You should be happy you are reading this article, as I’ve put a lot of thought into it.
You know, blogging is not just installing wordpress, picking a theme and plugins, and start writing… it’s a long term investment, you should look at it as a real business that will make you rich at the end, because it will make you rich if you put in the work and read this article carefully.
The first thing I need to talk about is your host, it is the first step to building a killer wp blog. 3 dollar hosting won’t cut it, I know you think:
“I’ll start with something cheap until my blog is huge enough to be able to afford the good stuff”
…but you need the good stuff to be able to grow your blog, it’s all tied together. When I started this blog I chose Hostgator, not only did my pages load turtle slow (even though they were optimized), but my site was put on a server packed with thousands of crappy sites that had ruined the server ip and shit… and I’m not even going to talk about the up time, but I’ll tell you it was more like down time.
Arviexe suck too, and all those big hosting providers like hostmonster, blue host etc are a part of one company, so they all suck, everything about them sucks… but you don’t have to believe me, I’m just sharing my experience and knowledge…
…you need Wpengine, these guys know their business, they manage everything for you, from optimization to security. You don’t need private servers, unless you get millions of hits a month, yet by the time you get there, you’d be able to buy your own servers, you need managed hosting with robust servers.
Once you host your site where it belongs and install wordpress, you need a sleek design optimized for marketing.
You have two options here:
1 Hire a designer who also knows marketing (they are not that many and charge a lot)
2 Install genesis
Genesis for a wordpress blog is what Ferrari is for sports driving. It is light, highly customizable, and there are free Genesis plugins for a lot of the vital stuff you otherwise need to code.
After you install it, you will need several plugins:
1 WP seo by Yoast (also known as Yoast Seo)
3 WP Smush.it
Update
Yahoo discontinued this one and now EWWW Image Optimizer is the second best thing.
5 Flare
update
I used to like flare, yet they stopped supporting it to create some app and now I use Mashshare.
To tell you the truth, I’m glad they did, Mashshare is superior to anything out there.
6 A Lead generation plugin. OptinMonster is what I use and recommend here’s why
Once you optimize your blog for speed and for marketing, you should start blogging, but that doesn’t mean to just research what’s trending and blog crap about it…
…here are a few articles you have to read to find and develop your voice:
https://wealthmagnate.com/the-science-of-blogging/
https://wealthmagnate.com/make-money-blogging/
https://wealthmagnate.com/5-blogging-tips/
Blog as often as you can even if nobody reads your content. They will start reading it eventually and if you go back and update your old articles, you will double your traffic in no time.
Don’t compromise the quality though, I did this when I started this blog (subconsciously, cause I had no idea how to blog) and had to rewrite more than 100 of my first articles, cause they sucked.
People just don’t care about mediocre content, the internet is filled with it, you have to be unique as you really are… we all are, yet most bloggers make the mistake to copy huge blogs, as they think this would help them write better articles.
Gigantic blogs like Mashable run monster paid marketing campaigns, they’ve become more of social networks than education hubs. Your blog should be ‘the place to go to’ and not the place to kill time.
It should also be a lead collecting machine, you need more than a sidebar form and you need more than just regular copy.
Now, you might be like:
“I don’t want to alienate my visitors”
…as some people react when I talk about lead optimization, you will not alienate anybody but make money… alright, you can push away some people, but why care? you can not be liked by everybody.
Let me sum it up
To create a killer wp blog you need:
1 Badass hosting
2 Genesis
3 Recommended plugins – Look up!
4 Lots of content – Blog as often as you can!
5 Lead generation tool.
I’ve set up a page to read more about them:
https://wealthmagnate.com/tools/
Now you can go read this “Traffic Generation Article – How To Get Traffic And What To Expect”
Let me know if you liked this article and stay awesome.
Vladi