Entrepreneur Newbie

It seems like each week I learn a little more about running my own blog/website.  A few weeks ago I was not really even sure what a plugin was, but now I have learned to LOVE them.  There is an amazing variety of plugins available for free, and they can add some cool features to your blog.

I have often times felt a bit overwhelmed when I’ve searched WordPress for plugins.  There seems to be endless options.  Not only do I not know which one to choose, but I also have a hard time figuring out how to activate them and select the correct options to configure them.  It seems like they are written in another language…the language of programmers and website administrators.  As a layman, I have relied on searching the internet for other people’s reviews of the plugins I should try for my blog.

These ten seem to be on almost every list/blog I visited.  I’ve recently installed them, and so far so good.  Word of caution, most of these require you to set up additional parameters for them to work properly.  Once you’ve activated them, check your Settings to see what additional information is needed to make them work.  I have to admit, I did not understand about half the questions they asked, so I kept most of these plugins setup with their default settings.  If anyone has any advice on how to maximize these plugins, please send it my way.

1. Google XML Sitemaps – creates sitemaps for you.
2. All in One SEO Pack – optimizes your blog for SEO
3. FeedBurner FeedSmith – redirects your feeds to a Feedburner feed.  Then you can use Feedburner Feedstats.
4. WP-Cache – makes loading time faster
5. Akismet – blocks spam comments
6. Twitter Tools – brings your tweets into your blogs and tweets your new blog posts
7. Social Bookmarks – social bookmarking widget
8. Google Analyticator – allows you to access Google Analytics
9. WP-DB-Backup – backs up your WP database
10. WordPress.com Stats – tracks views, post/page views, referrers and clicks

Following are some of the sites I visited to find most of these.  Let me know if you have any others you suggest.

• 50 Best WordPress Plugins by Quick Online Tips
• Top 12 WP Blog Plugins by Blog Tactics
• Top WordPress Plugins by the Blog Joint
• Best WordPress Plugins Maximize Your Blog by WordPress Max
• 50 Best WordPress Plugins by So Web
• My Favorite WP Plugins by Urbano Alvarez

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Help is everywhere, you just have to ask for it.  As I’ve written about before, much of what I am doing to get my business off the ground does not fall under my “old” areas of expertise.  I often times feel a bit lost and in need of some serious help.  As I’ve said before, I miss my staff!!!!!  Without the budget, resources and clout of a big corporation behind me; I’ve had to find that help by utilizing a new set of resources, primarily my network of friends, family and former colleagues.

Networking is one of those buzz words you here all the time in lots of difference contexes, but few people, including me, trully tap into the resources all around them.  As soon as I decided to become an entrepreneur, I started networking…not on purpose.  I am not even sure I knew I was doing it.  I just like to talk.  Anyone who knows me will tell you I talk fast and I talk a lot.  My husband would add that I ask a LOT of questions too.

At the park, dinner parties, the gym, family gatherings, etc., I have talked and talked about my new venture and the help I am need to get it to market.  Who knew all that talking would pay off.  I have been absolutely shocked at the amount of resources I have found just by talking to people I know and friends of people I  know.

Following are just a few examples, that I thought other new entrepreneurs might find useful:

• One of my in-laws turned me onto Constant Contact, an email marketing firm for small businesses.
• A college friend of my husband’s introduced me to a small business lawyer, who introduced me to a website designer who turned me onto Crowd Spring, an online market place for creative services (logo design, etc.).
• A mom in my daughters music class told me about the Small Business Opportunity Center, low cost legal help for small business put on by the Northwestern School of Law.
• An old colleague emailed me a list of entrepreneur groups on LinkedIn.  One of those groups had an article about HubSpot and their free website grader.
• A friend and fellow entrepreneur recently told me about Search Engine Watch, a site about search engine optimization and search engine marketing.  The same friend told me about Google Analytics, a free web analytics tool that gives you insight into your website’s traffic.
• An old partner/client told me about American Express’s free website for entrepreneurs, Open Forum.  You don’t even have to have an AMEX card to use it.
• Another old colleague told me about Mashable, a social media blog.

I honestly could go on and on.  Thank you to all of my friends, family and colleagues who have listened to me talk and talk and have generously lent me their expertise or pointed me in the right direction to find what I needed.

For those of you other entrepreneurs out there, take every opportunity to talk about your new venture.  Its free advertising, and who knows, you might just find the help you desperately needed.  If you do, please share.  I still need a LOT of help!

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After building my two blogs and writing a handful of posts, I was anxious to have people start visiting my sites.  I changed my signature on my email to include links to my new blogs, I updated my LinkedIn profile,  I sent an email to all of my friends and family asking them to check them out and I asked my Facebook friends to do the same.

Although having my friends, family and former colleagues check out my blogs and provide me with feedback was great; what I really wanted was for someone I did not solicit directly to find me.  Last week I got my wish.  On both of my blogs I received comments from total strangers who found me organically.   I can’t tell you how exciting it was to know that someone was reading what I wrote.

I decided to do a small experiment and see if I could find my blogs via searching for key terms.  Although I was able to find my posts eventually, it took a lot of scrolling and searching.  In the past week I have done quite a bit of reading on Search Engine Optimization.  The main thing I learned is that it is far from an exact science.  Everyone seems to have ideas on how to improve your ranking, but there is no magic recipe.

My blogs are not like the movie The Field of Dreams.  I’ve built it, but I need to do a lot more than that if I want them to come.

Following are a couple articles and tools I found useful:

• Search Engine Optimization Tips For Bloggers
• 9 SEO Plugins Every Wordpress Blog Should Have
• Website Grader – Site provides you with feedback on your site and how to improve your ranking.
• Title tags: SEO by any other name

What useful information have you found on this topic?

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After HOURS and I do mean HOURS of searching through free WordPress themes for my two blogs, I have found a number of great sites. Like I mentioned in my week three blog (When did I become a programmer?), free themes come with limitations. These limitations can be partially overcome by changing code, but that is not so easy for us non –technical types.

To avoid having to do a lot of modifications, I recommend doing the following before you start your search for a free theme:
1) Review lots of other peoples’ blogs and how they are setup. This will help you get an idea of what you need and want out of a theme (how many columns, functionality, etc.) Pay close attention to those you were immediately attracted to and found easy to navigate.
2) Decide what functionality you want in your blog. If the theme is “widget enabled” you can often add the functionality you want (e.g. RSS links, Twitter link). Some themes have built in functionality. For example it might have a built in RSS link in the header. You may prefer to have a subscribe icon that offers lots of different options (Facebook, Twitter, RSS, email, etc.). If you aren’t familiar with code and programming, these things can be very difficult to change.
3) Give some thought to the image/brand you want to portray. I looked at my blog theme as my packaging. For this blog, I decided I liked the idea of the sky is the limit and also the play on the metaphor regarding the grass being greener. I new when I was searching for a theme I wanted to incorporate those two elements.

Now that you have a good idea of what kind of theme and what functionality you are looking for it is time to start reviewing themes. WordPress offers an impressive array of themes, but there are many other sites that have quite a variety. My advice is to download any themes you find interesting. I made the mistake of not downloading a few I liked, and I wasted lots of time trying to find them again.

Here are a few of the free theme sites I found. There are many others, but I found these sites to have a good variety of themes and they were easy to navigate. One last piece of advice, if you plan on using widgets, make sure the theme you choose is widget enabled.

1. www.wordpressthemesbase.com
2. www.topwpthemes.com
3. www.wordpressthemespark.com
4. www.wpthemesfree.com
5. www.wpthemescreator.com
6. www.themespreview.com
7. www.amazingwordpressthemes.com
8. www.themes-wp.com
9. www.wptown.com – This is the site I found this blogs theme on.
10. www.ezwpthemes.com – This site has some unusual themes. I found my onthegochicago.com blog theme here.

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After completing three weeks as my own boss I can still say with certainty that I AM STILL A NEWBIE! This past week I spent much of my time tweaking my blog themes and Twitter background.

Although I have been absolutely astonished at the free resources available to a new entrepreneur, they unfortunately have their limitations and don’t come with a free guy from the “Geek Squad” to help you when you inevitably get stuck.

All you have to do is type in “Free WordPress Themes” into your search engine, and thousands upon thousands of options come up. Not knowing what I needed in a blog or what I wanted the two blogs I was building to really look like, I ended up downloading and trying a number of different themes. I soon learned that “free” came with restrictions and limitations. Like your dad always said, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”

Some of the limitations can be overcome by making modifications to the code. Sounds simple enough for a programmer, but for those of us who can barely work a TV remote it was intimidating. What the heck does all those <, * and / mean? I decided to try my hand at programming. I read through the code, looked for familiar words, deleted and added lines and then checked my site to determine the effect.

I am VERY proud to say that I successfully changed the header, removed the ad section and redirected a few pages on my site. I was like a toddler who had learned a new trick and couldn’t wait to show it off to their parents. I practically dragged my husband down to my office shouting “Look at me, look at me…I am a programmer.”

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