It’s been a couple months since I started my Blog. I thought it would be a good idea to give a little recap of what I’ve been doing to improve the appearance and effectiveness of my Blog.
The Initial Setup of My Blog
It’s amazing how many steps are involved when first setting up your Blog. I am fortunate that I am taking a training course, Partnership to Success, that has been guiding me, step by step, through the whole process. It would be pretty difficult to try to figure this all out on my own. I am also fortunate that through the training, I was encouraged to use the OptimizePress SmartTheme in the training, which is the WordPress Theme I’m using for my Blog. The training specifically trains you how to build your Blog with that theme.
Another training program that teaches you how to build websites is Wealthy Affiliate. They offer a tremendous training program as well. They focus highly on SEO optimization, which everyone should learn at some point, as well as all aspects of being an online entrepreneur.
Laying the Foundation and Appearance
This is where the Partnership to Success training began. We learned how to upload the OptimizePress SmartTheme and plugin onto our website. We were encouraged to gets some professional graphics created for the website heading. You can see mine at the top of the page.
Other tasks included setting my Gravitar image, creating an “About Me” page, adding menus, installing the header image and the list goes on. While it could be difficult to do that on your own, the training walks you right through every step, making it a very simple process.
Blogging & Email Lists
One of the benefits of creating a Blog is that it allows you to engage with people who are interested in following your efforts and advice. One of the most common ways of doing that is by setting up an optin form on your Blog or website, so that people can subscribe to your list and get updates about your Blog or to get your newsletter or whatever you’re offering.
The training taught me how to set all of that up and to connect it to my autoresponder, which allows me to send regular communications to my subscribers. You can see my optin form in the upper right sidebar on my Blog.
Partnership to Success also provided an in depth training on email marketing and the best practices. It was an invaluable training webinar that was extremely helpful.
Blogging Techniques
From there we moved on to some house keeping for my Blog. I learned how to activate the spam protection for my Blog, how to add legal pages, global styling settings, fonts and how to make all of my links the same color automatically.
I learned how to add images and videos to my Blog posts. We also set up a networking widget to connect the Blogs from other members of Partnership to Success and mine to theirs.
Of course, the training walks you through how to create Blog posts. They give you ideas of what to write about and where to find inspirational ideas for Blog posts.
Social Media
Then we learned how to add social media icons to our Blog posts and where to place them. This allows visitors to your Blog to share your Blog posts to their social media pages. Sometimes, that leads to other people sharing your content, giving you more exposure and possibly sales.
Then, we created social media accounts and linked them to my Blog. People can click on those icons and go directly to my social media accounts and leave me a message or comment on my posts.
Final Thoughts
I am amazed how far my Blog has come in such a short amount of time. Now, I have had times when I haven’t been working on my Blog. But, that’s mostly my fault by getting distracted by all the “shiny objects” that we are constantly subjected to. I intend on limiting those distractions as much as I can while I work through my Partnership to Success training.
This brings you up to date with where I am so far in my training. There is so much more to go (it’s a one year, weekly, training program), but I feel I have made great progress so far. My mentor, John Thornhill, who teaches the training, did a recap of what he says we have accomplished, so far. You can see it below:
- I Now Have an Authority Site Online
- I am Now an Accomplished Blogger
- I am Building a List
- I Now Have a Real Online Presence
- I Can Now Be Found Online if Anyone Searches For Me
- The Future Already Looks Bright!
Those were his words. I hadn’t really thought about it up until he mentioned it. But, he’s right. I have started something that I can be proud of and it will only get better. That is when I made a decision to rededicate myself to this training and to keep the distractions to a minimum.
You can start this journey as well if you think it is something that you would like to do. You can click this link and get started on your own online journey: Partnership to Success
Until next time,
Greg Hoyt
