Tweaking Your Blog

Com­pleted So Far:

So far, I have decided on how I want to mon­e­tize my blog and have begun devel­op­ing a blog that will sup­port the sale of infor­ma­tion prod­ucts. I have also sourced a num­ber of resources that I can use to help me develop my vir­tual busi­ness, but have already run into my first lit­tle snag.

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New Devel­op­ments:

In run­ning a crit­i­cal eye over my blog, I very quickly real­ized that I would need to put some major effort into it before I could even begin think­ing about mar­ket­ing issues and plans. So over the past cou­ple of days I focused on three things:

1. I renamed and slightly refo­cused the blog;
2. I migrated the blog over to wordpress.org; and
3. I began plan­ning and devel­op­ing content.

1) Renam­ing and Refo­cus­ing The Blog: The orig­i­nal name of this blog was Boomer Nomads, which was fine because the major audi­ence I am focus­ing on is baby boomers. How­ever, in plan­ning the con­tent I real­ized that the prac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion works for any­one at any age — hence the change in name to Age­less Nomads.

There will still be some mate­r­ial on the blog that focuses specif­i­cally on baby boomers. This mate­r­ial will address unique issues and cir­cum­stances faced by baby boomers, for exam­ple, my arti­cles Boomers as Entre­pre­neurs, and What is This “Third Age” Thingie? begin to look at some boomer-specific issues.

The other rea­son for the name change is that I am also work­ing on a sec­ond blog, Age­less Explorer that looks at a num­ber of other lifestyle design issues (e.g. deal­ing with major lifestyle tran­si­tions; prepar­ing for retire­ment; find­ing a pur­pose and a pas­sion, etc).

The path less well taken

2) Mov­ing the Blog to wordpress.org: WordPress.com has some real advan­tages when you are learn­ing to cre­ate a blog, and works great for a per­sonal blog. It’s easy to get started on, easy to use, offers a good selec­tion of func­tions and it’s free. For a busi­ness blog, how­ever, it’s lim­ited in what it can do. WordPress.org, on the other hand, offers func­tions that are per­fect for a busi­ness — and is still rel­a­tively inex­pen­sive and easy to use.

I am a techno-phobe and am con­stantly con­cerned about get­ting in over my head with stuff like this, so I called on my tech-guy (my son) to act as my go-to per­son in case I ran into any dif­fi­cul­ties. My con­cern was that every­thing I had read about get­ting started on wordpress.org talked about hav­ing to down­load the pro­gram onto your com­puter, then set­ting up an account with an online server, then cre­at­ing your blog. But noth­ing ever stepped you through the whole process.

As it turns out, if you use one of the hosts rec­om­mended by wordpress.org, or any online host that already runs wordpress.org on their servers, you don’t need to down­load any­thing onto your com­puter. All you need to do is to set up an account with the online server (I used Blue­Host only because it was one of the host­ing ser­vices listed on wordpress.org), pay for the account (mine cost less that $85 US per year), click on one but­ton (your host­ing ser­vice will tell you which one), fill in two or three lit­tle bits of infor­ma­tion includ­ing the user­name and pass­word you want to use for the account, and the blog is up and run­ning. It was really, really easy!!

The orig­i­nal wordpress.org blog theme that is cre­ated is a very plain theme, so you will prob­a­bly want to change it fairly quickly to some­thing a bit more pleas­ant to look at. Over 800 free themes can be found on wordpress.org (just click on the “Extend” tab, and then on the “Themes Direc­tory” link), which you can just down­load and then import into your blog. This process cre­ates a unique theme gallery for your blog that you can use to pre­view the themes you like while decid­ing on which one you want to use. Scads of other free and pur­chased themes are avail­able online — you can do a Google search to find thou­sands of theme sites.

The first big theme-related ques­tion for me was whether to go with a theme that was search engine opti­mized or not. I chose not to go with an SEO-ed theme mostly because I didn’t like the look of any of the ones I saw. For me, hav­ing the blog look nice was impor­tant. Most SEO aspects, like key­words and links, can be added quite eas­ily. How­ever, chang­ing the look and lay­out of the blog is not some­thing I am com­fort­able with doing — yet.

Once the theme was selected, I spent some time famil­iar­iz­ing myself with the basic func­tions, includ­ing find­ing how to use the “Text” wid­get to begin devel­op­ing an affin­ity pro­gram with Amazon.ca/ Amazon.com. OK, so adding a proper eBook­Store is some­thing I still have to work on

3) Plan­ning and Devel­op­ing Con­tent: Now that the blog is up and run­ning on wordpress.org my next step was to begin plan­ning and devel­op­ing con­tent. My goal was to make sure that there is a good amount of con­tent on the blog and that I know what other con­tent I want to develop before I begin mar­ket­ing. This way I know that when the mar­ket­ing begins to pro­vide results, there will be enough con­tent here for peo­ple to begin explor­ing and hope­fully come back to. I have also planned the con­tent for this blog to over­lap some­what with my other blog (Age­less Explorer) which will, hope­fully, ben­e­fit both blogs.

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Next Step:

My goal for Wednesday’s post is to explore how to Search Engine Opti­mize the blog and it’s con­tents. I fig­ure I might as well begin devel­op­ing the con­tent with search engines in mind right from the very beginning.

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