Blogging FOR BEGINNERS EBOOK.

Transcription

1 Blogging FOR BEGINNERS EBOOK

2 Table of Contents 1. A note on branding 2. Site Plan 3. Setting up your Hosting 4. Choose your Theme 5. Wordpress Basics 6. Wordpress Plugins 7. Blog Post Pre-Post SEO Checklist 8. Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing 9. Additional Resources to kill it with your Blog

3 A quick note for you I m soo glad you ve trusted me to help on your blogging journey. I have worked really hard to put together a roadmap that should give you a great start in getting your blog set up and running. I would have loved an E-book like this when I started so I hope this saves you some time and a lot of hours researching! Please follow the steps I ve outlined below and hopefully the added diagrams and checklists will be a great resource for you! I ve also included a list of the top resources I currently use in order to make my business/blog successful and I m hoping they can help you out as well. I m soo happy to be your guide here and remember you can reach out to me at any time! A quick note on branding One of the most important aspects of your blog/business is going to be your brand, as in your name as well as your logo. Let s be honest, this can be very challenging! My suggestion is by writing down some idea and then immediately checking to see if the domain name is available. Please don t do all the work of choosing a name and designing a logo only to find out that s it s not available. Start with the name and then go from there. Please also think twice before you choose a blog/business name that has 4 or more words in it. It can get very difficult to read or remember as a domain name. 2-3 words is absolutely ideal! Start looking for domain names on Bluehost see what is available, you don t have to commit to anything when you are simply looking to see if certain names are a possibility! The nice thing is you don t have much more to if you find the domain name or your dreams and want to make sure to snatch it up right away! *WE ARE OFFERING A 50% OFF COUPON TO OUR SHOP FOR ANYONE THAT PURCHASES HOST- ING THROUGH OUR BLUEHOST LINK! Affiliate Disclosure This ebook contains some affiliate links which means I may receive a percentage of any purchased products or services because of my referral. I do not recommend any products that I don t have full confidence in and/or have used myself. For more information, you can always check out my disclaimer here.

4 Site Plan Overview Now as you can see below, I ve laid out two different plans. The first one is if you are just running a blog and the second is if you are planning to have a small business and blog as well. I wanted you to see this first so you can have a good idea of how you are going to set up your blog/website before we begin.

5 About NOW YOU CAN GET TO KNOW ME! About Connected Colleague Connected Colleague was founded with the goal of providing me with a chance to have a flexible work environment and still be very present in kid lives. Now I spend my days offering VA Services and blogging to help other mwomen find the same kind of freedom! Additional Information I wanted to make sure to mention that I opened up a shop under CC Creative Design Studio which offers really great templates for Social Media, Opt-in Freebies and Branding. I used one of my Opt-in Freebie template packs to create this ebook. If you want to create amazing products too, please check out the shop here. CC Creative Shop. All of our Templates are made for Canva and Adobe indesign!

6 Website Hosting You are going to be creating a wordpress.org blog/website and you need a hosting service that will house all of your site s information. This is essentially, where your site is going to live. Think of your hosting provider as your cyberspace landlord, you want to deal with a landlord that is reliable, easy to deal with and always available if something goes wrong. This is where Bluehost comes in, they have an easy to use interface, a quick automatic install for wordpress.org and 24 online support. I recommend them because I use them for my own site and their 24-hour support has kept me from throwing my computer out the window a few times! Hopefully this guide will do they same for you! You will need to start here at: Bluehost Web Hosting WE ARE CURRENTLY OFFERING A 50% OFF COUPON FOR OUR SHOP IF YOU PURCHASE HOSTING THROUGH OUR BLUEHOST LINK! Just send us an to let us know! * I also have an entire detailed post dedicated to How to set up BlueHost! Then you can select Sign Up on the homepage. It will give you a chance to choose the plan that best suits you. Chances are that you will only need the Startup Plan at a mere $3.95/month, which is still what I m currently using. You might as well keep your costs down when you are starting out! Next, you will need to look for your domain name, I know we touched on this earlier with branding and hopefully you have been able to determine your blog/website name and you know that it s already available. Once you have entered in and selected the domain name, you will then be prompted to enter in all of your information and select how long of a term you want, 1 year, 2 year or 3 year term. I ll leave this up to you, when I started, I selected a 1 year plan but could have easily selected the others as I knew I wasn t going to be stopping anytime soon. Once you have your hosting set up, you will need to go to your CPanel (you will receive an regarding this) and select the install for WordPress. As soon as you have wordpress.org installed through Bluehost, you officially have your first Blog up and running! Woo Hoo!!!

7 Wordpress Themes If you are looking at your new wordpress.org site, you are likely seeing a white page with a few added defaults, don t stress, we can and will make this beautiful for you! A theme is essentially a pre-fabricated, sweet looking, front end to your website that will keep all of your information organized. I will be honest, you have a TON of options here and you also have some Free Options. I have an entire blog post on this and I explain why I think a premium theme is better when you are looking to monetize and a make a business out of your blog. That post also gives you a great list of tips and tricks to look for so you can pick the riht one for you! How to choose the right Wordpress Theme for you. I have two recommendations here in terms for Wordpress Themes. Both are geared more towards the femine style. If you are looking for something a little different or more manly, you should check out Creative Market, they literally have everything! 1. Bluchic Premium WordPress Themes I just can t get enough of these two! They are a husband and wife team that saw a need in the market for stunning feminine inspired Word- Press themes and they are just killing it! They have over 15 gorgeous paid themes to chose from. They also offer 3 free themes, if you provide them with your name and address, so you can try them out before hand. Other than your own stock photos, there is nothing else you need to worry about. The theme comes with everything, from excellent theme documentation, great support to install services. (remember you can also talk to me about this). They also have a SHOWCASE tab which is a compilation of websites that people have created using their themes. This will give you soo many great ideas of what you can do with the theme you are considering. They also have a FREEBIE page which has a whole bunch of amazing resources and guides. Check

8 1. Bluchic Premium WordPress Themes (cont) Just to prove that I m not all talk, the Wordpress Theme I m using is from Bluchic and I love it. Did I mention the Landing page you probably used to sign up for this ebook is also from Bluchic. See... No Bullshit here... The theme I am using is the Isabelle Theme, it works great for my services business, my blog and my online shop! See below how easily you can brand the themes so the represent the image you have in mind! 2. Restored 316 Premium WordPress Themes If you haven t seen what any of these look like yet, you need to take a peek, you WILL fall in love! Now one very important thing to note is that you need the Genesis Framework in order to use these themes. What does this mean? Essentially you need to buy the Genesis Framework by Studiopress as the framework for this theme to look the way that it does. This will cost you a bit more than the Bluchic theme but if you are looking online at various themes, you will notice a lot of them require the Genesis framework so it is quite common. You can find the Genesis link HERE. Restored 316 offers 20 different amazing WordPress Themes and some of their new ones even come with custom Pinterest graphics that match the theme. They also have a really great Showcase where you can see everyone else s site s that have been created using their themes. They are totally worth taking some time to look at!

9 Wordpress Basics So you have your Hosting and your Theme setup and now you have to figure out how to use Wordpress.org, this is no small feat! I have literally logged hundreds of hours learning the platform and there is still more to learn! I have a really great post already created for you on Wordpress Basics and I go through everything you need to know to get started personalizing your site. Check out the post: Wordpress Basics for Beginner s. I cover the following topics for you: 1. Title, Tagline and Site Icon 2. Homepage/Landing Page 3. Header Image 4. Pages and Posts 5. Menus 6. Widgets i know this post is going to give you a really good basic understanding of Wordpress. Please trust me in that Wordpress isn t a platform you will learn overnight! If you get stuck or lost or frustrated, take a minute and breathe. The first time I tried creating a Wordpress site several years ago, I gave up after a few days... Now looking back, if I would have stuck with it, I would be even more ahead now! Don t give up!

10 Wordpress Plugins I ve also compiled a great list of plug ins to add to your site that will help function even that much better. Now a word of caution, the more plug-ins you install, the slower you can make your site. If you find and download a plug in and then decide you don t want to use it, make sure you delete it! 1. Wordfence Security: Will help to keep your site secure from hackers, they have a free plug in and a premium, I m still using the free plugin. I love that they send you an the second one of your other plugins needs to be updated. They do this, as when a plug in requires an update, it can become vulnerable to attacks, which means that your site can then become vulnerable. 2. Elementor and Elementor Pro: This is pretty much my number one recommendation for making your site amazing. One of the main things that scares people away from using Wordpress is they think they need to be able to code to make their site look great. This plug in allows you to edit your site on the front end while being able to see the whole thing as you are doing it! I have just recently upgraded to the pro version because I plan to use it for client s sites as well, but you can totally stay with the free version for your personal site. Please for your own good, check them out! I also talk about this in my post on Wordpress Themes here. 3. Yoast SEO: As far as I m concerned this is not even debatable! I m sure you have heard of Search Engine Optimization. Essentially, it has how you can set up a blog page or post to increase your chances of it being found in an online search, such as google. This plugin is free and literally tells you what you can do to improve your pages and post to give you the best chance of being found by potential clients and readers. They also offer a number of course, some of which I have taken, that will turn you into an SEO whiz. I have included a starter SEO Checklist to use for when you are developing your first couple of posts. It will be super handy for you in the beginning! 4. Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights: This plugin links your google analytics right to your Wordpress dashboard so you can quickly get an overview as to what is going on. If you want in depth stats you will still need to log in to your Google Analytics dashboard but this will give you an quick overview on the day to day.

11 Wordpress Plugins 5. WP Forms Lite: This is a great plug in to use for any forms on your site such as your contact form. This is the lite version which means the free version so there are obviously some functions of the pro-version you won t have access to but I haven t needed any of the extras yet. 6. Mailer Lite: You would only download this plugin if you are subscribing to Convertkit to handle all of your / newsletter subscribers. They are who I use and recommend and therefore the plug in in a necessity. I can literally plug any sign up form I ve created with Convertkit at the touch of a button instead of trying to embed the code in my site. It also works great with Elementor! There is more on Convertkit below in the resources section. 7. WP Super Cache: This will help speed up your site so that you rank higher with search engines and so that people don t get annoyed waiting for your content to load. 8. Pretty Link Lite: This plugin will because crucial to you when you start using affiliate links. Instead of having to constantly copy and paste your affiliate links into individual posts, you can easily place links. The benefit to this is also in case for some reason the link changes for one of your affiliate programs, you only need to change it in the plug in and it will update the link in every post you have used it in! This can save you soo much time and frustration. 9. Woo Commerce: If you want to open up your own online shop then this will be a great help to you with your Wordpress Site. Once you download the plug in, you can literally start adding products to your site. I was thrilled the first time I got to publish one of my products and I know you will be too!

12 Blog Post Checklist So likely the whole reason you are reading this ebook is so that you can start your first blog and that doesn t happen until you actually publish your first Blog Post. Once again, I have a whole post dedicated to this that I want you to read but also wanted you to have this great Blog Post Checklist that you can reference to make sure you have taken care of everything! What to do before you hit Publish.

13 Affiliate Marketing Soo as much fun as Blogging for the thrill of it can be, if you are going through all of this trouble to get your shit together, you probably want to make some bucks doing it as well! The easiest way you can start making some income with your blog will be with Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate Marketing is when you make a recommendation on a product or service and a third party clicks on your link to purchase that product or service. The company that provides that product or service will send you a kick-back as a thank you for recommending their product. Seems pretty simple right? Well to be honest, it kind of is... There are some etiquette things you need to keep in mind but for the most part it s a pretty simple process. You apply to a company and ask to be a part of their Affiliate program. You insert the link they give you in blog posts, social media etc..., someone clicks on the link, and you get the kick back. Now please bear in mind, that because it is a pretty simple process, it s easy to get carried away. You don t want to just start throwing Affiliate links around like a man woman/man. People will click on your links when they trust you. If you are just in it for the money, chances are you won t be very successful. Your first priority needs to be to provide value you to your audience and then add in affiliate links where appropriate. Check out the VERY detailed post I have that takes you through Affiliate Marketing from start to finish! Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers and Virtual Assistants.

14 Fave Resouces I wanted to also give a sample list of some great tools/programs I use on a daily basis that help me kick butt with my Virtual Assistant Business and my Blog. I m hoping these can also help you get some big wins with your goals. 1. Freshbooks an accounting and invoicing software that rocks! 2. Screenspresso an AMAZING screen capture and video capture program 3. My hours Free time tracking program that is great as a Virtual Assistant 4. Tailwind Pinterest/Instagram scheduling tool. Check out my blog post here. 5. Mailerlite THE best newsletter and list building program. 6. Hootsuit Social Media scheduling tool including Facebook 7. Paypal payment program, you probably already know what PayPal is lol 8. Adobe Creative Cloud subscription based graphic design programs (what I use) 9. Canva - graphic design program that you can start using for free 10. Creative Market you can literally find anything from themes, to graphics, to fonts. Oh.. and did I mention, I also sell my products here? A BiG thank you to you! Thank you soo much for reading through my E-Book, I really hope it has made a different in your business/blogging adventure. Please remember you can get in touch with me any questions you might have, I would be thrilled to come along for the ride!