Measure Twice Cut Once - Day 12 of COWpetition

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The old saying “Measure Twice Cut Once” is an important one to remember, especially at this phase of your blog creation. Having a blog that is now 95% ready to go live is often a time that a we start to get impatient and want to focus on the promotions to start earning money. This is a HUGE mistake because we suddenly put more items on our plate and get distracted from finishing off important items that seem insignificant but are critical to your blogs initial success.

There is certainly a good balance here as well as there are also those that are never satisfied with what they have and therefore get stuck in analysis paralysis and just sit on thier blog never moving forward with it, never feeling like it is ready. Your blog does not need to have perfect graphics and the exact correct colors, there are what we refer to as “Deal Breakers” which are the items that are critical and then there are the other tasks that are not critical but “Nice to Haves”.

The remaining items to finish before we start to go heavy with the promotions are to…

• Optimize the optin message and “Thank You” page
• Checking for errors (broken links)
• Create and submitting the Google site map (why you want to submit and not just ping)
• Turn on ping

Part 1 –> Optimize the Opt-in message and “Thank You” page

How often do you go to a blog and see a message like “Subscribe to our RSS feed”?

Do you really think that is effective?

We can guarantee that the majority of you agree it is not yet the majority of you do that very thing. This is one of the factors of your site that is so important and yet our impatience or even laziness cause us to just skim over it and go on to other things. In the previous COWpetition post we reference creating a call to action that was placed at the end of your posts to entice the reader to take a desired action on your blog. This exact same thing needs to take place with getting readers to opt in to your list.

You need to put yourself in the shoes of the reader and answer the question “what is in it for me”. People do not subscribe to RSS feeds for the sake a seeing the word subscribe, the do not submit an email just to see what happens. Never assume that offering free advice is something people will appreciate but instead give your readers what they want by providing a solution to a problem. Whether your blog is about health, automobiles, racing or make money.. there is a problem your readers have and that is why they are on your blog at that moment. It is your responsibility to understand what it is and provide a solution to them with a high percieved value.

Once you know the problem, you now have to tell them how to solve the problem by opting in to your list or subscribing to your rss feed. With the Video Game Reviews blog that we built, the problem that we focusd on was video gamers not having all the latest gaming consoles so they could play all the coolest games and so we offered them a simple way to have a chance to win one. There were a few different ideas we had for opt in headlines, we thought of mentioning how they could make thier friends jealous by showing off ther new system, they could finally stop being the butt of the jokes and actually have a system like everyone else or we could just tell them they can win one and let thier own reason surface. We opted for the last one and made it very obvious to see when they went to the blog what the benefit of opting in was.

Once we had the opt in message ready we now need to figure out how to best use the thank you landing page. This a an extremely valuable piece of virtual real estate and so often we see a thank you page that simply says “Thanks for opting in”. This is where you want to be sure that you give your reader direct instructions on what you want them to do next and it might be giving them an upsell to a product or like with the GamerzReviewz blog we used this to instruct them how to get more chances to win which were by performing actions that promoted GamerzReviewz. This is the critical need to the blog, to get the word out, and so it is the main focus.

Part 2 –>Checking for errors (broken links)

Before we create our sitemap we want to make sure that all links are working and there are no broken ones. Having broken links can cause errors and the search engines will not only not be able to properly access areas of your site but you will give readers the impression of an unfinished, unprofessional site. This is very easy to check with the free tool http://validator.w3.org/checklink

Part 3 –> Create and submitting the Google site map

Now that all the pages on your blog are ready to go, and all the links are checked and acurate, you want to make sure that the search engines are able to easily access all of them. The most effective way is to accomplish this is to create a search engine (mainly Google) specific sitemap and with WordPress this is extremely easy to do with the help of the “Google XML Sitemap” plugin. This plugin creates a sitemap that all the major search engines can read and is very easy to use.

Step 1: Go to the Plugins area and activate the “Google XML Sitemap” plugin.

Step 2: Open a blank notepad file and select save as and save the blank file as “sitemap.xml” and then repeat this step and save a new one as “sitemap.xml.gz”

Step 3: Upload these two new files to the same directory as your robots.txt file and change the permissions on them to six.six.six which is read & write access.

Step 4: Go to “Settings” –> “XML-Sitemap” and on the top of that page in the “Status” area, click on the link that says to build sitemap manually.

Step 5: You sitemap should now be ready and now scroll down and make sure the option “Build the sitemap in a background process (You don’t have to wait when you save a post)” is checked and if you have any extra pages on your blog, such as an opt in thank you page, then you are going to want to put the id# of that page in the “Exclude the following posts or pages:”.

To get the ID #, go to “Manage” –> “Posts” and then mouse over the title of the post and you will see “&post=#”, the # is the post ID.

Step 6: Now go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and if you do not already have an account with them, create one and then submit your sitemap. This is very important because the information that Google provides after a few days is very powerful and so do NOT just rely on the “ping” feature with this plugin. We promise that in a few days when we show you the data Google provides, you will be thankful you did this.

Part 4 –> Turn on the Ping

Now it is time to turn on the auto pinging feature in your blog but since we are having FeedBurner doing the pinging for us, we only need to ping FeedBurner and let them do the rest. The benefit of this is the back end issues that pinging the services can cause with your blog and by only pining feedburner you eliminate all these issues.

To do this simply go to Settings –> Writing and scroll down to the “Update Services”  area and enter http://ping.feedburner.com and click “Save Changes”.

Congratulations… We Are Ready For PROMOTING!!!!

Hope this post helped… let us now your questions and comments.

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