How to start an Internet Business Blog Part 2

There are five big chapters in starting an internet business blog.

1. Niche

2. Content You are here!

3. Traffic

4. Monetization

5. Optimization

In this series we will cover this five huge aspects with simple words. Today we are going to talk about content.

What is content?

In the second part of our online course we are going to talk about one of the most important things that makes a blog successful, and that is with one word: Content. In a previous article Content is the king, l wrote about this topic, but now we are going to extend it more further. When we say content we mean not only the text, the videos and the pictures of you internet business blog, but also the graphical environment, the WordPress theme that you picked and advertisements, the widgets, the footer, the header and the title of you internet business blog.

Why content is so important?

First you must think as a search engine. Search engines like google and many others big search engines are making their search based on text. They are not based on animation, videos, photos etc. So bear in mind that a search engine is looking always for good and unique content. Search engines hate duplicated content, it is useless to have the same articles in our blog twice or repeated many times, offering no value to our users at all.

Always ask yourself this question: If you are a search engine, what kind of development resources will help make you more effective? As a major search engine for instance Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. you will benefit from millions upon millions of dollars of development effort.

Second, you must create real value to the user. Why to come to your site? Is it a waste of time? are you offering something with real value or not? Are new visitors bouncing on your site or they stay and read?

The third rule of thumb is to offer something for free. Even offer everything for free! Then the new user thinks if they are offering everything for free on beforehand, imagine what they are going to offer inside! This is one of the basics concepts of attraction marketing or boomerang marketing. Offer everything for free is the real value to the visitor. They will come back asking more and more again. So Picture this: Having thousands of thousands of new visitors that are returning to your site because you simply offer to them great value, asking for more. It’s like the candy store effect.

Four, review your content always before submission or after submission. This is like after post service, it is hilarious but reminds me of the after sales service that offer many high street motor companies such as Toyota. l like Toyota’s strategy and l took many things from them. creating my own marketing strategy.

Search Engine Optimized Content

When we say content we mean not only the text, the videos and the pictures of you internet business blog, but also the graphical environment, the WordPress theme that you picked and advertisements, the widgets, the footer, the header and the title of you internet business blog.

A very good plugin for content search engine optimization is WordPress SEO by Yoast and it is free. It is the most near version to the SEO pressor paid version. What We should take care in optimizing our content for the search engines?

Here is a helpful list:

Have only one keyword or a keyword phrase, a long tail for instance for every post or page you write. The keyword should be in line with the market niche keywords that you have for your internet business blog. Try to have only 10-14 keywords or longtails for your blog.
Aim to a keyword density from 1 to 4%.
Try to have a short slug for your post page.
The page title should contain the keyphrase and it would be minimum 40 characters.
The copy writing score should be more than 70 in the Flesh Reading Ease Test.
The keyword phrase should appear in at least one sub heading in the post.
The images you use in the post should contain alt tags with the target keyword or phrase.
The post should has more than 20 outbound links.
The keyword appears in the first paragraph of the copy.
The meta description contains the primary keyword / phrase.
The keyword / phrase appears in the URL for this page.
The post should have a minimum limit of 300 words, even though it is a video post. Try to combine video with text.

Maybe you are not very familiar with this all these information here and terminology, but we will cone back to this topic again in the phase three, when we will talk about traffic and how to raise our internet business blog traffic.

Content or Blog Structure

We need at least 5 pages to have in our internet business blog. First we need the home or the blog page, the about me page, the unique selling proposition page that we need to offer something for free to make new visitors to opt-in in our page, the contact page that many times would be on the about me page, nad the topics pages. For instance if we need to blog about more affiliate marketing, then will add a page about that. If we have some permanent columns, then we need to add them as blog pages.

Categories

Try not to have too many categories or too little, in the start when we haven’t found our path yet, it is possible to have more or less categories and then in phase 5, in the optimization of our internet business blog, we will make the proper corrections. Try not to have a post in more than two categories. So try to be specific.

WordPress

WordPress is an open source multi functional content management system, that l personally use and thousands of people are using worldwide. It has many options, it is scalable and expandable, through plugins. Why to use WordPress instead of other content management systems, is obviously because it designed for blogs and especially for internet business blogs.

Web Hosting and WordPress Installation

It a important to find a reliable web hosting provider such as godaddy. There are many reliable web hosting companies, but i prefer godaddy because it has full WordPress support and one click WordPress installation. So, after we got our domain name from godaddy, we are going to buy a hosting service. l usually propose the middle web hosting package with 150 Gb of space and unlimited bandwidth. Then you need to set up your email address to be mail on the domain. For instance if your domain name is divramis.com, you need to take a generic email address of the type info@divramis.com or a personalized one of the type john@divramis.com. It is better for your personal branding, and for blog promotional reasons. Avoid using a free email service.

After doing all the above, and have WordPress installed, we need to choose our WordPress theme properly. Free WordPress themes that comes with the first installation is not usable and in any reason l don’t recommend them if you want your internet business blog to look professional. Twenty eleven is a very good theme, but it’s not for your internet business blog.

How to find the proper WordPress theme?

WordPress themes are playing a huge role in your feel and like of your site. When we have to choose a WordPress theme, we should always buy one premium theme. Unless we are in a tight budget and we want to test first the roadmap we are going to follow and invest money later, we have a range of good free WordPress to choose. In a previous article l covered the topic of the 10 best wordpress free themes. To save you time, if you are in a tight budget and you don’t have the money or the mood to pay for a premium WordPress theme, l suggest you to definitely start with flexibility theme.

Flexibility 3 for WordPress

Flexibility 3 allows you to take complete creative freedom with your WordPress theme. Customize widths, fonts, colors, images and more from an easy-to-use options panel. Suitable for google Adsense and it can almost beat every premium theme because of its high flexibility. Its name tells us all!

Another two themes l also suggest are designora and wise business.

Designora WordPress Theme

A very well designed theme for WordPress with lots of widgets, very customizable menus, images and easy to use control panel.

Wise Business WordPress Theme

This is an excellent free theme by Site5. It has a fully configurable theme options panel and is one of the best free themes we’ve seen. Installation and configuration instructions can be found on the company’s website, while its very easy to customize and to install it even if you are not an advanced user.

Solostream Themes

The theme l suggest to all of you and l consider it to be the best of all l have tested untill now, is the solostream themes. Solostream themes are the most comprehensive, most professional WordPress themes l have seen and it is the perfect solution for your internet business blog. It have many options and custom design abilities. They are fully functional and has more than every other theme such as advertising widgets, video widgets etc. This means that you will need less time to install new plugins on the theme, and it will save you a lot of designing time and money.

Resources:

Premium WordPress Themes

Solostream

WordPress Plugins.

After that we need to pick our WordPress plugins. There are free and they are premium WordPress plugins. The top ten free plugins that should a user has are the following:

Security

We will start with security in mind, as many hackers are attacking websites or spider software is spamming your site.

1. Akismet. Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam.

2. Antivirus. Security solution as a smart, effectively plugin to protect your blog against exploits and spam injections.

3. BackUpWordPress. Simple automated backups of your WordPress powered website. Do not forget to download the back up files on your desktop, or to send them by email automatically.

4. WP-DBManager. Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop or empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up, optimizing and repairing of database. Definitely a must for every webmaster!

5.WP Security Scan. Perform security scan of WordPress installation. At this point some people come to me and ask: Why l need to security programs? One isn’t enough? l don’t know, why do we have two eyes? Notice that this plugin does not influence the other antivirus plugin performance.

6. Simple Login Lockdown. A simple way to prevent brute force login attempts on your WordPress installation.

Various plugins

7. WP Super Cache. Dramatically improves the performance and speed of your site!

8. All in One Webmaster. Sitemap Submission option to Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com. Options to add Google, Bing, Yahoo, Alexa, Facebook Insights, Facebook, Blogcatalog Webmaster Meta Tag. Options to add Google, Quantcast.com, GetClicky.com, Compete.com Analytics scripts for your blogs.

9. Jetpack by WordPress.com. Bring the power of the WordPress.com cloud to your self-hosted WordPress. Jetpack enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users. This one of the best plugins l ever used and you can have it free. It is all in one plugin that includes many other smaller ones. Very well designed user interface with simple tabs and a lot of helpful widget. Absolutely useful for your WordPress blog.

10. Shareaholic. Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites. it works for every single page or post you want and integrates with more than 30 social networking sites.

These are a simple top ten but l have to admit that there are many other plugins that are very helpful, depending what you do in your site. All the above was free. l have also to mention and give credits in some more.

Last but not least

11. WassUp Real Time Analytics. Analyze your visitors traffic with real-time stats, charts, and a lot of chronological information. Includes a sidebar widget of current online visitors and other statistics and an admin dashboard widget with chart. Caution: don’t upgrade when your site is busy! l also use this plugin in accordance with Google Analytics.

12. Google Analytics. A plugin that enables google analytics on all pages and saves you time and programming effort. It is fully integrated with google analytics. The most serious and complete analytical tool you should have.

13. WordTube. This plugin manages the JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER 5.0 and makes it easy for you to put music, videos or flash movies onto your WordPress posts and pages. Various skins for the JW PLAYER are available via www.jeroenwijering.com. if you have a paid hosted service, then you need to host your own videos. YouTube is not always a good choice for two reasons. They usually display interuptive commercials and you are not always sure whether one day they will ban your channel. Tryst me, many friends of mine are banned and work of a whole year lost in web space! Do not leave your videos unsafe!

14. WPtouch. A plugin which formats your site with a mobile theme for visitors on Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android, Blackberry Storm and Torch, Palm Pre and other touch-based smartphones.

15. All in one Favicon. All in one Favicon management. Easily add a Favicon to your site and the WordPress admin pages. Complete with upload functionality. Supports all three Favicon types (ico,png,gif) It personalise your blog or website and helps you build your personal brand.

I used all the above free WordPress plugins. Sure there are thousands of new one plugins that are better than the above and in the future l will test more and find the best for you. All them are tested and worked for me well in the beta twin site l have for this reason www.paramarketing.org.

The beta tester site.

l always have a beta tester blog for every new thing l want to adopt on my blog. This is a very important tip l give, maybe one of the most critical. Always have a beta tester blog. l do have www.paramarketing.org internet business blog, that is almost the same with this one, in order to test new plugin, test new themes etc. When you are new, you are based on guesswork and on test work. Never try on the fly new things that will make your internet business blog go down or even go to a irreversible mode! Be very careful!

Where to find good content

That is a million dollar question. It is like asking for rain in the desert? No absolutely not! But where else? In the search engines! Quality content is everywhere. Make your own research on the web, on the blogosphere and find topics that are good and relevant with you or your target audience, your market niche. For every hour writing you need to spend at least three or more making your due diligence. What a headache this word causes me! Just look upon to other blog authors that are best-selling! Like David Bach, Antony Robbins, Warren Buffet, Paolo Cohelo!, Look what they offer, what they say, why they are famous and best-selling authors?

And a final piece of advice. Keep it simple. Blogging is not a rocket science, as good content. It is better to be yourself and write about a topic that you know it well and many other people would ask you about it, rather to try to copy something you don’ t even know. A good start is to use yahoo answers. Asking and answering questions for every topic you can imagine. Find your place there!

Good Quality Content Example

A good quality content example is to write pillar articles. We have three types of content in our site apart from pages:

1. Daily posts. If we want to raise our internet business blog audience, we have to blog daily. This will raise our traffic and the visitors will stay longer in our blog.Daily posts have to be approximately 500-700 articles and always we have to include a photo or a video if we can. A post is always prerequisite, even if we have to post our own photo from the about me profile.

2. Pillar Articles. These are the basic article post that you have to support your blog in his first step. Pillar articles will be built during the first 90 to a 100 days of your internet business blog. Don’t wait to be an expert in something to write about it. Start immediately posting on the day one, and do it consistently. Pillar articles should be from 500 to 2500 words and should be about the basic niche topic we have chosen for our internet business blog.

3. Epic Articles are more lengthy in comparison with the daily posts. It should be from 1.500 to 2.500 words and you should have at least one epic article for every 5 posts. That means that for the first 100 day you need to post daily, you need at least 80 post and 20 epic articles. Epic articles should absolutely cover the basic niche keywords you have for your internet business blog. If you have 14 keywords, you need 14 epic articles. One for every keywords, The same rule is valid for the post articles. If we have 10 keywords and 80 post articles, we should have 8 articles per keyword if we want to have a balance strategy. If not, we should use more articles for the targeted keyword we want to expose more.

Tip: Try to start blogging daily, even though you don’t have a specific topic. We will deal with this in more extend in the phase 5 of the internet business blog optimization.

How to avoid duplicate content in your internet business blog

Does google penalizes us for the duplicate content? The answer is no, but our market competition raises higher. This means that if we have a keyword to compete for like healthy coffee and we duplicate articles from other authors, then we use the same keywords that the author used, sometimes misleading and we raise the competition in our niche. Google looks in every internet business blog page and when it spots a phrase that is dense, consider this phrase as a keyword and displays it to the relevant search results. It is very wise to produce your own unique content and if you would like to share an article, do it in your own internet business blogs. As an example, l have three internet business blogs l write posts to, empower network viral blogging system, my main internet business blog divramis.com and the beta internet business blog paramarketing.org. Even writing almost daily in the three of them, the content it is not the same. To share it in other catalogs or forums, or ezines, you should spin it or change you internet business blog content at least 40 %. The best spin score is 60% or more.