So if you’ve been following along, by now you have a blog up and

running. You’ve also played with a few WordPress plugins and

enhance your site.

You’re pretty close to launch. If you’re like most of us, you

feel something is missing but don’t know what it is.

Don’t worry though, it happens to me every time, even when I have

gone through this process numerous times. That’s why I developed

this checklist.

It helps remind me of things that I need to set or do on my blog

before I announce my blog publicly.

Note this is not random list of things. It doesn’t try to be

comprehensive. If you try to cover everything before you launch,

and get it perfect at the same time, you will never get the blog

out the door.

I am a firm believer in gradual growth. For it to grow, your blog

has to be out there soliciting feedback, getting the contents

out, and start the promotion engine.

Those would not happen unless you launch. So instead of tweaking

every single detail, get it to the point that you have all the

important points covered, and then launch. You could always

adjust your blog logo a few pixels to the left later.

You get what I mean.

Quick blog pre-launch checklist
You have quite a bit of work to do, so let’s just begin.

1. Blog name

Check to make sure your blog name is optimal, both interesting

and search engine friendly.

2. Set the categories up

Enter the categories you have carefully researched in previous

modules into WordPress.

3. Blog pages per page

Set it up so it displays 5-7 posts per page, especially if you

display full content and your article is long.

4. Comments

If you decide to allow blog comments feature, use the Discussion

setting to adjust your preference. Also activate the Akismet

plugin to filter comments.

5. Permalinks

By default, WordPress is fine but you can optimize it further by

changing the permalinks to include %postname%

6. Miscellaneous

Does your blog include image and other files? If you will often

upload images, make sure you organize your folders into month-

and year-based. Otherwise turn this option off.

7. FeedBurner

This is one of the must-have plugins. Setup a FeedBurner account

at Google and enter your FeedBurner URL in your blog setting.

8. XML-Sitemap

Yet another useful plugin to help search engines find your

content.

9. About page

Create a compelling about page. You want your readers to know

you. Make it interesting, talk about you a bit but still focus on

the readers.

10. Contact form

Use the plugin in the previous module to set one up quickly. Give

a way for the readers to get back to you personally, if they

choose.

11. User name

By default, it will display admin as the default blog author. You

want to change it by clicking on your user name in the upper

right corner, fill in your full name, update the profile once,

choose your full name in the “Display name publicly as” field and

finally update your profile once again.

12. Get the first few posts ready

You want to welcome readers with at least a few good content to

increase the chance of them sticking around or subscribe to your

RSS feed.

Get to work, we are about to launch…
I purposely make this lesson short so you can have more time to

work on your blog. In the next installment, you will be launching

your blog.

Congratulations, you have gone through most of the technical

stuff if you’ve reached this step. Blog software is here to make

your web publishing experience better. Once you have it up, most

of the time you can focus on content and promotion.

Of course, you also need strategy to get more traffic, grab the

readers attention, produce content quickly, create high quality

content, monetize your blog and more.

Those are the topics that you are going to learn for the rest of

this course.

Enjoy, and get to work.