Blog Design - Andrea Bolder's Marketing.Mindset.Money Blog

If you are looking to make money online, hopefully by now you have bought your domain name, set up your hosting account and installed WordPress! If not, here?s a quick tutorial on how to start making money with a blog. Today I want to share with you how I made the this blog look so nice, clean and user friendly and how you can customize your blog design too!

Free Vs. Premium Theme For Your Blog

There are thousands upon thousands of WordPress Themes you can use to customize your blog. When you look at this blog you probably thought, GEESH, if only I could create a blog like that! Well to be honest, I?ve been through 3 different blog designs in as many years and to get the current look I have now, I paid $70 for my WordPress Theme. But it?s not just the theme that brings a blog to life and highlights your brand but the dozens of awesome features you can use to personalize it yourself. The biggest benefit to investing in a premium WordPress theme is that you don?t have to fork over thousands of dollars and a ton of time to get the same results as a top-notch professional blog!

So where did I get my WordPress Theme? I use a company called Woothemes!

So whether you decide to invest a little more in a premium theme or go with free theme, uploading it is simple, once you?ve found there perfect design. To get your theme installed follow these quick steps:

1. Login to your WordPress Admin and click Appearance
2. Click Themes and then at the top of the page click ?Install Themes?
3. Click upload and then search for your theme zip file and then click install now
4. Then you are finished! How simple was that.

If you purchase your theme from Woothemes, take some time to play around with the features and settings. Scroll down to the bottom of the sidebar in your WordPress Admin and click the name of your theme. Having a great blog design, one that is clean, professional and easy to navigate is extremely important to how well people receive your content.

WordPress Settings

We?ve all heard the phrase ? ?Beauty is skin deep?. Well the same applies to your blog. What good is it to have a gorgeous looking blog that no one really gets to know. One major thing I see a lot of new blogger?s do is not make their website search engine friendly.

Quite frankly, when you understand WHY things rank the way they do, dominating the search engines is as easy as 1,2,3?it?s the little things that sometimes make all the difference.

Organic,keyword driven content is the easiest source of traffic. The very first thing you should do when optimizing your WordPress blog is to look at your first blog post URL. By default your blog URL will look something like this ypurdomain.com/?p=1 when you really want it to say yourdomain.com/how-to-build-a-killer-blog.

To increase you SEO ranks and your traffic, you want your URLs, blog post titles, taglines and headlines to be what you expect people to be searching for in Google, not just something that sounds cool. While catchy headlines and titles are great you want a combination of targeted keywords inserted in there as well.

So the question is?

How do you make your links search engine friendly?

To make your links search engine friendly follow these simple steps:

1. Go to your WordPress Admin and click Settings
2. Click Permalinks on the left side.
3. Change the settings to Custom Structure and use the code /%postname%/ ? This will now make your blog post link?s SEO friendly.

For more on updating your WordPress settings check out this detailed blog training:

http://andreabolder.com/2012/making-money-blogging-updating-your-wordpress-settings/

Another important place to maximize your search engine traffic is to optimize the title and description for every page and post you publish. There are a number of different tools you can use, but I personally use a FREE plugin called All in One SEO Pack to do this.

Another quick tip is to edit the details in the General settings section of your WordPress blog.

It is really important to choose the right page title, if you look at the this blog you will see that my title is filled with target keywords which tells readers exactly what my site is about: Online Marketing Training, Resources and Mentoring, Make Money Online, etc?

My page title has a list of my most important keyword phrases and you should do the same. If you are creating a weight loss focused blog, this is how you should create your tagline and headline on your website.

Weight Loss Blog| weight loss | lose weight fast | your specialty weight loss blog |
better weight loss methods | shrink bellyfat

This would cause Google to ?find? me faster and my keywords will dominate FAST!

If you are interested in learning more about Search Engine Optimization and keyword research , then check out this video:

http://andreabolder.com/2012/internet-network-marketing-blog-series-video-10-keyword-research/

Building Your List

More Traffic, leads, readers and subscribers, all equal more money for you. There is only one thing more important than driving traffic to your site?Getting traffic to stay on your site. One of the most effective ways to hook readers is trough your RSS Feed. Now remember you must have useful content that people actually want to read to keep them coming back so always lead with solution based value.

So what is a RSS feed?

It is basically a way for regular reader to receive reminders or alerts when you publish a new blog post. I use Feedburner to manage all my blog feed updates. It?s free to sign up and all you need to do is create a code and update your RSS link to the feedburner one. Feedburner also has an email update script that you can use.

1. Log in to Feedburner.com
2. click Publicize and then Email Subscriptions on teh left had sidebar
3. They will generate a code and then you can add it as a widget on your blog.
4. To edit your RSS widget login to your WordPress Admin and click Appearance
5. Go to Widgets, then click on RSS under available widget
6. 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 an email or RSS message alerting them to check your blog out.

Ask any online marketer what their biggest regret was when they first go started. 95% of them will tell you they wish they would have started building their list sooner. Building a list is the most important asset in your business. Creating a list is powerful, creates momentum and it makes you money. Just imagine if you could drive 1000 people a day to your site and get 10% of them to subscribe to your email list or newsletter. This allows you to promote your brand, services and money making products for as long as they are on your list.

An email list s a great way to leverage your marketing efforts by promoting products to multiple people at once. What I do is create an auto responder series which automatically sends my subscribers an email every day that gives them tips, strategy and motivation that encourages them to build successful businesses online with less work. Then every once in a while I will promote a product or two that I think will help them make more money online. Don?t be scared to promote products to your email list from day one, after all you are in business to make money. You are a salesperson and if you want to eat, you need to make sales. If people opt out ? SO WHAT ? you only want people who are willing to spend money on your list anyways. Otherwise they are just taking up space and costing you money.

I have built my lists into the thousands and I always encourage people to ?give away? something of value ? something that helps your readers solve a problem. That is how you get opt-ins. Give people what they want. Think about what problems your target audience is facing. How can you help them. In the online marketing world the #1 solution people are looking for is how to drive more traffic and generate more lead via automated systems. So if you look at my opt in offer you?ll notice I am giving away a free report called Blog Traffic Bootcamp. You have to know your target market.

Your email list is like an ATM and if you focus on providing quality content and products, making money online is as easy as sending an email and watching hundreds, even thousands of dollars in commissions flood your accounts. For those of you who will be using your blog to earn money I recommend you look at getting yourself an auto responder to do this. I personally recommend Aweber which is an awesome service! If this is something that interests you, then set up your Aweber today and I will show you in the following emails how I make thousands of dollars from my mailing list.

To our success,

Andrea Bolder
Gold Medal Olympian & World Class Online Marketing Trainer

If any of this has gone straight over your head, then feel free to ask me a question in the comments sections and I?ll make sure you get your answers!

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Source: http://andreabolder.com/2013/blog-design-how-to-customize-your-blog-in-just-minutes/

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