The next thing you need to do is order professional graphics. Unless you are a graphic designer I would strongly recommend against creating your own. I used Canva and made my own header on my last blog. It looked okay, but, professionally designed graphics are definitely the way to go.
Don’t forget about your Gravatar. What is a Gravatar? It is an image saved in the WordPress system. After setting your Gravatar image, every post you make will show your Gravatar. To do that in Optimize Press‘ Smart Theme, from your dashboard click on users off to the left. Then click on your user name. Scroll down the page and you will see where your Gravatar will appear. Click to open the link and it will take you to where you can open a free Gravatar account. Then in settings under discussion scroll down so that anyone that has set a Gravatar, it will show their Gravatar when they leave a comment on your blog.
You will want to create an about me page telling your story who you are and your journey. You will also need legal pages and to become GDPR compliant. You can find plug ins to create your legal pages and GDPR compliance. The plug in I am using for my legal pages is WP InstaLegalPages. For GDPR compliance I have RandysGDPR MySite. Unless you are going to block all of the EU from accessing your site GDPR compliance is a must and, why would you block that many potential customers? That would leave a lot of money on the table. Don’t forget a social share plug in so your readers can share your posts to social media.
When you are writing your blog posts, be sure to include an affiliate link in each one. Obviously you don’t want to load up the post with links it would look bad but also appear desperate. One or two would be fine. Blog frequently and always share your post to social media to let people know that you have a new post. Include a photo or two in your post. you can go to pexels.com and find a variety of stock photos that are free download or you can purchase others. In the search bar search for the subject that your post is about and choose a photo that you like. I never did this with the old blog and I just had a white page filled with grey text and nothing to break it up. The appearance of your blog is important if you want people to visit and read what you have to say.
Lastly, be sure to have a call to action in every post.just as in sales, if you don’t ask for the sale you won’t get it, if you don’t tell your readers to do something they won’t. Tell them to share your post on social media if they found it helpful, tell them to feel free to comment on your post. This brings up another point to make about blogging. Spambots are forever searching the web for places to leave their links. There will never be a Gravatar, usually it is just nonsensical text having nothing to do with the post. You can spend a lot of time deleting spam from your blog unless you install an antispam plug in. I myself use Akismet. It does a very good job and the only comments I have to moderate are legitimate ones. Once you have your blog set up, spend a little time once a week or so and search for other blogs in your niche, read their posts and leave comments, but leave legitimate comments about the post. Tell them what you liked about the post or ask them a question about it. Why am I telling you to do this? Back links, the more back links to your site, the better. Just make sure that they are good links, you don’t want a bunch of back links to blogs that have no relation to your niche. Every blog when utilized correctly sets the blogger up as an authority in his niche. You want the back links from what Google would consider authoritative sites.
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PS If you want to order blog graphics you can contact the gentleman that did mine. You can email him at steve@gfx-1.com I can’t guarantee the same speed but, I ordered mine on a Friday, Saturday morning I had samples in my inbox. I approved them and had my graphics Saturday night and on the blog Sunday.
