OK so you’ve made the decision to go self-hosted, congratulations. Now what? Assuming you’ve found your perfect blog theme and written a killer launch post; here are 10 essential things to do with your newly unwrapped WordPress blog.
1. Get your first post off to a good start with an introduction of who you are and why you decided to launch your blog. At first absolutely no one is going to see or know of this post, but with enough time and hard work you can look back upon it and feel proud of your first launch post, thinking positively of course and that you are going to succeed.
2. Create your author box and create a good one at that. Write a brief description about yourself and what you do, add some info about what you like to do in your spare time too. Most importantly, don’t forget to add a link to your social networking profiles, specifically your Google+ account.
3. Get a Gravatar by registering on the Gravatar website to create one for your blog. If you already have one then use it. Find out how you can optimize your Gravatar here.
4. Add your own Favicon icon to your blog; If you’re using Genesis, check out our short tutorial on how to do this here: Theme Customization.
5. Add and claim your self-hosted blog on Technorati.
6. Install the SEO WordPress plugin by Yoast so you can start using it from your very first post.
7. Install the Sharebar Plugin so that your posts can easily be shared on Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon and Digg plus many more social sites. If you don’t like the Sharebar plugin, consider the Digg Digg plugin instead. Check out the list of my top recommended plugins for newbie bloggers.
8. Add your blog’s RSS to your FeedBurner account. If you don’t have one of these yet, click the FeedBurner link to create one.
9. Install the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and install your tracking code.
10. Create a sitemap in Google Web Master Tools.
11. Claim your website on Alexa.
OK, once you’ve taken care of all those little essentials, you can sit back and begin cranking out tons of awesome, mind boggling content for your future readers… Enjoy.
About Samantha Wright
Top post and great tips once again, many thanks for sharing.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed the post.
Thanks for sharing useful tips about blog.
Dear Samantha and Fabrizio:
Thanks for laying out some useful and valuable information that I can really use now.
I’ll be doing a website launch, hopefully by the end of the summer, and definitely plan to tap into more of the good info you all are putting out there.
Fabrizio – I want my site to be like yours when it grows up!
Thanks again!
–Donna
Hi Donna,
thanks for your kindest words and I’m really pleased that you enjoyed the post. We’ll be adding much more resourceful information in the coming months so do keep checking back or subscribe to our RSS. All the best with your website.
Samantha
All these are really important points to do with new blog, especially gravator image and autor box info, and a link to facebook is required as well
Hi Samantha
Just wondering why you were suggesting self-hosting, especially for startups- what would you say were the advantages of that over hosting on WordPress.com with a custom URL?
The only thing I think I am missing that I wish I had on my site is the ability to use Google Analytics, but there is a (more limited) amount of data available from WordPress anyway which is quite useful.
Cheers
Peter