(Reading time: 9 – 14 minutes)
We worked late last night: Website In A Weekend: Friday Evening – Off to the Races.
Before you get started on your second day building a website in a weekend, eat a great, big breakfast.
Here in California, that means going the full monty: a mound of bacon, scrambled eggs, hash browns, grits, a waffle, toast and jelly, and a couple of quarts of steaming hot coffee. With heavy cream (no Half & Half for me).
For you Norwegians, tank up on the pickled herring, smoked salmon and brown cheese; Swedes, an extra smörgåsar and glass of milk, or two (Thanks, Lars).
Brits: make it a fry up, and don’t skimp on the pudding. Over there in Ireland, extra rashers and eggs.
For everyone else, it’s going to be a very long day, you will burn every calorie, no problem, so whatever it is you eat for breakfast, eat plenty of it!
Here’s how the day breaks down: Basic Infrastructure and Security (morning), Developing Content (afternoon) and Creating Search Engine Presence (evening).
Basic Infrastructure and Security
For too many people, security is an afterthought. Yes, security is tedious and boring, and that’s exactly what malicious hackers and crackers are counting on. If you can’t be bothered… you will pay the consequences.
You can’t get away from security issues 100%, but you can reduce the amount of time you spend cleaning up from being hacked by spending a little time now.
Along with security, there’s a few more odds and ends you need to build out your “blogging infrastructure.”
Let’s knock it out.
- 9 am
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Add Copyright Notice, Terms and Disclaimer: It’s a good idea when you’re running a business to have standard documents explaining various policies to your customers. For example, when you ask for email addresses, people want to be sure you’re not selling their email addresses to spammers. If you sell or promote products, you will need to have a disclosure explaining your policy. Some of these documents may be required by law. We’ll provide you with some initial documents that you can take to your attorney for final approval.
- 10 am
Install 4 Critical Plugins: WordPress is amazing right “out of the box,” but there’s still a few important holes you need to fill… like getting indexed in Google’s search engine.
You also want to have your backup plan running on autopilot, and there’s a plugin just for that. Rounding out, the Akismet plugin will help you get that spam under control.
- 11 am
Secure Admin Account: Now that you have your site up and running, it’s time to start locking down your security. Your first task is to replace your admin user account with an administrator using a different username. This provides a surprising amount of protection from simple, brute force hacking attacks.
The procedure is simple, a dozen steps, you’ll crank it out in less than an hour for sure… if you’re behind, you’ve now caught. Or you’re ahead of the power curve, excellent work.
- 12 pm
More Simple Security. Rain contempt on spammers and scammers with these 5 plugins taking your WordPress security to the next level. You will learn how to prevent hackers from reading files from your WordPress system, how to reduce “crackability” by examining the strength of your password, find out whether strangers are accessing your blog’s system files, how to prevent malicious robots from registering as users for your blog, a bullet-proof way to eliminate automated spam from your comments (limiting your link juice bleed), and an easy, time-saving way to keep your eyes who’s hitting your blog… and why (you can actually see spam attempts stopped in their tracks).
- 1 pm
Lunch.It’s been a big morning.
I recommend you take the time to enjoy a full hour for lunch. Don’t even think about websites, WordPress or blogging. You’re going to get your fill for the rest of the day: we’re hammering away until 10 pm again this evening.
But don’t eat too heavy! Keep it light, you don’t want to get groggy in the middle of the afternoon.
Creating Blog Content
You’ve been champing at the bit. You just want to write, but there’s been all this technical junk in the way. Well, most of the technical junk is out of the way now, and it’s time to get started writing.
- 2 pm
Add Favicon for instant brand recognition. Among 6 billion people and millions of websites, you can have a tiny little image that gives you instant brand recognition. It’s called a favicon, and it’s easy to add to WordPress.
The benefits are many: visual reinforcement of your brand everywhere on the internet, and in browsers, bookmarks and other stored web links.
Note: favicons are brutally effective when derived from your existing logo, and the better the logo, the more effective the favicon. If you don’t have an excellent logo, work with what you have.
- 3 pm
Write Pillar Content: How To Rapidly Create Pillar Content For Your Blog. Now that you have WordPress securely installed, it’s time to pack your blog full of content – pillar content – which will support your blog over it’s entire life span. Your first task is to write out 100 titles as fast as you can. Don’t even think, just write.
Write write write.
Once you have your titles, we’re going sort everything out into your categories. Then you will be ready to produce tightly focused, highly relevant articles your audience wants to read.
- 4 pm
Write Pillar Content (cont.): Writing is a big task, so we’re taking two hours for it. In truth, you will spend many more hours on pillar content in the future, including time spent revising these articles you’re writing here.
But you have to get started, and now is the time and the place. It’s more important to get the writing done. We’ll worry about cleaning it up a bit later.
- 5 pm
Choose Your Writing Style. Ok, you just spent a couple of hours grinding out blog posts for your pillar content. Now let’s classify what you wrote according to one of 5 types of common blog posts. After you see what class of beast you have, you can clean it up and publish.
There’s many ways to classify blog posts, but these 5 will serve you very well for getting started: list, journalist, rant, snackable, and shaggy dog story. For each article you have written, match against one of the 5 types, and polish off the rough edges. Don’t hit the “Publish” button yet, we have a little more work to do.
- 6 pm
- Dinner!
You had a huge breakfast (right?), a decent lunch, but you’re hungry again.
Stands to reason, it’s dinner time!
Once again, take your time and enjoy your meal. Forget about blogging for a bit.
And as lunch was light, make dinner just a little bit lighter because we still have many hours ahead of us this evening. You will definitely sleep well tonight.
Creating Search Engine Presence
- 7 pm
Create Effective SEO Post Slug and Permalinks. Your pillar content is written. Before pressing the “Publish” button, let’s make sure you have a search engine friendly URL to create your permalink. The permalink is a permanent URL which – hopefully – you never have to change. You want to
get this right the first time.It’s not difficult, you will learn what a permalink is, why permalinks matter, and how to quickly create a post slug for your permalink.
- 8 pm
Build Your Own Web with Effective Linking. Once you press “Publish” and Google learns about your blog, you have a presence on the web. It’s really cool when think about it!
What’s even cooler is creating your own space in the web community; doing that requires linking within and without your blog.
Linking is easy, and you will learn how to link to other websites, how to link to your own blog posts, and how to anticipate future links to create a compelling story line within your blog.
- 9 pm
- Smart SEO -More Bang, Less Buck. Search Engine Optimization is both really easy and super hard. Fortunately, the super easy part gives you 50% (at least) of what you need for ranking well in search engines.
In this lesson, we’ll get fill in some simple SEO details using the most popular WordPress plugin of all: All In One SEO pack. If your theme handles SEO data, the procedure will be very similar.
- 10 pm
- Measuring Blog Traffic with Google Analytics. Once you get going, you’re going to want to know who is coming to visit your blog, where they are coming from, and what they find interesting. Google Analytics will help you do all of that.
All you need is your gmail account and your blog address. The service is free; it’s in Google’s interest to help people build traffic… because it helps them sell more ads.
Along with your basic Analytics set up, you’re going to set up a goal; get hard numbers on your website’s performance!
Next up: Website In A Weekend: Sunday – Dominating the Homestretch.
