Monday 30 December 2013

8 Essential Things to do After Setting Up WordPress

WordPress is an extraordinary content management system (CMS) for developing websites and there are lots of tutorials to aid you get started. But what happens after the installation?
Here are 8 essential tasks to complete after setting up WordPress. Accomplishing these tasks will make your blog look more proficient.
1. Install a premium theme
Design plays a vital role on how thriving your blog will be. Many people focus more on content, more than anything else, which is completely acceptable if you don’t want to be a successful blogger.
That’s not to say that good content isn’t a vital component, but it all begins with how your blog appears. First impressions are significant, particularly since over 70-80% of your blogs visitors won’t come back.
If you don’t have a good looking design, then visitors won’t take you sincerely. To find a good looking premium, check out our WordPress Themes category. Or if you don’t want to spend money on premium theme, then choose a theme from a trusted source such as WordPress.org.
Start building an email list
One of the primary things you have to do is to start creating email list. Nothing Beats email. It’s one of the fastest ways to get exposure to your new endeavors.
Having an email list enables you to directly connect with your readers and endorse your own products.
If you don’t have your own products, you can employ email lists to endorse associate products and make money from it. These days approximately every blogger is creating mailing list and giving out exclusive content with them.
To put up an email list, you’d require signing up for an auto-responder service. If you are just starting out, then it is good to o with Mail Chimp, because it’s free till 2000 subscribers and you can send up to 12000 emails per month.
You can also employ a list building plugin such as OptinMonster, which inserts popup box to your site to improve the number of subscribers and aid you get good results.
Optimize your blog for search engines
The default WordPress settings are quite good for search engines, but they surely are not going to increase your blog traffic or aid you set up authorship markup. To make a brand presence and drive search engine traffic, you will need to ensure your site fits with best SEO practices.
There are numerous plugins obtainable that can improve your blog’s SEO. But the one that is prominent from the rest is WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. A free plugin developed by Joost De Valk.
Make your blog spam proof
There are 2 ways to cope with the spam comments in WordPress. Either take out the spam comments manually or install a WordPress plugin. The best choice would be to go with the latter one, and set up a plugin like GASP or Akismet.
Grow map Anti spam aka GASP adds a checkbox to your comment from inquiring users to verify that they are not a spammer. It is advised to use Akismet combined with Conditional captcha plugin as it works really well.
You can also employ another commenting system for instance Disqus or Intense Debate which develops the default WordPress comments by adding user profiles, threaded comments, social media integration and much more.
Add social media buttons
Any beginner blogger can notify how imperative social media is. After search engines, social media sites are the second major source of traffic. Driving traffic from these sites can be simple or possibly hard, based on how well social media is integrated in your website. Well placed social media buttons can boost the chances of getting more tweets and likes.
Below are 3 of the best social media plugins to decide from:
1.     Floating Social Bar The plugin was announced recently and has been downloaded 50,000 times. It automatically adds a vertical floating sharing bar to below the title. It presently supports 5 key social sites – Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Linkedin. 
2.    Digg Digg – Certainly the most liked social plugin obtainable on the Internet. This fantastic plugin enables you to insert social sharing buttons vertically to the left or right of your post or horizontally to below or above the content area. The buttons can also be manually inserted anywhere else employing a simple template code.
3.  Flare This is one more social plugin which is not in active development, but works very well with the newest version of WordPress.
Install a backup plugin
Though, you don’t have anything to backup, setting up a backup plugin will ensure that your site is protected and safe. There are numerous free and premium backup solutions accessible on the web. Don’t take the danger by not employing a backup plugin:
·         VaultPress – A premium backup service by Automattic. The cost starts $5 a month.
·         Backup Buddy – A backup plugin for WordPress, developed by iThemes. It automatically backups your site to DropBox, Amazon S3 as well as other services.
·         WP Backup to Dropbox – This is a handy plugin that will back up your media and database to your Dropbox account.
Make your blog more secure
Here are some easy guidelines that can aid you to improve the security of your lately installed WordPress site.
·         Backup Plugin – The first thing you need to do is to set up a good backup plugin such as Backup Buddy. You cannot make your site 100% safe but you can nearly guarantee its safety by guaranteeing regular backups are carried out.
·         Update – The vital thing that you can to do secure your website is revise everything which includes core, themes and plugins.
·         Install Security plugins –Better WP Security and WordFence
Track your blog progress
Once you have all the important things in place, start tracking your progress by inserting heatmap solution such as Crazy Egg and Google Analytics code. This will also assist you in enhancing the conversion rate, which means more affiliate commission and advertisement revenue.
Google Analytics is free to install and Crazy Egg starts at $9 a month.