WordPress, Blogging & Tech Tutorials | Web Training Wheels

How Do You Build Online Community For Your Business?

Small Business CEO have published my guest post – “Kickstart Your Online Community With Your Offline Customers”. The post was written with small businesses in mind that already have a customer base and offline touchpoints such as a physical business location, call center etc. This offline base can provide an excellent foundation to start building …

The Antidote to Information Addiction (AKA Blogger’s Syndrome)

Blogging Basics

Here’s a couple of simple truths about blogging:

There is no ‘secret’ to the success of your blog.

There’s barely anything new at all to be said or read on the topic of blogging.

Once you’ve got a solid grasp on the fundamentals, it’s all about execution – gathering more and more information ends up being crippling and getting in the way.

Information Overload

As bloggers and business people, our Twitter streams, Google Readers and Facebook News Feeds are likely filled with all kinds of tempting headlines about secrets and methods to success – whether that’s getting subscribers, readers, traffic, you-name-it – there’s a ‘secret’ and a ten-point plan to getting it.

Except there’s really not. When you click on those links, how often do you actually find something new you can use? Personally, I find that to be rare. Yet we keep on clicking. Somewhere in our ‘lizard brain’ (as Seth Godin would say), we are looking for easy & magical answers. We’re looking for something ‘out there’ which will save us from actually doing the work, and that will have instant and incredible effects.

Things You Should Know Before You Start Blogging

Blogging Basics

Avoid the 6 month blog fizzle-out, or the non-starter by being prepared for what’s to come in your new incarnation as: A Blogger. I wrote a guest post for She Takes On The World with some pointers on the topic. Set yourself up for success – read the whole article at She Takes On The …

How To Update Your Readers When You Post A New Blog

Blogging Basics

If you’re blogging you want readers to be able to keep up with what you’re writing, right? Here’s an overview of some of your options for enabling readers to subscribe, along with pros and cons of both.

Via RSS feed

RSS forms the basis of most updating systems. Every blog has an RSS feed (simply the output of your blog) which automatically updates when you publish new posts. For WordPress blogs, the feed is usually located at: yourdomain.com/feed. Visitors can use a tool like Google Reader to subscribe to many different blog RSS feeds and receive all the updates in one place. Here’s a shot of my overflowing Reader with a few of the sites I subscribe to:

As a publisher you can use Google’s Feedburner service to manage your RSS feed.

Pros – Feedburner is pretty easy to configure and you can implement it with the help of a plugin. Feedburner also provides copy/paste code to place icons on your site to advertise your feed. Feedburner formats your feed cleanly so that it displays nicely in browsers (try looking at a raw RSS feed in Chrome….it’s unreadable) & feed readers and the subscribe options are clearly presented. You’ll also be able to get stats on the number of subscribers you have and the click activity on your feed.

How Do Themes & Plugins Help With SEO?

SEO, WordPress

I recently wrote about the need for the website owner to take responsibility for SEO and not rely 100% on a theme or a plugin. Themes and plugins do of course have some benefits if you understand what it is they do, and what they cannot do.

The benefit of themes and plugins

‘SEO-friendly’ themes and SEO plugins present your content in such a way that it is easy for search engines to understand, determine the relevancy of, and navigate. So if you’ve targeted your content for specific keywords, the search engine will have no doubt what that piece of content is all about. The content and keyword research is up to you. No theme or plugin alone can make your site rank highly if your content is not valuable and targeted. Also, this all relates to on-site SEO, but ranking is also determined by off-site factors such as incoming links from other websites. Themes and plugins cannot help you with these off-site factors.