The 2 things to watch for when you start a new blog

This has been written by blog gurus the world over but not followed by blog beginners the world over, including me, when I started out. Though adapting these 2 won’t be bringing you overnight success, it does help out a wee little bit if you are one that is thinking of making some money from your blogs. However, I think this is applicable if you are using wordpress and hosting your own domain. I don’t know about other platforms as I have never tried them out except for Blogger which I know won’t apply.

Get a Good WordPress Theme

I change themes like I change my underwear. I really have a terrible weakness for new themes and I have said it many times, but the reason I change is because every now and then a new theme comes out and claims that it is SEO optimized and I feel myself itching to try it out and see if it does wonders to my traffic. Most of the time it does not show any improvements but having a theme that is Validated is better than a theme that is not.

If all the codes are valid it will provide search engines a clear picture of your contents in your blog. It has something that I don’t quite understand but know enough to tell me that the theme is good or not so good. Some themes includes the words, “valid xhtml” or something in your sidebars. It should stand to mean that all the codes have been written according to specifications and are good and clean. A theme like this normally loads very fast because there are no unnecessary or error codes. Search engines also loves this kind of themes as their robots won’t be crawling over too many errors.

However, even if you are using a clean theme, errors will still set in when you start to write your contents. Especially if you embed a lot of flash movies like those from YouTube into your post. Spelling mistakes also cause lots of errors. If you are curious, head over to validator.w3.org, type in your URL and you can check the number of errors you have. This blog turned up 26 errors, all from the video embedding codes and typos like white spaces. Compared to AhPek.com, which turned up 106 errors, this is still considered good.

Having said that, I think it is quite impossible to keep the codes clean when we keep inserting post in our blogs. As long as the original markup is good, there is no need to bother too much about those errors except it might prolong loading time, which is not a good sign in the eyes of SEO experts. Of course if you have he expertise, it is always good to clean up all the errors. Unfortunately, I am just a noob, so I continue using the theme as long as I still like it. Don’t get over obsessed with this. It won’t be good for your mental health. The thing is get a validated theme when you start out.

Write a Good and Informative “About Me” page

The most neglected portion of a blog is the “About Me” page. Every guru have reminded bloggers time and again and I remind new bloggers here again, that the “About Me” page is a very important element in our blog. Normal blog surfers will not pay any attention to this page, but when an advertisers comes looking, they WILL want to know more about you before deciding whether to put links in your blogs or whether they want you to write a review for them.

A good “About Me” page is like what the title suggest. It should be about you. It should be like a full resume of yourself. What are your strong points, your interest, your various other blogs if you have them, your writing skills and references. It should give someone interested a clear picture of your objective in starting that blog. In short, you should blow your own trumpet as loud as you can, but please do it in a very humble way and not sound too arrogant or obnoxious to an extent that it becomes disgusting.

Hope all those who have just started a blog will take into account what I have just said. though I don’t profess to be a blog guru, experience have told me that this 2 things have to be heeded. I wrote this after receiving an email from a potential advertiser who is interested to buy links from one of my blogs, saying they would like to know more about me when they can’t find anything informative in my “About Me” page in that blog. I redirected him here an I think he was quite happy because he offered to buy 2 links from both my other blogs and he offered 100 USD. for them.