I’ve been looking for ‘do follow’ blogs to comment on recently and came across this tongue in cheek post I’d like to re-publish.

Sure it’s sarcastic, but it highlights common mistakes that are so easy to avoid.

I’m sure that you all want everyone to think that you’re a blogging newbie! That’s what I want! Wouldn’t that be an awesome way to develop your brand?
For those of you that want to appear like you actually know a lot about putting together blogs and websites, sorry but you’ve found the wrong place! I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I think that looking like you started yesterday is one of the most important things you can do. I have compiled for you the greatest internet marketing list of all time:

10 Easy Ways To Make Yourself Look Like A Blogging Newbie

1. Don’t use title case. Using ‘Make money online like a champ’ for your title would make you look 100 times more like a newbie than ‘Make Money Online Like A Champ’ would. You may want to consider leaving all of the words of your title in lower case, for maximum affect: ‘make money online like a champ’.

2. Use the original URLs that look like this: http://courtneytuttle.com/?p=123. Bloggers that have more experience will use these: http://courtneytuttle.com/2007/02/27/not-using-permalinks-search-engine-suicide/. Make sure you don’t have URLs like that if you want to look like you started your blog last week.

3. Make 26 categories for your 26 posts. This is a very effective way to look like a blogging newbie so make sure you don’t forget about this one! Adding a new category for every post is a powerful, advanced newbie disclosure method.

4. Change your blog’s theme and layout every 13 hours, that way people will know with absolute certainty that you have no idea whatsoever what you want your blog to look like. Tweak your theme relentlessly so that your readers get a chance to see each ‘mess up’ you make in the process.

5. Admit openly in your writing that you have no idea what you want your blog to be about. Consult with your readers about what kind of things they would like to learn. Better yet, hold a poll to allow your 7 active readers to determine your blog’s main topic.

6. Spread yourself thin. Make sure to cover celebrity news, blogging, real estate, credit card debt, technology, programming, social media, home based business, fast cars, music, movies, books, computers, drug rehab, pet training, exercise, framing, construction, writing, photography, art, wealth, investment banking, and water balloon fighting. Definitely don’t become an expert at any one thing. That would make you look too well-informed and advanced.

7. Install your blog in a directory named ‘wordpress’. Using http://yourdomain.com/wordpress/ for the main address of your blog would look a lot more newbie than http://yourdomain.com/ would.

8. Use meaningless post titles. Titles like ‘Another meaningless Monday’ (You’ll notice that I’m ignoring title case for a double-newbie-effect.) and ‘Life sucks again’ are my personal favorites for looking newbieish. (Is newbieish even a word? Hmm.. Is newbie even a word?)

9. Post erratically. Write 7 posts your first day, and then don’t post for a month. Then come back and post 9 times in a day, and then don’t post for another week. Trust me, it works. Do this, and you will definitely look like a newbie – people will surely take note.

10. Beg every decent site you’ve ever heard of to link to you. Definitely don’t tell them about any posts you’ve written, just ask them to link to you without offering any reason at all why they should.
Please no one take offense, this post is 20% a joke and 80% to show you a few things to avoid. I’ve personally made 9 of these common mistakes! It took me a few months to work them out of my system, so I thought it would help some of you that are starting out! Please let me know if you have any questions, I would be more than happy to help.

Feel free to add any other suggestions to this list in the comment box.

With Thanks to Courtney,
John

Today, I thought I’d make a few changes to my blog, to improve the way it looks, both to visitors and search engine spiders.

I’ve signed up to Matthew Wolfe’s Wordpress Classroom and by following his step by step video guide, I’ve raced through a load of changes that have been bugging me for weeks.

So what have I done?

I’ve changed my Theme from Press play to Cordobo Green Park.

First Impressions count and I think this theme has a cleaner more structured look, (but let me know if you don’t like it).

Added an RSS Icon and Feedburner Account

Many fellow students have been oil rig hopping to get traffic, but with so many students, it’s very time consuming to constantly check each blog site for new content.

RSS is the term used to stream blog content out to anyone that wants to subscribe to your blog.

This tutorial showed me how to set up a Feedburner account (which you need to manage and read RSS feeds), download a nice RSS button and then associate the button with my Feedburner account address.

So it’s now possible for anyone to sign up for and read my blog postings.

Created a Google sitemap

Getting traffic to your site depends on getting your content found by search engines.

Up until now, I hadn’t created a site map for my blog as I didn’t know what they were for or how important they are for organic search traffic.

Within a few seconds, this video tutorial had shown me how to add the ‘Google XML sitemap’ widget and explained that from this point on, my sitemap will be submitted to Google, Yahoo and bing every time my blog is updated with a new post.

Added the Top Commentators widget

Bloggers add comments to create back links and gain Google page ranking. The Top Commentators widget gives more back link juice to people that take the time to post comments.

Having this widget displayed on your blog is a signpost to bloggers that it is worthwhile posting a comment.

I really feel I made progress today.

If you want to make changes to your blog and learn secrets on how to get more traffic to your site, I fully recommend joining Wordpress Classroom Pro.

It’s often said in sales, that people buy from people, but what is often forgotten is the fact that people see you before your product.

In traditional sales, you make contact with a prospect, either through a telephone call or a physical meeting. So the prospect either hears what you have to say or sees you in person before they know what service or product you are offering.

It’s human nature to develop a first impression, based on the experience you give and that first impression can be the difference between doing business or not.

People buy from people.

Now, in the virtual world of Internet Selling and Internet Marketing, that first impression is made when the visitor views your squeeze page or blog.

So it is really important to display quality content that engages and informs the reader, presented within a blog theme that is easy on the eye and easy to navigate.

With that in mind, I’m looking to change my Wordpress Theme and alter the layout of my blog.

Does anyone have any favourite themes that I should use or widgets to recommend?

I was looking back at a few of my own blog posts yesterday at work, and something occurred to me.

It was a lesson that I learned, years back now, about writing for the web. Something that apparently slipped my mind in the midst of all of this excitement.

I almost forgot – how to write for the web.

But first, I want to share with you, that up until now, all that I know about website development and having an online business, I learned from Ken Evoy, the founder of Site Sell.

One of the things that I learned from Ken, early on, is that when we are writing for the web.

We need lots and lots of white space….

Lots of line breaks…

And short paragraphs.

And why are we doing this?

We are doing this for our readers, yes, the people that land on our webpages and blog posts. We have to consider what they see and think when they arrive.

The last thing that we want to down is drowned them out with a sea of words. So they just initially look at our blog post and think…

“Well this looks exhausting,” and just click away.

We want to make our pages as reader-friendly as we can, and help our readers get through our writing, so we can get our message across.

And the way to do this, is to shorten our paragraphs.

And yes, included lots of line breaks.

And make sure there’s lots and lots of white space on the page.

See, how easy that was to read?

I can take this a step further, too. And share a bit more, and this is about the font that we are supposed to be using when writing for online reading.

The font is Verdana.

Verdana is apparently very easy on the eyes when reading on a computer screen. And we should be using this font with all of our post, pages, and ebooks.

Because the idea is make what we write for online reading, as user-friendly as we can. So we don’t loose our visitors.

We worked hard to get them to our sites and blogs, and we want them to stay.

Because remember, it’s just one-click and they’re gone.

So do everything you can to make what you write, really easy to read online.

This is so your visitors can get through your masterpiece.

Your thoughts and ideas…your writing.

For more information from Karen, visit her excellent blog at http://karenkalata.com/

(Now I need to work out how to change the Font on my Blog)

• Using Powerpoint, I created a series of slides, which I then saved as jpg images.
• Open Windows Movie Maker and upload the series of images.
• Add Royalty Free Music and save.
• Upload to your YouTube account and copy the Embed code that YouTube provide.
• Paste the Embed code into your blog using the HTML tab (rather than Visual).

Select Preview and watch your video play in the blog.

Whilst I was going to buy a themed page for my blog, I’m short of money and WordPress 2.8 has 35 pages of themes. It’s really easy … select a style you like, upload and activate it. (I chose Press Play 1.1)

Next I need to learn about widgets. This will require me to upload files to my site, so I downloaded some free FTP software from File Zilla at http://filezilla-project.org/download.php

Alex Jeffreys Marketing training provides the group of students with a Free Traffic Network Builder widget, the idea being to connect a network of bloggers in order to create a community.

After downloading the file, I fired up Zilla File and simplydragged it from my C: drive location to blog/wp-content/plugins. The next step is to activate the widget using the WordPress dashboard.

I’d been recommended a Social Networking widget called ‘Tell a Friend’ which I’ve also loaded in the same way. For more information on how to get ‘Tell a Friend’ look in my review section.

My plans and pledge are a bit sketchy at the moment, but I can refine and expand things as I go along. The main thing was to take action now.

I logged on to Alex’s training forum and was pleasently suprised to see comments building up from other members offering support and downloads on ‘How to build a blog’ (thanks Tony McLaughlin).

Realising my blog would be central to my business, I searched for a host provider that supported cPanel and Fantasia. I decided to go with Just Host as they were voted number one for support and price, with a current offer of a free domain for life and a hosting account with lots of features for £2.95 per month.

A useful tip I’ve learned   …..

One you’ve found a product or service you like on the internet, start your order, then close the window before completing. Sure enough this style of exit presented me with a pop up which linked to an online sales rep who offered me a one time 50% discount if I returned to complete my order …. Cool!

So I bought my domain and web space, which was available within minutes and went about following the tutorial on how to set up a WordPress blog using cPanel and Fantasia.

As you can see, things have worked and I can make posts. My next task is to improve the appearance of the blog and make it friendly to generate traffic, so tomorrow I want to learn about WordPress Themes and widgets.