you are looking for something simpler, check out a service like StatCounter or WordPress’ own FireStats to track your progress. As much as I hate to over-rely on statistics to gauge my success as a blogger, it’s important to at least check how you are performing on a statistical basis now and then.

Forming a Blogging Routine
The biggest pitfall in blogging is the failure to create a blogging routine. When you own a publicly viewed blog, you need to be posting as often as possible and doing everything possible to expand your reach. I don’t know too many people that own blogs as personal journals that they really don’t want to pick up lots of readers, so I am going off the assumption that we want as much traffic as possible.

My recommendation is to make a new post every day. I have experimented heavily with posting at different intervals, but there really isn’t a better way in the world to increase your readership than by posting regularly every day. If you simply don’t have the time to fit this formula, try to pump out a minimum of 3 posts every week. Blogs that publish content less than 3 times a week are generally forgotten about. As much as people want to read your material, you will lose interest at an alarming rate if people assume that you simply don’t care enough about your own content to post regularly. :razz:

In addition to posting often, you should be doing all the right things after you make a new post. Your personal “bloggers routine” can include anything and everything from commenting on other blogs in your niche to publishing to social media networks. I find that my routine often consists of:

  1. Commenting on related blogs to get clicks back to your post
  2. Submitting each post to submission services like BlogEngage and BlogsVine
  3. Re-Writing good articles and submitting to free article services like EZineArticles
  4. Posting 5-10 useful thread responses in forums like DigitalPoint and Bloggeries

If you keep a steady routine of posting on regular intervals and following up each post with a slew of marketing techniques to gradually increase the number of readers you receive… you will be well on your way to turning an undiscovered blog into a niche authority. Your routine should be unique to your particular needs as a blogger, and you should never try to overdo it as we all run out of time now and then.

Conclusion
I hope that you have enjoyed this series on creating your own blog. We’ve covered everything from finding a useful topic to base your website on, registering a domain name and even marketing your name to attract visitors. The length of this guide itself is a testament to how complex owning and operating a blog can be. It is important to know what you are in for before you start if you want to hit the ground running. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask me to work things out for you (jim@thenetfool.com)… I’ll be happy to work with you to help you get your footing!

-The Net Fool

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