So, you finally have your own blog. Now what? You’ve been anxiously awaiting the moment, and now that you have the ability to share your thoughts with the entire world, you can’t think of anything to say. Maybe you feel intimidated by the whole concept of a world-wide publishing system at your fingertips. Maybe the user interface of your blogging software or CMS (Content Management System) is confusing and difficult to use. Maybe you’re second guessing your own ideas.

Whatever the reason, it must be overcome. Whether your blog is for your business or just an outlet for your personal ideas, to be successful, you must produce interesting content. Here are some guidelines and tips to help get your blog up and running.

1. Familiarize yourself with WordPress.

One of the main reasons why you wanted a blog was so that you could make updates yourself. To do this, you must be familiar with and able to use your blogging software or Content Management System. If possible, have somebody show you how to log in and make posts, etc. First hand experience is always best. If nobody is available to assist you, you can find lots of useful information online. If that’s not working for you, you can hire someone to teach you how to use WordPress.

(Did I mention that I’m available for WP instruction and consultation?)

2. Write your post before logging in.

Don’t try to write your post from the Add New Post page in the WordPress Admin panel. Even if you’ve become familiar with WordPress, you’ll be more productive if you write your ideas down on paper or in a word processor first. This is a more comfortable writing environment for the majority of people. It will allow you to focus on the content of your blog post instead of being distracted by other elements of the WordPress interface. Most of us have too many distractions already. So, why add more?

3. Don’t copy or scrape content.

Create your own content and be original. It’s not only unethical and possibly illegal to copy or scrape content from other blogs, it can actually be detrimental to your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). When the same content is found on multiple pages by a search engine, it could result in a lower search ranking for both of them. Also, if the site you copied from is more popular than yours (which is likely if you’re using their content), your site will be pushed down in the search rankings. If you find it absolutely necessary to inform your audience of some other content, write up a brief summary and why you think it’s important to your readers. Don’t forget to include a link to the original article and give credit to the original author.

If you can’t think of any ideas or topics for your own posts, stay tuned for How to Blog (Part 2) coming soon.

4. Don’t worry about perfection.

Of course you want your blog post to be perfect, but don’t let that stop you from generating content. Remember, you can always edit your posts after they are published. That being said, please spell-check, proof-read, and double check everything before posting. In most many cases, the bulk of the traffic that a page generates comes shortly after it is posted.

So please, take the time to nurture your blog. Consider your audience, create quality content consistently and you will see an increase in traffic. As usual, your comments and questions are always welcome.

There are many reasons to have dynamic content on your website, but the two most important are to increase traffic and to increase sales. Dynamic content will drive traffic to your site by helping give you a better ranking in search engine results. It can drive sales (assuming you’re selling something) or conversions by giving your visitors a better user experience.

What is dynamic content?

Back in the day, a hypertext document on the world wide web was a static file that looked the same to everybody who viewed it. If the page was lucky, it would be updated periodically, but for the most part, it just remained the same and collected virtual dust. If you’ve ever stumbled across a website that looks like it hasn’t been updated in 10–15 years, it probably hasn’t.

In contrast, a dynamic document on the world wide web can be customized for each user based on individual conditions or parameters. So it could show different content depending on the time of day, a user’s profile, operating system, browser or just about anything else.

Sometimes referred to as “conditional content”, it allows a more unique experience for the user with personalized messages and such. With dynamic content, the content is separated from the design and stored in a database. The content seen by the user is generated at the time of request at the server level using CGI, ASP, PHP, or a content management system.

How does it drive traffic?

Search engines, or more accurately, their search bots (also known as spiders) crawl the web and index the sites they find. They prefer dynamic content over static content because they figure something that changes often is more relevant than something that doesn’t. Therefore a dynamic page is more likely to ranked higher on a search engine’s results page and that means more traffic to the site.

How does it drive sales?

Even more important than its SEO benefits is the fact that human visitors like to see something different each time they visit a site. It keeps them interested. If it looks the same every time they visit, they are much less likely to return again. We humans also tend to enjoy an experience more if it’s personalized. For example, when a user logs in, they might see a custom welcome message that includes their name. No matter how it’s done, if a user has an enjoyable experience while using your site, they are much more likely to return again. They are also more likely to tell all their friends how great your site is, buy your widgets, visit your physical location or sign up for your service.

Using a CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc., allows you to control your dynamic content very easily, hence the massive number of “blog” type sites that have popped up over the last several years. The key to this is quality not quantity. You must give your audience something that is interesting or important to them.

So, keep it fresh, keep it flexible, keep it dynamic.

I was pleased to notice that the Google PageRank for my site (middleearmedia.com) recently jumped up from 3 to 4. According to Google, PageRank reflects their view of how important a web page is. Or, in other words, it’s the relative value of any single page on the internet in relation to every page on the internet. To determine this, they consider more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Understandably, they keep their exact algorithm a secret.

As you might have guessed, the higher the PageRank, the more likely a page will appear at the top of the search results. Well, sort of. The problem is that Google shows us one score (Toolbar PageRank) that gets updated periodically (3 or 4 times per year) and uses a different score (actual PageRank) that is constantly being updated. So, we really don’t know the exact relationship between the visible Toolbar PageRank and the actual PageRank or how much either of them help or hurt our listing in Google search results.

Hold on though! Now Google is telling us that we shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much. In fact, they removed PageRank data from their Webmaster Tools recently. Apparently, there are other metrics that are far more important for website owners to track in terms of SEO. Some of these include traffic, relevancy and backlinks. Yes it’s true that the publicly visible PageRank (via the Google Toolbar) is updated infrequently, and therefore is inherently inaccurate, but people still use it as a benchmark.

One problem I see with Google telling us to ignore PageRank is that much of the online Advertising and Link Exchange that goes on is based on using Toolbar PageRank to determine value. So, why even give us a PageRank to look at if we’re supposed to ignore it, especially if it’s almost always out of date?

There are many aspects to a professional website. There is the overall design and layout, typography, graphics, images and hyperlinks that are obvious. However, there are a many other things that can be done to add an extra touch of professionalism to a site that may not be so obvious at first glance. Here are a few that may not be absolutely critical, but important none the less because they either aid in branding, navigability, usability, or SEO.

1. Favicons


A Favicon, short for favorites icon and also known as a shortcut icon and bookmark icon, is the little logo you see next to the address bar of your browser. They can also be seen in your favorites or bookmarks section. They are great for strengthening your brand and visually separating a bookmarked site from all the others.

It never ceases to amaze me how many “professional sites” lack a favicon. After all, it’s not that hard to create one. Implementation of a favicon is super easy too. All you need to do is add a bit of code (which is a link to your favicon image) to the head area of the page and make sure to upload your favicon.ico to the root directory of your domain.

2. Analytics

Google is amassing a huge amount of awesome and useful services, and one of the greatest is Google Analytics. Conveniently integrated with Gmail, all you need is a Gmail account and access to a domain in order to use analytics. I’ve used many statistics programs in the past to keep track of traffic to various sites, but none have had the depth and ease of use that Google Analytics offers.

To implement, just copy and paste a bit of code into the footer of your page. That’s it! Now, sit back and wait for the traffic. The amount of info about your site and its traffic are staggering. Unique Visits, Unique Visitors, Average Time on Site, Bounce Rate, Unique Page Views, Pages per Visit, % New Visits, Traffic Sources and Viewed Content, are only a few of the many different things you can find out about. These are all displayed in a variety of easy to understand graphs, charts and lists. Also, giving others access is as easy as typing in their Gmail address.

3. XML Sitemap

XML Sitemaps are used by search engines in order to easily navigate your entire site for indexing purposes. They can also be used by humans who want to see all the links on your site or who are looking for something specific.

An XML Sitemap is simply an XML file with a list of URLs for a site that also includes additional metadata about each URL such as when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site. XML Sitemaps can be found (if they exist) by typing “/sitemap.xml” after the domain name in the address bar of your browser or sometimes you can find a link (usually in the footer) to the sitemap from the page itself.

4. Custom HTML email to match the site

This is something that won’t be apparent until you interact with a site. After leaving a comment about a blog post, sending a message with a contact form, or signing up to receive updates via email, etc. a user is sent an email from the site. Now wouldn’t it be nice if all those emails were customized with an HTML template so they would retain the look and feel of the site and strengthen the brand? I think it’s a nice touch.

5. Page not found 404 error page

When you type in the URL of a page that doesn’t exist, by default, the server gives you a “Page not found 404 error” page. Although there are ways to minimize the chances of it happening, there is no way to prevent someone from looking for a page that doesn’t exist on your server.

One way of making sure people don’t get lost, loose interest, or get confused is customizing the 404 page. It could be an interesting graphic, something funny, or anything you want. Included on this page should be prominent links to your home page, portfolio, products, or whatever it is you really want people to see.