Before you submit your post to social media sites, get your blog ready. Not only do we want a high hit count, we want a very low bounce rate and high subscriber rate. REPEAT VISITORS! Start with these few simple steps to make your day of fame worth while.

Speed! Make sure your site is fast and ready to handle the load. If your site is too slow, you can almost guarantee they will leave. Is your blog ready to handle 10,000 visitors? I wrote a post about simple things you can do to speed up WordPress. I highly recommend at least installing the WP Super Cache from the article. Do that before you submit it to the social media sites.

Minimize the ads. Too many will deter the visitor and many will ‘Stumble’ onto another blog. With the initial social media burst, you want to work on getting your visitor to subscribe or bookmark your blog. The money making part will come as you build a nice reader base.

Make it easy for them to subscribe. Again, we want repeat visitors from the initial burst. Add subscribe buttons, Digg buttons, bookmark options, link options. Don’t over crowd the page with buttons, but make it easy and accessible. Remind them to Digg your article. Just a little nudge to wake up the visitors who are day dreaming while they browse.

Verify all your links work. Nothing is worse than a dead link on your site. You finally got 10k visitors from Stumbleupon, and you finally got them to browse around your site. Don’t let them hit a bad link and think it’s a dead end. Check them all!

Got more easy tips for the social media onslaught? Share it with us!

I finally got my butt up and began the dreaded chore. I started by putting all my bills into a BILLS folder, all my receipts when into a RECEIPTS folder, and all of my contracts went into a CONTRACTS folder. I then tagged each document with a post-it note. Each bill got a post-it with ‘bill’ written on it. Each receipt got a post-it with ‘receipt’ written on it. Once I was done, each document was in a folder and also had a post-it stuck to it. How’s that for organized?

I know what you’re thinking. This guy is nuts and is wasting his time with these silly post-it notes that aren’t very helpful. Well sadly enoough, most people follow this exact silly behavior with their blogs. No, really, they do! WordPress provides Categories and Tags to organized your blogs. Most bloggers don’t understand the intended use of these 2 items enough to fully harness it’s power. I’m here to help you.

Think of Categories as the manila folders (BILLS, RECEIPTS, TAXES, etc) and think of Tags as the
post-it notes. Put all your bills in the ‘Bills’ folder but put a different tag on the post-it note. Maybe some of the tags will say: ‘Phone’, ‘Water’, ‘Alimony’, etc. Do the same with your blog posts. All your posts should go in a Category, and each post should also be tagged with words that help complement the category name.

Tags are very helpful for a many reasons:

• They help with site navigation and can be used in a very similar style as the common ‘Related Posts’ links you see in blogs.
• When used properly, it can almost replace the Search function on your site.
• They help with SEO, allowing you load additional keywords into your blog. You also get an archive section for your posts organized by tags; again, nice for SEO.

Simple enough? Go through your blog and see how many times you’ve done any of this silliness. I bet you’re guilty of it too.

Akismet: The best comment spam protection for WordPress. Comes pre-installed with WordPress 2.0 or higher. All you need to do it get an API key and enter it in the plugin. See our article on the Akismet plugin. Must have? YES! Well, you already have it, just activate it.

All-In-One SEO: A very simple plugin that allows you to customize meta tags, page titles, keywords, descriptions and a lot more! Settings can be set globally, and edited per post as well! Must have? YES!

Login Lockdown: Helps to secure your admin page by locking an IP out after X number of failed login attempts. Stop brute for attacks with this nifty plugin. Must have? YES!

Sem-Google-Analytics: If you’re using Google Analytics, this plugin will allow you to very easily enter your Analytics tracking code into your site. Activate the plugin, paste your tracking code, and you’re done! Must have? YES!

WP Super Cache: Speed up your site with this simple to use plugin. Pages get cached into html files for super fast access. Must have? YES!

How many people do you know have Attention Deficit Disorder? According to some studies, it affects up to 12% of people living in the US. According to MY study, 100% of web users have it. How long do you wait for a webpage to load before you get ticked off and leave? 3 seconds? 2 seconds? half a second? For me, if it doesn’t show up almost instantly, consider me gone, off to another webpage. I only have 24 hours in a day. After sleeping, eating, drinking and blogging, I really have no time to wait for a webpage to load. I’m sure you’re the same way (minus the drinking part).

Do your readers a favor. Speed up your WordPress and don’t frustrate them with slow pages. They pay a pretty dime for high speed internet. Don’t let your site make them feel like they are still on dial-up.

There are a million different things you can do to speed up your WordPress. Some thing require knowledge of MySQL, Apache and PHP, not always easy. Start with these few easy steps and I’m sure you’ll notice a difference right off the bat.

1. Find yourself a good reliable hosting company.
   Not only does the hosting company need to have good uptime, they need to be fast. Lots of bandwidth and fast servers are a must. See our post on WordPress Hosting Recommendations.
2. Cache your WordPress pages with the WP Super Cache plugin. (Download here)
   Every time a link is clicked, WordPress makes a request to the MySQL database and renders the page using PHP. Nice design, but it can get slow if there are a lot of requests at one time. This plugin creates static html pages once a page is requested. The next time the page is requested, it gets delivered through the static html page, rather than making another request to the databse and regenerating the page. Simply upload the plugin to your plugins directory and activate it in your WordPress Admin page. Go to Settings, select wp-cache and click the ‘Enable It’ button.
3. Do some house cleaning on your plugins.
   Plugins are one of the best things about WordPress. They are Open source, free, and widely avaiable. They do slow down your WordPress a bit. The more you use, the slower you’ll get. Some are more optimzed than others. Go through each plugin you do use and ask yourself if the plugin is really needed. If not, deactive it and delete it from your Plugins directory.
4. Resize your images.
   Do you have a lot of images on your site? Check the file sizes of the images. Shrink the file size down buy saving your JPGs with more compression. Any photo editing program will do it. Get them as small as possible without the image becoming visibly pixelated.

WordPress, Made Easy…