Well, it’s been a while, and I do apologize to everyone who’s following “Does My Blog Make Me Look Fat” (aka DMBMMLF). I stopped at lesson 3 and haven’t gone further.

The rest of the lessons are in the wings, but just not up here.

I’ve been a bit on a rollercoaster regarding my working life and unfortunately DMBMMLF has been a casualty. It’s not dead, just recovering.

I’m starting on a new path, involved with a group coaching program with Suzanne Evans, and I’ve let WPChick sort of languish. I need to pick it back up and keep going because I still believe in what I’m doing here. I have a few things up my sleeve with regards to DMBMMLF, a few products and services related to the series, which will be coming out soon.

The other thing that’s been taking my time and energy recently: I switched all my sites over to Fat Cow hosting because it’s what I’m encouraging clients to use. I figure I’d better put my sites there too. It was a painful process moving 15 sites, but it’s finally done! And I have a new idea for a blog post on moving your WP site from one host to another. Look for that soon, too!

One more thing:

If you have a business and can’t afford thousands of dollars for a business coach, here’s the next best thing.

Dave Navarro‘s put together a great series of calls with business coaches such as Naomi Dunford of Ittybiz, Chris Garret, Mark Silver, Pam Slim, Brian Clark of Copyblogger and more.

Twelve excellent teachers in their own right talking with Dave Navarro the Launch Coach on various ways to help you in your business.

You can get the More Buyers Mastermind* for $97 until Friday. Then the price doubles. And 30 days from Friday it triples…

So you not only get 12 calls, but you get transcripts, workbooks and follow-up calls.

An hour with just one of these folks is way over $97, so I suggest you get in now. Lots of solid information you can go back to whenever you need it.

*(yes, this is an affiliate link)

So that’s it for now.

If you’re following the Does My Blog Make Me Look Fat? series, I’m running a little behind editing week 3. The flooding where I live has me a bit distracted lately.

It should be up later this week, and if you’ve subscribed to the blog’s feed or to get emails in a previous post, you’ll be notified.

Alrighty! Time to get on with week 2. I updated the post that used to be “Day 2″ with a couple of screen shots & a bit of clarification.

But first, did you do anything for week 1?

Did you run into any snags?

If you have, let me know in the comments & I’ll do a once-weekly Q & A Post along with the assignments.

So, without further ado… Week 2: Personality.

This is part of a series called “Does My Blog Make Me Look Fat?” – a now 10-week series on how to improve your blog doing small, relatively simple things that don’t take up all your time.

Since I switched this to be a weekly thing, I’m going to take the opportunity, as the first in the 10 week series, to go over what has been posted so far and what’s coming up next.

If you stared out with me and tried to keep up, take this opportunity to go back over the first four days at your convenience. This week I’ll be updating and revising the last few posts so you will get some new and clearer information.

So, Week 1 is Look & Feel. This is essentially how all the parts of your site work together to emphasize your site’s mission.

So this week, with your site’s mission in mind, re-read that post.

If you don’t know what your site’s mission is, take about 10 minutes and write down everything you can think of about what you want to say with your site.

Take another 5 or 10 minutes and make what you wrote into a coherent site mission. Now you have a guideline for your site, and whenever you decide to change something or add new content, refer back to your mission.

It will guide you well.

Week 2 is Branding. Branding is just a fancy way of saying “personality,” or how are you different from anyone else.

Week 3 is Basic SEO, or making your site spider-friendly. I’ll flesh this one out a bit with more information about what Spiders or Crawlers are and what they tend to like.

Week 4 is Navigation. How easily people can find information on your site will help you keep them there.

I’ll add a blog post letting you know when the previous four weeks have been updated.

Now here’s what to come:

1. Posts: Categories – What are categories and how to use them.
2. Posts: Content – What you write is probably more important than any other point covered. If you focus on anything, let it be content first.
3. Posts: Schedule – A regular posting schedule helps set your readers’ expectations.
4. About Page – How well is your About Page portraying who you are?
5. Contacting You – How easy is it to contact you?
6. Social Media Integration – Getting your site visible to the right people will do wonders for your visitor count.

I’ve been getting some great feedback regarding this series and because of the sheer volume of information, I’ve decided to change it from posting daily to weekly.

This will give you more time to absorb the info and do the exercises without stressing out.

So there won’t be another post for a few days. I’ll start up again on Monday.

I’ll also be editing the first four posts based on some comments and questions I’ve received.

Thanks if you’ve made it this far, and I hope you’ll stick around for the rest!

This is Day 4 in a 10-day blog series called “Does My Blog Make Me Look Fat? Ten Days. Ten Small Actions. One Great Blog”

Today will be a little lighter than the past 3 days. Again, I apologize if I’m overloading you with information. I guess I underestimated my gabbiness. I think the last 7 days will be easier to handle.

How visitors find things on your site – your pages and posts – make up your navigation.

Most sites have a main navigation bar across the top or on the left side of the page where it’s easy to see.

The same goes for a lot of WordPress templates.

There’s usually some sort of navigation across the top (usually below your logo/site name) that has all your pages in it. You don’t have to do much but start creating pages for them to show up in the navigation

Widgets can take care of the navigation as well. These are found in your Admin under Appearance > Widgets.

Widgets on WordPress

• You can add a Pages widget which will list all your pages in order.
• A Categories widget will list all the post categories.
• The Archives widget will list all the months you’ve blogged and a link to each months’ posts.
• And there’s a Tag Cloud widget which will cluster all your tags and the bigger they are, the more posts are associated with them.

We’ll get into how to use Tags & Categories properly tomorrow, so for now we’ll concentrate on how your visitors find your content once they’re on your blog.

If you’re running a blog for your business, you probably have several pages regarding your services, who you are and how to contact you.

The easiest and most accessible spot for these links is across the TOP of your site.

As I said before, most themes have this ability. If you’re just blogging for yourself and NOT your business, I still recommend you have at least an about and a contact page.

Quick tip: You can change the order of your Pages by editing a page and changing the “Order” box on the right hand side under “Attributes.” This is a little buggy still so play around with your page order to find what works best.

WordPress Page Order

Next I recommend you add the search feature on your page. Some themes come with the search built in to the theme itself, but in most cases you can add it using the Search widget.

Lastly, choose one secondary way for people to find your posts. It’s not all that necessary to have the Archives, Categories, Tags and Calendar widgets on your sidebars.

Select one that makes the most sense to you.

I do not recommend using the Calendar or the Archives though. The calendar doesn’t really add much but clutter in my opinion, and isn’t all that useful. The Archives can be handled through an Archives page.

To create an archives page you need to make sure your theme has an Archives template.

You’ll find “Templates” under the Attributes section on the right side of the Page editor.

Choosing a Page Template in WordPress

If you click the drop-down and it has something that resembles the words “Archives Template,” you’re in luck.

Just create a new page titled “Archive,” set the template to “Archives” or whatever it’s called, and publish.

You should have a new page that lists all your posts. Cool, huh? 

Now not all templates have an archives template, so YMMV (your mileage may vary).

So your assignment for today, should you choose to accept it is to find someone who hasn’t seen your site before and ask them to find a few things:

• Your about page
• The very first post on your blog
• Any post from a month ago
• A post that has a Tag of your choosing.

Try to observe them doing this and see where they have trouble. Then ask them how easy/hard it was to find each item.

And if you have enough energy, take some of the stuff you learned today and fix the problem areas.

Don’t forget to Subscribe to the blog or sign up below to get the next 6 days delivered to your inbox. Remember, I’ll be offering all this as an eBook at the end of the series and folks who sign up will be the first to know (and get a sweet discount).

This post is part of the Does My Blog Make Me Look Fat: Ten Days. Ten Small Actions. One Great Blog Series. Here are the rest:
MYDMBMMLFPOSTS

Ten Days. Ten Small Actions. One Great Blog.

I’m realizing that the tagline for this series isn’t exactly honest. True, I’m doing this all in ten days and if you follow all the recommendations you’ll have one great blog.

But each day has more like 4-6 small actions. So for that I apologize, but the tagline’s staying. I’m giving you all this information but the assignments only have one action – the most important one (at least, in my opinion).

Feel free to do it all, only complete one. or heck, be a rebel and ignore my advice completely!

Onward!

I’m sure you’ve heard of SEO – it’s short for Search Engine Optimization.

It’s making your site easy for search engine bots to index and writing good content that relates to what your blog is about.

You know those guys who send you emails out of the blue claiming they can get you in the top spots on Google for thousands of dollars?

You don’t need ‘em.

Really. With a decently optimized WordPress theme (I’ll list some later), a few tweaks to your site, and good targeted content, you too can rank highly on Google and other search engines.

My own site, WPChick was up only a couple of months and I’ve ranked as high as #2 on Google for “WordPress Coaching.” Granted, one of the reasons is that there’s not all that much competition for those keywords right now, it does show you that a few simple things can definitely improve your standing.

Your Theme

First of all you need to make sure your WordPress theme is not causing any problems.

A clean, well-coded theme will give the search engine crawlers an easier time getting through your content. Try to choose a theme that says “SEO-Friendly” or “SEO-Optimized.” There’s really no guarantee these themes actually ARE what they say, but your chances are good.

Or stick with proven paid themes like Headway, Frugal, Vigilance or Thesis. 

Make sure you enter a descriptive Blog Title (your name, VERY short blurb about what you do) and a tagline under Settings > General in your WordPress Admin. Your META tags (title & description) will reflect whatever’s in these two fields.

If you need more control over your theme’s defaults, consider the All-in-One SEO plugin. This will allow you to fine-tune all the META information on your main page, each blog post and each page.

Links

Link your site everywhere and get others to link to you. 

Create internal links. These are links to other pages on your site within your posts and pages.

And most of all, link to other relevant sites in your posts and pages.

And for the love of chocolate-chip cookie dough don’t abuse this!

Don’t beg complete strangers for links. Don’t use stupid link-generating “systems.”

The key here is “organic.” Ask friends, family members, associates, anyone/where you have a relationship with folks for links to your site.

And reciprocate. 

Be a good Netizen (Sorry. I hate that word, too).

Permalinks

How easy is this to read?

http://yoursitename.com/?p=118

It doesn’t say much about what may be on the page. Funny thing is, the search engine bots can’t really do much with that either. It’s a number. Numbers don’t really correlate to any meaningful search terms that will help you with your SEO.

So WordPress has a built-in feature called “Permalinks.” You can tell it to re-write the structure of your permanent links so they look something like:

http://yoursite.com/wordpress-rocks-harder-than-ac-dc/

See the keywords? You have WordPress & AC/DC in your URL. And if your post has those repeated a few times (in moderation and in context!! keyword stuffing is a no-no), you’re good to go.

If you already have lots of posts on your blog, changing your Permalinks will make it a bit difficult for people who have linked to specific posts before. That URL (http://yoursitename.com/?p=118) will no longer be accessible. 

So make sure you install a plugin like Permalinks Migration to handle the Permalink structure change.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are handy little things. They’re a place where all the pages of your site are listed and linked.

Excellent for search engine bots/crawlers/spiders since they can go to one page and see every single page listed.

Use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create a bot-readable XML file (eXtensible Markup Language – just another coding language that handles structured information like a blog post).

Then sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools account, verify your blog (requires a bit of coding or FTP access) and submit your Sitemap. This will help your site get indexed quickly and make sure that all your pages are indexed.

Google Webmaster Tools is also handy for analyzing your site. See this comprehensive guide for the other features and reports if you’re interested.

Your assignment for today: Check on your Blog Title and Tagline in the  Settings > General screen in your Admin. Make sure they’re short, but descriptive and include the keywords you want to target.

If you’re feeling adventurous, install the All-In-One SEO plugin and see how much control you can have over the META tags on your blog and each individual post and page.

If you’re feeling absolutely nuts, take on all the above recommendations.

As before, let me know how you’re doing!

P.S. I know it’s a lot to absorb. That’s why at the end of the 10 days, I’ll make this all available as an e-Book (with more in-depth how-tos and step-by-step instructions!) so you can work through it at your own pace.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog or sign up below so you don’t miss a thing.

This post is part of the Does My Blog Make Me Look Fat: Ten Days. Ten Small Actions. One Great Blog Series. Here are the rest:
MYDMBMMLFPOSTS

Yesterday we took a gander at your blog’s Look & Feel. It was a lot to digest, I know so I’m going to make Day 2 of Does My Blog Make Me Look Fat a little easier on you (but not much!).:

Today we’re going to work on getting your personality on your blog. This is also known as “Branding.”

In this world if you’re a solopreneur or tiny biz, you need your business to stand out.

What if your core business is not so unique?

How do you differentiate yourself?

With your blog you have several opportunities to do so by infusing it with your personality.

Logo. Make sure your name is in lights.

Most WordPress themes have decent type-based headers so don’t fret too much about having a custom designed logo.

If you simply must have a logo, there are inexpensive logo designers out there or you can fire up the GIMP (or Photoshop) if you’re brave and make one yourself.

I highly recommend you stick with a text-based logo or logotype as the fancy-shmancy designery types say.

But what’s most important is that you you have YOU splashed across the top.

A quick aside: The WPChick logo was created by an excellent Atlanta-based designer named Helen. You can find her on Etsy.

Along with your name or logo, you want to make sure it’s super clear from the first few seconds of viewing your blog who you are, what you do or what you’re blog is about.

You can use a tagline or sub-heading on your blog to do just that.

Here’s how you add your tagline to your header in WordPress:

1. Go to Settings > General in your WordPress Admin
   
2. Type in your tagline in the “Tagline” field:
   
3. If your WordPress theme has this enabled, your tagline should now appear on your front page below your Blog Title.

Here are a few examples of useful taglines:

• Chris Brogan
• Un-marketing
• The Art of Non Conformity
• Coach Cathy Loh

Be Consistent.

Make sure you have the same thing splashed across the top of every page and  looks essentially the same (a no-brainer with WordPress).

Enough about logos. So how about your personality?

Theme. Does your WordPress theme match your personality?

There are TONS of themes for WordPress out there both paid and free.

It just takes a little time to look for them.

You’re bound to find one that captures your eye as well as reflects who you are.

The two that I like most mainly because I’m a huge fan of simplicity are Vigilance (which I use on WPChick.com) and Frugal. Both have free and paid versions. And yes those are affiliate links. That is, just in case you’re wondering.

Posts. Do they sound like you?

Is your voice showing through or does reading them out loud make you sound more like the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons than how you actually speak?

Before you hit “Publish” on any of your posts, read them out loud.

If your writing sounds stiff and dry, try this:

Pretend you’re writing a letter (with a pen on paper no less!) to your closest friend. Start out “Dearest Mathilda…” and go from there.

If you have to heighten the reality and actually write it on paper with a real-live pen go for it. And if you really have a friend named Mathilda, excellent!

You’ll find your writing style is a LOT more conversational, and a lot more interesting. Lose the jargon, the industry-talk. Be more you with your writing, and your personality will shine right through.

Your assignment: Re-write the most boring post on your blog (or write a brand new one) as if you’re writing to a friend. Be conversational, informal, and write the way you speak. And If it rocks harder than AC/DC, let me know in the comments. I’d love to read it!

p.s. here are some free font resources for you:
DaFont
1001 Free Fonts
Chank: some free, some not-so-free

Sign up below or subscribe to this blog so you don’t miss a thing!

This post is part of the Does My Blog Make Me Look Fat: Ten Weeks. Ten Small Actions. One Great Blog Series. Here are the rest:
MYDMBMMLFPOSTS

What is Look & Feel? Why does this matter to me?

Look & Feel is a designer-ese term for how all the elements in your site work together to form a coehsive “thing.”

Think Apple.

You know an Apple product just from the packaging, right?

Everything they do radiates the same Apple Look & Feel.

From the product to packaging to commercials, you instantly know it’s Apple.

So what does this mean for you?

All the elements of your site are supposed to support your site’s mission.

So today we’ll pick on three points today to help you better express who you are:

1. Your Blog Header (logo & navigation)
2. Your Blog Posts
3. Your Blog Sidebars

There are tons of things that encompass “Look & Feel” but we’re taking small, easy steps, remember?

What can I do to Improve my Look & Feel?

Your Blog Header & Navigation

Your Header – Tell Them Who You Are!

Your header is usually the first thing people see when they come to your site.

Make sure it’s eye-catching (nice font or cool logo) and has a quick tagline describing what you’re about.

Most themes already display your Blog Title and Description (both can be changed by going to Settings > General).

Other themes allow you to specify an image URL to use as a logo, like Vigilance (the theme I use for WPChick.com):

And yet others require you to use the “Editor” feature of the Appearance menu and look at scary code. Don’t do this unless you really know what you’re doing.

Your Navigation

Does your navigation just SCREAM “Hey I’m the Navigation!” or does it whimper?

Consider a theme that has navigation across the top.

Most WordPress themes are laid out this way anyway, but if it’s not and you have Pages as well as Posts, consider finding a new theme. I have some suggestions.

Your Blog Posts – Highlight Your Points

Make use of header tags (i.e. <h2>… </h2>) to highlight your main points. Use the Format drop-down in Visual mode when editing a post.

The Format menu is only visible when you activate the “Kitchen Sink” – as seen below (thanks to Vintage Mommy for the reminder):

This makes it easier to skim and has the added bonus of doing some cool search engine-y things (more on this on day 3).

Sure, some people can get away with LONG-arsed paragraphs, but I think that being concise has its merits, too.

Short paragraphs and headers makes your blog easy to read. I know my eyes get tired when they see long stretches of text on a computer screen.

I may be old-fashioned but I’d rather do my intense reading on paper.

Sidebars – Keep ‘em Simple

Sidebars are there not to stuff everything and anything in ‘em but they serve to keep things visible and highlight important stuff.

You can highlight things like your newsletter signup form, subscriptions to your RSS feeds and even how to find you on Twitter.

Leave out anything that doesn’t really add to your site’s main goals.

You don’t really need post categories, tags, archives and pages as well as all your friends’ blogs and latest photos from your Vegas vacation (of course unless your blog is a personal blog than none of these guidelines apply).

Add post categories OR tags – not both. Create an Archive & Blogroll or Links page (I’ll show ya how to do this soon) instead of having all that information crammed into your sidebars.

So that’s it for today. Leave a comment and let me know how you’ve done, shoot me some before & after screenshots or just let me know what you think about this series so far (even though it’s only the first installment).

Here is the rest of the series:
MYDMBMMLFPOSTS