How To Start A WordPress Blog (Part 2)

[00:00:00] Hey, before we get started, there's some time sensitive information that I wanted to share with you. And that's the reason that I'm releasing this on Monday is because if you purchase Pat Flynn's Power Up Podcasting course by 9am Pacific Time, you will get a group mentorship

[00:00:19] call with Pat where he's going to go over everything. You need to know whether it's in the course or not about how to start a podcast, how to get set up. And the call is actually happening at 1pm today, Monday Pacific Time.

[00:00:34] So that's why you need to sign up by 9am. And then also on top of that until March 17th at 9pm Pacific Time, Power Up Podcasting is $100 off the regular price or $90 off the three-pay installment plan.

[00:00:56] So awesome deal there that you can take advantage of until tomorrow at 9pm. And then you also get a free 14-day trial of Alitou, which is Colin Gray's powerful, easy to use podcasts, our audio editor, and it makes it really easy.

[00:01:14] And then you also get 25% off your first month after that trial. So that's included with Power Up Podcasting. And then you also get one month free of HughesBox Pro, which is the smart podcast player. They did a rebranding and now it's HughesBox Pro.

[00:01:30] And you also get a transcript plug-in, which is really cool and that ties nicely in with today's episode of starting a WordPress blog. So that's a nice little bonus there. And what is Power Up Podcasting? You might be asking.

[00:01:47] It's a step-by-step course to help you launch and grow a successful podcast that gets found and grows your online brand. And Pat has been teaching podcasting for years. He has, I don't know, five different podcasts as one of the most successful podcasts out there and maybe a couple.

[00:02:08] And he's excellent at teaching. And I think this is definitely the best course out there to teach you how to get started. You can learn some great tips about how to kind of launch your show with a bang.

[00:02:19] So that means that you'll have a built-in audience ready to go. And until March 17th at 9 p.m., it's $100 off. That's kind of the big discount and I definitely think you should take advantage of that if you can. And that's it about that.

[00:02:50] Be sure and sign up by 9 a.m. if you want to join that group call. And let's get into the episode. Hey and welcome to part two of the How to Start a WordPress Blog series, I guess. It's just a two-part series.

[00:03:05] But if you haven't listened to the first part, go back to last week's episode. It'll say part one and start there because this is just going to continue right where that one ended. So we are on to create required pages.

[00:03:21] And there are some essential pages that nearly every website has, the about page, a contact page and a privacy policy. So we're going to talk a little bit about each one and you want to create separate pages for each of these.

[00:03:38] So your about page, the first one, it should actually be more about what your readers can expect than about you or your company or your podcast. So visitors should immediately know if your site is a good fit for them when they visit your about page.

[00:03:53] So you can take, I'll link up my about page. I think it's a decent example if I say so myself. But it starts with kind of what you can expect and some links to some popular posts and things to learn.

[00:04:06] And then it goes into a little bit about me towards the bottom. So that's kind of the order that I believe things should be in in order to best help your visitors.

[00:04:19] So it might be if it's just about a podcast, it might just be about what your podcast is about and how it helps people or what it does. And then you can talk about yourself and your co-host or whatever you want kind of after that as an example.

[00:04:35] And then I say another tip is to link to popular articles which is what I do or answer common questions your readers might have. It's a great place to do that if you don't have a separate maybe frequently asked questions page.

[00:04:47] And after leading with value, you can go maybe into some social proof. So if you have testimonials or reviews or something you want to highlight that can be a great place to do that as well. And then if you don't have that stuff, that's fine.

[00:05:01] You can always add it later. Might be something to strive for. Try to get some good reviews and then you can kind of take a screenshot or make a quote, put it on the page and then you have a nice, nice addition there.

[00:05:13] And then finally, you write about you, your history or something relevant that your visitors or listeners might find interesting. Now the next page is the contact page. And this will let people easily get in touch with you.

[00:05:27] And I don't recommend just putting an email address and plain text on the page because there are crawlers that will find those and then you'll get a bunch of spam. So that's why a lot of people use contact pages because it hides your actual

[00:05:43] email address, not that you want to hide it from your visitors, but it hides it from people who want to spam you. And then when people fill that out, it sends it to your email and you can reply to them and have a normal email conversation that way.

[00:05:58] And then there's also some... If you want to do like a voicemail recording, there's software that will allow you to do that so you can have people leave voicemails that you can then respond to on a podcast, which is kind of cool.

[00:06:14] I'm going to have to look up with the name of those are because I don't use them. But for contact forms, there are several plugins that make it easy. I use Gravity Forms on podcastinsights.com, but I'm actually... I typically recommend WP forms.

[00:06:33] I just happen to have a lifetime access to Gravity Forms back from my WordPress agency days, so that's just what I use. But either one will work. There's others that are free. Contact Form 7 is another one that is pretty popular and I used to use years ago.

[00:06:51] And basically you create the form so you have a name, email address and maybe a comment field. And then people will submit that form and it sends it to your email. And that's about it. You just embed it on the contact page.

[00:07:08] And then I also add some additional info before the form on the contact page so I let people know I get tons of emails. This might not be the case, but I link to relevant articles or common... Also like the About Page, common questions that people might have.

[00:07:24] I will link to relevant articles so that people can try to get the info without emailing me. Not that I don't want emails from people, but it just helps ease the stress of having hundreds of emails and if I can get just a few less than...

[00:07:40] And still help people, that is the goal. Now the next page is a privacy policy page. And I know that might not sound that exciting, but there's all kinds of new regulations that have come out or are coming out. So things like GDPR and the CCPA in California.

[00:08:00] That means that you need to have certain language on your privacy policy page, among other things. And I can't... I'm not a lawyer, so I can't tell you exactly what to include. But there is a couple of services that will make this easy

[00:08:18] and you don't have to pay a lawyer and go back and forth and figure all that out. It's called... One of them is called IUBenda. That's what I recommend for people who want an easy way to set

[00:08:27] that all up and have a cookie policy as well, which is kind of part of all this regulation stuff. And it automatically updates as you add new plugins. It'll update your cookies and everything. So it's kind of cool.

[00:08:40] I'll leave a link to that if you want to check that out. But it is important to have a privacy policy page. And if you do any online advertising, a lot of times they'll look for that and actually not run your ads if you don't have one.

[00:08:53] So it's not something you need to mess with once you create it for the most part, unless there's a new regulation comes out. So spend the time, get that right, and then you should be good. So what should you write about?

[00:09:09] Your first blog post definitely doesn't need to say, I'm starting a blog or welcome to the blog or podcast or anything like that. You really want to write posts that solve a problem, answer a question that people have.

[00:09:21] So you might have a few ideas, but it's good idea to do a little research to see exactly how people are searching. And that means doing some keyword research and keyword research basically means exploring the words and phrases people are already searching for.

[00:09:36] There are tons of different tools you can use to speed this up. And the better paid tools will give you more accurate info on search volume, which means how many times people are searching per month and difficulty.

[00:09:49] So how hard it will be to rank on the first page of Google for a given phrase. But they can be costly. I use Ahrefs, which is A-H-R-E-F-S dot com because it's in my opinion,

[00:10:03] the most accurate and has a ton of reports and it's what I'm used to. So I know my way around it, but it starts at $100 a month, which is definitely not cheap. And there are some great options for free or a lot less cost.

[00:10:18] One of them is called Uber Suggest. It was bought by Neil Patel not too long ago and he's done a ton of updates to it. And it has quite a bit of info and it's free. And then another one that I use is called Keywords Everywhere.

[00:10:32] It used to be free and now I think you have to pay $10 or something. And what it does is when you go search on Google, it'll show you the search volume and some other info right there in the search results page, which is really cool.

[00:10:50] And then it also show related keywords and their volume. So that way you'll get a good understanding of how popular certain words are. Just right at a glance. And I use that all the time. So doing good research will help you narrow down your blog post topic

[00:11:08] and help you include sections that would make for a complete and educational post. So another tool is called Answer the Public, which will help you find those questions that people are asking. And so it's things like who, what, where, which, when, why?

[00:11:24] And it shows you in kind of a cool circular image, but it's kind of hard to read, which so that you can actually switch that view to more of a standard table format, which is a lot easier to see instead of trying

[00:11:39] to read things upside down, which kind of kind of happens. But Answer the Public is that website, which is really cool. And then after you have done your keyword research, the basic process of creating a blog post is just to go into WordPress and add a new post,

[00:11:58] give it a title, edit your permalink, which is your URL. And you want to make that short and, you know, not have 37 words in it. And then write your post and hit publish. And on, on the written version of this, I have some screenshots

[00:12:20] and they show using the classic editor plugin, which is kind of the older style writing mode in WordPress. And there's a new block editor called Gutenberg, which is still being updated. And I, I'm not quite a fan yet, but they, I might be, I might be soon.

[00:12:40] So just so you know, when you look at these screenshots, they're using the classic editor version and not the newer Gutenberg version. So give it a title. When choosing a title for your post, it's important to think about what would spark interest in your readers while also being

[00:12:54] clear and descriptive of what they're about to read. And because many more people read headlines than the actual post, it's important to put, I say a little bit, a lot more effort into this than you would think.

[00:13:09] And I actually recommend writing several headlines and then choosing the best one. And some of the best writers and websites actually might write 100 different headlines before they choose one. And there are a handful of tools, one from Co-Schedule, which is probably my favorite.

[00:13:28] You do have to sign up. You used to not have to, but you do. And then there's one, a couple others that I will link to. So they will tell you if your headline is, I don't know, they give you

[00:13:42] a score basically and they tell you if it's interesting and, and clickable. So next is edit your permanent link. And like I said, you want to keep it short. I recommend three to four words maximum.

[00:13:55] And when you separate words, you want to use a dash instead of an underscore. And I'm not sure 100% sure if this is still true, but Google used to consider in a dash as a space, but an underscore they wouldn't consider as a space.

[00:14:10] So then the two words could get mashed together in their computer's mind, I guess. So that's, that's just what I recommend. I, I still think that's the way to go use a dash. And you never want to change this. So don't put dates in it.

[00:14:29] So don't put, you know, 2020 because next year it'll be outdated. Instead, you can put dates in your, in your post title. Yeah. In your post title and then write, write your heart out, write your blog post.

[00:14:43] And when writing for the web, it's important to keep your paragraph short. Add media such as images or videos to enhance your writing. So that means to kind of clarify something. Don't just add a stock image just because you think it looks good. That's not really helpful.

[00:14:59] And then try to not use fluffy language or repeat yourself or, you know, a lot of, a lot of writers do this, but they'll, they'll kind of have a really fluffy intro that doesn't mean anything and it's just not needed. So take it out and then hit publish.

[00:15:15] So before you hit publish, you actually want to read through your article. Make sure there aren't any mistakes. You want to click preview and make sure everything looks as you expect and do this in, in different sizes.

[00:15:26] So resize your browser down to all the way as small as it gets to a mobile size to make sure everything looks good there. And this is especially important when you start adding images and things because formatting can get kind of messed up.

[00:15:38] And then if you have multiple categories, be sure and choose one that best fits or create a new one. But if possible, I like to have my, my posts or yeah, my posts be in one

[00:15:54] category, maybe two, but I don't want there to be a ton of overlap in, in the categories. And then once your spot checks there are done, you can go ahead and click publish. So that is the guide to how to start a WordPress blog and

[00:16:12] writing your first post, few tips there. So I hope that was useful. And again, be sure and look at the description of this episode. You'll find a link to the written version of this. So if you need to go review anything and see screenshots and links

[00:16:29] and everything, it'll all be there and you can learn how to start a WordPress blog for your podcasts or not. And lastly, be sure and subscribe so you can be the first to hear about new episodes when they're released, which is typically on Tuesdays.

[00:16:50] Thanks for listening and we'll see you in the next one.