Tag Archives: blogging for beginners

IT Pie is tweeting on twitter

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Well I’ve been thinking about tweeting for some time and to be honest I’m still not entirely sure of its value to our business (though I do recognise that it can be almost invaluable to certain industries) and I will blog on this later, but for now I want to anounce our arrival on Twitter and let you in on a little secret – I have a plugin which should update my Twitter account (This is a test) meaning that as I blog I Twitter, hitting two social media tools in one go and generating links back and forth between blog and Twitter.

I’ll post soon on my experience of setting up Twitter and the plugin used for my blog. But got to do some more testing first.

Oh yeah follow us here http://twitter.com/itpie

Links – Generating Backlinks

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Generating Links in the Blogging World

Generating Links in the Blogging World

I’ve spoken about linking in previous posts, it’s in my top 5 SEO tips and I’ve spoken about the annoyance of spam, but the Internet is made up of links and it is essential. We all now that generating links to our website or blog will have a huge influence on traffic and search engine results and usually with my Web developer hat on I would recommend contacting customers and suppliers and anyone else you know with a business to see if you can get a link, though it is important that the website linking to yours is relevant (hence customers and suppliers) or you can look for businesses working in the same industry which can link to you, my ideal example is the wedding industry, it’s made up of so many different parts which don’t necessarily compete with each other. So assuming you’ve exhausted this route and have all the links your going to generate you turn to your blog and it can be a powerful tool.

One of the excellent things about a blog is the way in which it is structured means that it creates loads of internal links when you post, and it helps to create pages quickly almost everything you create on your blog, be it a post or category, or using the archive or calendar feature, they all help create unique pages so if you had enough material to blog daily you could create 365 posts, if these went into 30 categories was part of your monthly archive and you had a tag cloud active on your site well I’m sure it would generate nearly 500 pages! All of which will have an effect on your search engine rankings.

Having hundreds of internal links is great but how do you use the blog to generate incoming links? Well you need to get into the world of blogging, research bloggers in your industry or field, or even just blogs your interested in, take the time to read them and then comment on them, but only if you have something to say, I’m sure they will be interested in who commented on their blog and visit your blog, but by leaving a comment you have left a link back to your site. Hopefully by writing good relevant comments you will generate interest in your blog and bring readers in, but better still if they read your blog and like it they will recommend your blog to others and then the world of word of mouth marketing takes over.  Think about it, if you could comment on a blog a week, that’s 52 blogs a year, now imagine they have a strong readership of say 100 each that’s 5200 people who will see your comment, not say only 10% of those people take an interest in your blog it’s 520 visitors, now what if half of those visitors went away and recommended your blog via their blog – that 260 in bound links plus your original 52 which is 312 links, not I know this is a lot of what ifs – but by being a proactive member of the blog community you can reap the benefits and contribute some value to it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read some of my favourite blogs and hopefully be able to make some comments on them

Starting my blog

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So I’ve decided to blog (as mentioned in other parts of my blog coincidentally) and this is all about the beginnig and setting up my WordPress blog.

So why did I choose wordpress?  Basically, little research was done on my part, I know another blogger (Business Blog Angel) whom I consider an expert in this field and even though she uses Typepad (one of the other leading Blog tools) she recommended that wordpress was really on the way up and possibly better than typepad (I hope that’s right Claire, if not apologies). But a quick visit to the Typepad website and it turns out you have to pay for the Typepad  blog (starting at $5 a month – not much admittedly $60 a year or £45 a year going on the current exchange rate – but that is the basic package) and as I own a web development company I am able to host my blog using the WordPress software for free – so two reasons to use WordPress, I think going on what my hosting company charges for php hosting the basic Typepad package is comparable to hosting WordPress so no real advantage.

But if your reading this blog and thinking about starting your own blog visit my site (IT Pie) and let us know you read this blog and we’ll be able to sort one out for you for £20 a year including domain registration – pretty good indeed! (by the way you may need to remind us of this post but we’ll honour it)

So little research was done, but a choice was made between the two leading blog packages (that I know of) and ultimately I went with a recommendation and a price influenced decision.

Setting the package up
Now WordPress boasts of its 5 minute installation and I’m sure having read the instructions that it is easy and takes 5 minutes, but my hosting company installed it for me (because I have a windows hosting package) and I think on their Linux hosting package there is a button to click and it installs so pretty straight forward. So setting up the package was very easy!

Design
Now for my own blog I was happy to use one of the many templates available on the WordPress site and chose the ‘Desk Mess’ theme, partly because it seemed apt as I am a messy person but secondly because it has the Apple iPhone on the desk and I am currently obsessed with getting an iPhone.  I have also set-up a blog for one of my clients and had hoped to style it myself to match his website, unfortunately when I looked into all the files and the work required, I recognised that though it is certainly possible to do it, a lot of work was involved and with so many templates to choose from it felt like re-inventing the wheel.  One day I think I will seriously look at developing my own design, but for now, I’d recommend choosing one of the 1000s of templates available on the site.

Basic Feature
WordPress comes with some basic features and then there are the many plug-ins available, I’m planning on getting to grip with the basic features (which I will blog about later) and then going wild with all the plugins available and blogging about them.

But all in all, first impressions and as a web developer, I am impressed with WordPress and I’m sure my appreciation will only grow.