Website In A Weekend: Sunday – Dominating the Homestretch

(Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes)

It’s Sunday morning.

It’s been a long weekend already, and there’s still a full day ahead.

I’m assuming you’ve had that big breakfast… if not yesterday, then this morning for sure.

Today should be a little easier. We’re going to learn about blog post promotion in the morning, then close out the class with how to operate your brand new WordPress blog in the afternoon.

Promote Your Blog

Promoting your blog is fun, sometimes, too much fun. We’re all in love with our own words!

Unfortunately, not everyone shares our eminently good taste.

Because we’re mannerly, we’re going to promote, but not over-promote. The notion is putting out work in front of people, and letting them be enticed with our compelling headlines and intriguing copy.

9 am

Add Twitter Widget. One of the easiest ways to promote your blog is to post a link to each article on Twitter right after you publish. Twitter can give you fantastic exposure. Even better, you can use a WordPress plugin to make it automatic.

If you don’t have a twitter account, sign up for one now. Go ahead and follow @websiteweekend, I’ll follow you back. When you write great articles, I’ll retweet them into my twitter stream. That’s called “leverage,” and it’s cool.

10 am

Strategy for Attracting Comments. Many people who want to learn to blog want to build a community of like-minded individuals. But writing killer content isn’t enough. You have to enable your blog to allow people to interact. Encouraging comments on your blog is an excellent strategy.

Fortunately, it’s easy. There are dozens of plugins available for WordPress that make it very easy for people to interact, while keeping spam very low. In this lesson you will learn not only the plugins, but how to use them effectively, and how to measure your commenting rate (important, you want to be able to measure your impact).

11 am

Top 3 Social Media Bookmarking Services – Don’t leave home without them. Social bookmarking provides more fantastic leverage: very liittle effort provides you with very wide coverage. Spend this hour registering and setting up your accounts. You can find me – and friend me – on Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon (dmdoolin). I’ll friend you back, and we’ll help each other out.

12 pm

Lunch.

Once again, make it a light lunch. Just enough to get through the afternoon. Take your time and enjoy yourself. Go outside for a mini-picnic if you can; anything to get away from your computer. You’ll be plugged in all afternoon, that’s plenty of computer for anyone.

You’ll be finished at 6 this evening, that’s when to cut loose with the pizza and beer!

Operating Your Blog

Now that you have finished with installing, configuring, writing and promoting, it’s time to learn a little bit about keeping your brand new WordPress website operational. This afternoon, you’ll learn many important tips and techniques.

Note: these are some of the most important lessons of the entire course. Don’t skimp on learning.

1 pm

Operating Your WordPress Website. Once you have everything installed and running… the fun has just begun!

Old hands know that installing software and creating a website is just the first step in an ongoing process. We’re going discuss to the most important chores you need to keep up with, including backing up your site, backing up your file system, and upgrading both WordPress and plugins.

2 pm

Site Backups are Different than Database Backups. It’s easy to find a plugin for backing up your WordPress database; there’s a half a dozen.

But you need to back up your files and images, and possibly themes and plugins as well.

It would be awful to have every one of your articles restored from your database backups, but all great images be completely gone. Read the article for details, and I’ll providing more information on a new plugin that will help you automate your file system backups.

3 pm

Maintain Your New Blog with 9 Point Checklist. You’re basically done. You have everything you need to operate a basic WordPress blog.

But installing and operating aren’t quite the same.

It turns out the WordPress is not that different from your car; all require periodic maintenance. Fortunately, maintaining WordPress is very easy. It just takes a few minutes per day. Go through the checklist right now for a practice run. You will get used to it very quickly, and be able to keep WordPress well-maintained with hardly any thought.

4 pm

How to handle important and ongoing technical chores. When you’re just starting out, you’re going to have to climb the learning curve very quickly. You have 3 basic options: 1. if you have the budget, you can outsource everything; 2. you can learn to do most everything yourself; or 3. some combination of outsourcing and do-it-yourself. Find out which works best for you.

5 pm

You now have a website in a weekend. You built a WordPress blog, installed important plugins to increase security and become indexed in major search engines such as Google, learned critical skills for operating your blog such as how to make backsups.

You have your first articles written, and you promoted them on social media sites. You have commented on other people’s blogs, and quite likely received comments in return.

Email a link, I’ll add it to the Website In A Weekend alumni page!

Into the winner’s circle!

That’s a wrap.

Congratulate yourself, because you really did an enormous amount of work this weekend.

And it’s not just that you installed a blog. That’s not the important part.

What’s far more important is taking action to turn your dreams into reality!