After writing out the “About” page and “Aims” pages I began to try and arrange my thoughts around how to format these pages and the layout, I am trying to make it into a easy to follow day by day story about a normal persons attempt to break into IM, I’m aiming to monetise any web sites I do make to lean towards AdSense, for the simple reasons that it is simple to work with, has proven track record for paying on time and as stated in there TOS.
There are a lot of dubious companies out there claiming all sorts of payouts, Google AdSense has been around for years and is about as safe as you can get for reputation. I will of course be using other sources of revenue, AdSense may not be right for a particular niche and other services may preform much better, its just a case of trial and error till you find the optimum media for that niche.
So the first on my list of jobs to be done is to set up this blogs layout to the way i want it, then set the actual nuts and bolts of the blog up ie plug-ins etc. I use many different plug-ins but will give a list of my main favorites.
- Stat-press – Visitor stats, tells me everything I need to know, spiders, visitors, referrers, page views etc.
- All in 1 SEO – Handy little add on to allow you to tweak new posts for SEO work.
- Privacy Policy – Makes the PP page you see on this site, keeps Google and AdSense happy.
- Follow Me – Twitter follow me plug-in you see to the right of the screen.
- GreetBox – Individual Greeting to new visitors based on which site they came from.
- Sociable – Social bookmarking add on to allow visitors to easily bookmark the page from there favourite Social Site.
- XML Sitemap – Generates a special XML site map which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
- Twitter Tools – Twitters any new post, great for getting new pages indexed fast.
- DB Backup – Backs up the database for your blog…..and that means all your posts etc.
As for the theme I have just changed the header on a standard WP Theme 10 Min’s on photoshop, I might later go on to a custom theme but so far I have always found it a pain to work on adjusting them to get them just how I want them. There are optimised themes said to generate a better CTR for AdSense and Ill take a look at some later when traffic is established and split test to see if there is any results worth looking at.
I have hosting already from previous projects so I’ve just used some spare space, I’ll be taking a more in debt look at whats around soon. So where on GoDaddy at the moment.
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