Find Your Dream Blog Theme And Make Important Changes

Blog Tips – Adding design and plugins

Did you read my last blog tip on how to start blogging ?. Hopefully you already have bought your domain and hosting. If you didn’t get it yet, you can get one here. Today I will share with my readers how I make all important changing to my themes. It is necessary to make your blog user friendly and SEO friendly!

Finding a free theme or a premium theme

I just want to talk about free themes only because I use a free theme for my blog. If you have enough budget you can grab one premium theme. I’m also saving to get my first premium theme. In mean time, I use free theme. There are a lot fantastic free theme that you can find. If you want to get one interesting like mine don’t be lazy to search it for yourself.

So where did I get my WordPress Theme? BlogOhBlog of course.

Once you have downloaded your theme, uploading is 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, I personally use a FTP client called FileZilla which you can get for FREE.

The other 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.

Once you have done this, login to your WordPress Admin and click Appearance and you will see your theme, 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!

Make your wordpress SEO friendly

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.

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 fazreen.com you will see the title is “Blog Tips To Make Money Online Blogging” – it says what the website is about and it has my  6 more important keywords and you should do the same.

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. It is also important to have a SEO friendly link.

RSS feeds and building your list

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 Feedburner to manage all our 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.

Ask any Problogger what their biggest blogging mistake was and they should of started 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 to do is create an autoresponder series which automatically sends them a email every day to encourage them to work harder and make more money online – then promote them a product or two. Don’t be scared to promote products to them from day one, after all you only want people who are willing to spend money on your list.

Hopefully I can get one autoresponder for my blog one day. I don’t use it yet for my blog. Looks like there are a lot things that I don’t do yet. So guys you can follow my journey to grow this blog and provide more blog tips

PS. If any of this has gone straight over your head, then feel free to hit the contact page and ask me a question!

PPS. Leave your comment or share with us your tips.
Subscribe to Blog Tips For Beginners by Email