Blogging Resources
The following is a guide to the all of the resources (courses, networking, website services, WordPress extensions, and more) that I utilize for Kikolani and other projects which I would recommend to anyone looking to create a successful blog and website.
Jump to: Courses | Networking | Website | WordPress themes | WordPress plugins
Education
Darren Rowse of Problogger created 31 Days to Build a Better Blog that helps bloggers take their blogging to the next level, from determining their blog’s elevator pitch (which was the key for me to determine my focus on Kikolani to blogging and social networking) to creating a posting schedule calendar and so much more. This workbook is a great guide for bloggers just starting out, or ones that want to refine their process to become more successful bloggers. Read my review to see how this ebook changed my blog!
The latest ebook by ProBlogger, Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers, helps bloggers improve their writing, grammatical, and SEO skills to produce more engaging content for readers and optimized blog posts for search engines. Read my review on how to use this ebook to compose better blog posts!
I am currently taking the Income Blogging Course Guide, a six month program that teaches you how to make money blogging, from keyword research and blog creation to product launch and much more. Start with the free guide in the banner above, or learn more about the course. Or check out my in-depth review on why I joined the program.
This year I’m attending the Blog World Expo in Vegas, confirmed for Friday and Saturday with Thursday as still a possibility. I’m sure that the schedule is going to be great, and the opportunities to network and meet some of my readers will be even better!
Social Media Examiner has brought together lots of big names for the world’s largest online Facebook event designed to empower marketers and small business owners to master Facebook marketing. It’s a live online conference you can attend from your home or office. The best part is if you miss anything, you can download the video and slides after it is on, and save them for future reference.
Even if you don’t decided to attend this online even beginning October 5th, don’t miss out on downloading the free sample class by Mari Smith!
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Networking
Third Tribe offers community members a private forum for marketing minded people to come together and help each other in building their blogs and businesses in a spam free, supportive community. They also offer regular recorded seminars (currently 14 in the archives) on a variety of topics including building a business around a blog, copywriting, video marketing, product launches, SEO, and more as well as question and answer teleseminars.
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Website Design & Services
CMS (Content Management System)
Kikolani, as well as my other websites, are run on a self-hosted WordPress platform. WordPress is a free blogging and content management system that can be used for blogs as well as static websites.
Domain Registration & Web Hosting
Domain registration and hosting for Kikolani is provided by GoDaddy. GoDaddy is based locally in Scottsdale, AZ and offers great support and service for a low price. Currently, I have several domains hosted with Kikolani for $7.99 a month on their Linux servers. You can get great deals for GoDaddy products monthly using the GoDaddy coupon codes on Game Weasel.
Mailing List
Kikolani’s mailing list and newsletter is powered by Aweber, one of the most widely used email marketing services by many top bloggers. You can try it for 30 days, and after that it is $19 per month for up to 500 subscribers.
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The Thesis theme for WordPress is a great theme for SEO optimization of your website. You can use it in it’s raw form straight “out of the box” or you can utilize the hooks platform and customize it to your heart’s content.
Press 75 offers some great premium designs – my particular favorite is the Social Life theme that I use on my personal lifestream, KristiHines.com.
If you are looking for a less expensive solution for premium WordPress themes, Elegant Themes is a great option. For only $39.95, you get one year access to all of their themes, plus any themes developed during your annual membership. Currently they have over 40 themes to choose from. Each theme has an options panel so you can choose to enable specific features, and most themes have stylings for at least three colors.
Jump to: Courses | Networking | Website | WordPress themes | WordPress plugins
The following are the plugins used on Kikolani to enhance design and functionality of the blog.
Akismet
Akismet is a spam filter for WordPress that comes default with the theme – simply register for an account on WordPress.com to get your API key to activate it. This prevents 90% of the incoming spam from coming through the comment form – everything can be checked in the backend (and should be often) for “false positives.”
CommentLuv
CommentLuv is a plugin that allows commenter’s last blog post to show directly below their comment. The benefits for having CommentLuv on your blog is huge – it helps readers discover new, related content from other readers, helps blog owners see what their commenters are about, and helps blog commenters share their content with others. Read about more reasons to love CommentLuv!
Compact Archives
Compact Archives creates a compact date based archive for your blog, which you can see in action on my archives page under the Calendar section.
Configurable Tag Cloud
Configurable Tag Cloud lets you create a customizable tag cloud for your blog so you can sort and size tags, only display select ones, and so forth. You can see this in action on my archives page as well.
Dofollow
Dofollow simply removes the nofollow attribute from commenters links and trackbacks. I like to think of this as a thank you to people who leave a valuable comment – they, in return, get a valuable backlink to their website.
Fast and Secure Contact Form
Fast and Secure Contact Form is a contact form plugin that has a lot of customizable options, and Captcha protection if you choose to enable it (I haven’t, but it is an option).
Google Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps creates and maintains an active sitemap to help your site become more search engine friendly. If you are just starting a site, you should create this right away and submit it to search engines for faster website indexing.
KeywordLuv
KeywordLuv allows commenters to enter Your Name@Your Keywords, giving their website link specific anchor text. Perfect compliment to the Dofollow and CommentLuv plugins. Learn more about the benefits of KeywordLuv.
Redirection
Redirection let’s you handle all of those pesky issues where you need to create a quick redirect right from your admin dashboard, such as when you share a post, change the name, and then the URL changes but doesn’t redirect to the new post URL for some reason. It also keeps count of how many people come to that link and are redirected to the new one.
Show Top Commentators
Show Top Commentators creates a list on your blog of the people who have commented the most. You can customize this by time period, so it will show the people that have commented the most in a week, month, year, or ever.
Subscribe to Comments
Subscribe to Comments allows commenters to get an email notification whenever new comments are added to posts they comment on. Blog owners also get the advantage of seeing what posts have the most comment subscriptions.
Thesis OpenHook
Thesis OpenHook is a great companion to the Thesis theme. It allows you to add custom code to your blog without having to know all of the hooks in an easy to use interface. Learn more about getting started with Thesis.
WordPress Super Cache
WordPress Super Cache helps keep your site from overloading if there is a heavy surge in traffic.
WPTouch iPhone Theme
WPTouch iPhone Theme creates a mobile friendly theme for users browsing on their iPhones or other smartphones. Learn more about other mobile WordPress themes.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin adds related posts on your site to every post, encouraging visitors to stay longer on your website and read more of your content.
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