Concepts

This first day will be very light on concept since the first order is to set up your blog and begin to personalize it. I’d encourage you to just go through the motions today, as we’ll go over the “why’s” on a different day. Let’s begin by watching this great 3 minute overview of how blogs work and how you might use yours…

Actions

Pretty cool, eh? Let’s get started!

Go to BestAgentBlogs.com, log in, and then click on “Your dashboard” in the blue Your Info box in the center of the page. When you are looking at your Dashboard, you will see a series of menus along the left side of the screen. That’s where we’ll be doing most of our work today. Let’s start by scrolling toward the bottom of the page and then click on “Settings”.

Settings > General

First, let’s change the Blog Title and Tagline to reflect the neighborhood or specialty you intend to promote.
Think in terms of someone searching Google for information on the neighborhood. Search engines will try to match the words used in the search, so don’t get too clever with the name. Ask yourself how your ideal client would search fto find the information you’ll provide. For example, if you farm the Hilltop neighborhood, you can expect people to search for “hilltop neighborhood” or “homes in hilltop denver” etc.

Let’s consider some possible titles and taglines:

“Living in Hilltop Denver – Your guide to the best neighborhood in Denver” – A great name that is relevant to searches from buyers, sellers, and current residents. Plus, both local and relo clients. Furthermore, it will rank with searches for “best neighborhood in denver. Local business people and community leaders would love for you to write about them! More on that later.
“Hilltop Real Estate Blog – Information for Buyers and Sellers” – Terrific Keywords, (“hilltop real estate”) but the theme is limiting. It sounds pushy – like you’re trying to sell something (real estate) instead of inviting a conversation about all things Hilltop. The pitch is premature.
“Pronouncements from the KING OF REAL ESTATE!!!! – BUY OR SELL A HOME IN HILLTOP TODAY!!!” – Uh… no. Really. No.

You can tweak this later, so don’t get too bogged down. You’ll find that one of the best benefits of having a blog is that it helps you focus your message, and nothing is written in stone.

Everything else in Settings should be fine for now except…

Settings > Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web application that tracks the visitors to your blog. It will give you more useful information than you can imagine, but it takes a while to get going. That’s why you want to set it up right away so we will have a few days of data to look at in a few days. Click here for instructions on how to set up Google Analytics for your blog.

Users > Your Profile

Avatar (Profile Picture) If you’re new to blogging, you probably don’t have a “Gravatar” but you want one now. A Gravatar is just a picture of you that will appear on your profile and next to any comments you make. The really cool thing is that it will also put your photo next to comments you write just about anywhere on the internet — automatically! People can click on your picture and follow the link to your blog. You only have to set this up once (it follows your email address) so take care of it right away. Just click the “Click here to get started” link. It will only take a couple of minutes and it’s free.

After getting your Gravatar, fill in the Name fields and choose “Display name publicly as” your full name. This will be used to identify you as the author of all your posts and will almost guarantee that you will be findable in Google as time goes on. You have Googled your own name, right? If someone is sure that they want to work with you and tries to find you via Google because they lost your card, you better be on one of the first few pages! We’ll make sure of it.

Never mind the rest of the contact info right now. However, now is a good time to change your password to something you will actually remember.

Appearance > Themes

Here you get to play with some styling. Although you have over a hundred themes to chose from, I’ll suggest that in general the more colorful and ornate the theme, the less you can personalize it. The theme controls your blog’s fonts and colors — all the layout, really. It’s not easy to go around the choices of the theme designer, so choose wisely, but know you can change themes later if the one you choose doesn’t work out. Personally, I prefer to use simple, clean white themes so I can really make it each post look like I want with photos and such. It seems more like a glossy magazine or something to me. “FastMoving” and “Cutline” are particularly versatile themes that let you easily submit a custom “header image” which is geek-speak for the picture at the top of the page. Take some time to browse by clicking on the various options to pop up a preview. If you like it, click “Activate” at the top right. If you don’t like it, click the “X” at the top left.

Appearance > Widgets

Widgets are the things that appear in the sidebar of your blog, such as Links and recent posts. You can even put photos or videos in there, but let’s leave these for another day.

Posts > Categories

Click on the blue “Local Real Estate” to change the category to something more specific, such as “Hilltop Real Estate” or whatever is appropriate for your specialty. You can add extra categories such as “Hilltop restaurants” or “Hilltop Schools” as well if you like. Changing the categories in this way will help your search rankings for key terms quite a bit. Don’t go too broad, such as “Denver Real Estate” because there is just too much competition for those. Focus is key here. More on this subject tomorrow.

Posts

Finally! Let’s make your first post. Posts make up most of the content of a blog. As you learned in the video, each new post will be added above the others so your most recent post will always be on the top. For step-by-step instructions, see: How to Add Your First Post.

That’s it! Go to the top of the screen and click on the Blog’s title where it says “Visit site” and you can see your blog as a visitor would. Click your back button to return and then click “Posts” to see the list of two posts. If you want, you can delete the automatically created “Hello World” post by holding your mouse pointer above the name of the post, then clicking “delete” from the options that appear.

Pages

Pages differ from Posts only in that they are not part of the timeline. They stand on their own, each with their own tab. For example, your “About” page is always relevant and won’t change much over time. Spend some time up writing a bit about yourself on your About page. Again, we’ll revisit it again on some other day to touch it up.

Click on the Pages bar and then click on the blue “About”. It will look virtually the same as a post. Start by changing the title from “About” to “About [your name]”. In the body, write a bit about yourself. This is your chance to shine! When a visitor to your site is so grateful to have found the only good source of community info, they’ll certainly want to know more about the expert (you!) who provided them with this great resource.

Discussion

That’s quite a lot for the first day! Take a few minutes and share your thoughts over at the forum:

Day 1 – Set Up Your New Blog.