Guide for New WordPress Bloggers in 2014

The Ultimate Resource Guide for New WordPress Bloggers

1.Email Marketing
2.WordPress Themes
3.Web Hosting & Domain Registration
4.Google Tools
5.SEO Resources
6.Social Media & Marketing

Email Marketing

In your overall marketing strategy there needs to be a way for you to develop lasting relationships with site visitors beyond your blog articles. Email list building is a powerful way to accomplish this, which enables you to keep in touch with subscribers on a more regular basis. An opportunity for you to build trust through powerful relationships.
GetResponse is one of the most powerful email marketing solutions you’ll find on the market and a tool like this is vital for your list building. Forget about sending individual emails via your personal email accounts. Their software allows you to create professional campaigns with statistics and template creation. Their Learning Center is also a useful resource to get started on setting up a mailing list and how to market to your acquired audience. In addition, they have a useful WordPress plugin to integrate a subscription form on your blog that links directly to your GetResponse account. Certainly powerful.

Building relationships will be vital for your long-term blogging success.

WordPress Themes

The main things to take note of when choosing your WordPress theme are:

Is it mobile-friendly and responsive?
Does the design make sense and places content as priority?
Is it from a reliable source?
Is it customizable with a user-friendly admin panel?

These are important qualities to consider when choosing a theme, whether it’s a free theme or paid. I particularly love WordPress themes on the Themeforest marketplace and for free themes, I encourage you to try WP Explorer.

Web Hosting & Domain Registration

Finding the right web host for a self hosted WordPress site is quite challenging as there are so many skewed reviews and false claims geared towards making the respective hosting provider look great. Even when their service is frankly, poor and debilitating. I’ve used about 7 different web hosts in the past before settling with the perfect ones that simply work.

Don’t spend hours searching, here are the top performing web hosts for your WordPress blog:

For lower budget and moderate traffic: HostGator & Bluehost - Both starting at around $5 per month, depending on your plan.

For higher end services with the ability to scale for huge spikes in traffic and resource demands, then WP Engine is perfect. Their package starts at $29 per month. More expensive but is highly recommended if you’ve managed to build a very busy blog with high user resource demands.

Here are some powerful free plugins to install to get you going with security, SEO and social sharing:

WP DB Manager - I can’t stress enough the importance of having backups to secure your content. This plugin automatically backups up your database and will even email you a copy of your database files on a regular schedule.

SEO by Yoast - This is probably the only SEO plugin you’ll ever need. Forget about plugins that claim to automatically boost your rankings. Magically! Those statements are ridiculously untrue and you’ll be wasting time and money. This plugin allows you to create important sitemaps, assign title and description meta data and many more SEO related functions for perfect on-site optimization.

Login Lockdown - Login lockdown blocks users from accessing your admin dashboard once they’ve repeatedly incorrectly attempted to login to your site. This is the typical profile of a brute force hack.

Flare Social Share Icons - This is a beautiful set of floating social sharing icons to complement your WordPress theme. You need a method for your content to be shared and this is one of the most elegant plugins available for free.

There are definitely more plugins out there to try depending on what you want to accomplish but installing these will ensure you’re not wasting time on the basics.

Google Tools

Google Analytics – This allows you to track all traffic coming to your site. This is vital for studying your visitor behavior to determine your marketing strategies that work.

Google Webmaster Tools – A free and powerful SEO tool that most webmasters under utilize and end up paying for services that this tool offers for free. Integrating this tool will allow you to track links to your site, revise your linking profile, get your websites indexed by Google faster and many other tools that affect the health and performance of your website in search. A must have.

Keyword Planner – This is the Google Adwords keyword tool that advertisers use to determine which keywords to target for their search advertising campaigns. Although this is targeted to advertisers, the keyword data provided will help you to better understand what people are searching for and the volumes and value of the different phrases on the market. Use this to help steer your site’s content toward relevant and regularly searched keyword terms.

More SEO Resources & Which to Trust

Everybody these days seem to be an expert on SEO. However, there’s some advice that will potentially destroy your site’s reputation in search engines in the long-term. Here are the only SEO resources you’ll need to launch the first leg of your blogging journey

The Quicksprout University – The online guide was created by Neil Patel, who is a proven white-hat SEO expert with real experiences that helped many major brands improve their rankings in search engines. Neil is a huge advocate for safe and authentic techniques that yield real results in the long-term that last. He debunks the hype and shares what really works for websites and businesses. It’s a lot of content and is worth approaching like a study.

Any resources on the web that claim to be able to show you how to rank overnight without much effort should be avoided. Note also, that in many cases these techniques work but in due time Google’s algorithms will notice the site’s profile and will downgrade the its ranking or even blacklist. Black hat is not a long-term strategy for blogs looking for reputable and long-term success.

Social Media & Marketing

Social media is another powerful tool when it comes to building relationships. I know many new bloggers are asking how can I get 1,000 followers or how can I create a respected voice that will lead to sales and income? It begins with one reader or user at a time. Do not think about trying to acquire 1,000 fans or followers. Instead, think about how you intend to create genuine relationships. The numbers are irrelevant and your focus on that superficial metric will not yield maximum results. Remember, we’re thinking long-term and your energy needs to be directed to providing genuine experiences for all. So as you engage users on social networks, be of service to those you come in contact with, share and engage in useful conversation. The opportunities will come to talk about your brand and website, that just should never be your primary goal. You’re not a traditional salesman.

Building your profile in these communities will yield excellent results for you. A presence on 100 different social sites will not make a bigger splash but instead drive you thin. As a new blogger, target and focus only on a few networks and make those few count in a big way.

The tool to use here is Hootsuite which allows you to seamlessly manage 5 social media accounts from a neat interface along with a few other useful tools for bloggers. Thus eliminating the need to be switching screens and logins. A powerful time saver.

The networks I recommend for new bloggers are mainly Twitter, Google +, Triberr, LinkedIn & Facebook. The list order is intentional. Every follower, user and connection is important and worth engaging at some level. That’s how you’ll begin to build your reputation.