Welcome to the first day 1 of 31-Days to Kick Your Blog in the Butt. As will happen on each day of this series, I want to give you two things to take away:
- Some teaching points
- A task or two to take and do something with
Teaching Moment
Today’s task/homework/assignment is for you to step back for a moment and take a look at your blog. Let me explain why this is important and why I have it for our first post in the series.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should when it comes to your blog’s design
Blogging is wonderful. It is easy to start a blog. And it is easy to add features to your blog. In fact, with WordPress there are literally 1,000′s of plugins and add-ons out there you could put on your blog. Thousands of bells and whistles you could add to your blog to give it all those wonderful functions. Thousands of things you could add to make it look, oh so wonderful. There lies the problem and why this is the first post in this series.
While I will admit I love WordPress and as far as I am concerned it is the premier blogging platform. It also has one drawback and that is all those darn plugins, bells and whistles you can add to it to make it look and do the things you think it should do.
However, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Stop for a moment and really take a look at how many plugins or add-ons you have or are thinking about putting on your blog. Do you really need them? Most likely you don’t. In fact you really only need maybe a hand full of plugins to make your blog do just exactly what you need it to do.
One of the problems with overloading your blog with all of these plugins is the fact you might actually be harming your ability to get and keep traffic on your blog. Putting all these plugins or add-ons on your blog may actually be slowing it down in the browsers people are using to visit your blog. Remember, your goal is to have your traffic become visitors, your visitors become readers and your readers to become your community. If they can’t get past the loading of their browser, they will never see just how wonderful your content or offerings truly are.
Don’t let your ego get in your way
Usually it is our egos which causes us to put all those things on our blogs we think we need. Or it is our inner child who thinks we need all the best toys and treats we can get. Either way, don’t let those things get in your way of having the best possible blog you can have.
What Plugins Do I Recommend?
Here is my list of must have WordPress plugins you should be running on your blog.
- Akismet – to handle spam. I use it on all our blogs and our client blogs. It just works.
- All-in-One SEO Pack – Also something we use on our blogs. However, now that we use our own Headway Themes to build our own blogs on and all of our clients’ blogs, we have this feature built in.
- Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin takes the technical process out of creating an XML Sitemap
- Gravity Forms – If not this one, make sure you have a form builder plugin on your blog. It just makes the job of building forms so much easier.
- Related Post – It is very important to do some cross linking to your own internal post. This plugin will do that. And what is also important, give your readers a reason to stay on your site longer. And if you give them “related post” to look at, they will stay longer.
- Subscribe to Comments – Remember blogging is a great way to have a conversation with your intended audience. And giving your readers a way to subscribe to the comments is a great way to encourage the conversation.
- What Would Seth Godin Do – this is a plugin you can use to welcome visitors and even give them reminders to subscribe to newsletters or your blog’s RSS. It is one of those plugins which helps build your community too.
The list is not long. In fact it only includes seven plugins I would not be without.
Homework for Today
Spend some time in your blog’s Dashboard under the Plugin section. What plugins are you using? How many are you using? And, which ones could you really live without? Cull out those you don’t need or don’t get a benefit from. Get rid of the add-ons and plugins that only stroke your ego and do nothing to build your community or enhance your readers’ experience on your blog.
Tomorrow, we are going to spend some time talking about F.L.E.E.
