January 19, 2008

Product Review: Mark Joyner’s Learn to Blog for Profit & Fun Lesson 2

Just finished with Lesson 2 of Mark Joyner’s “Learn to Blog for Profit & Fun.” So you know how I was saying yesterday that I probably wouldn’t learn anything new until lesson 6 or 7, well I was wrong. I managed to get a really good idea from the second lesson. We covered the essential parts of a blog. And wouldn’t you know it, essential item number 1 I’d never even considered. It never occurred to me to have a welcome page. I always figured that the latest post should be displayed there. But it does make sense to have a “cover” page that tells my blog visitors who I am and what to expect from my blog. I guess I sort of have that with the subtitle in my blog header but I have no where near the brilliance that Joel Comm has in his blog header. Just take a look…..

His header image serves as his home page so that introduction is always there. Now I just designed my header a few days ago and am really having a hard time getting my head around a redesign. But it really is a great idea. I know in Typepad, you can have a featured post - a post that always displays at the top of your blog no matter what the latest post is. I already do that for my Million Dollar Rolodex blog but never thought of doing that for any of my other blogs. It’s easy enough to do for my Typepad blogs but I am slowly transitioning away from Typepad and to Wordpress and I know there’s a Sticky Post plugin but many of the Wordpress plugins don’t work with an SEO plugin that I have so I tend to shy away from them. I suppose could always modify the timestamp of the intro post so that it’s always on top but that’s a pain. If you know anything about me, I’m all about automation so to I better get cracking and figure out how to make the two plugins play nice. Hello Google - show me the way! Mind you, I could just do what Joel does and put that info in my header and not have to worry about it. We’ll see what happens over the coming weeks.Another thing that I must admit I’ve never done on my blog is conduct surveys and quizzes or run polls which is also an essential item. Running surveys is a great way to get insights about what your readers want. I run them all the time when I create new products but have never posted them on my blog. Probably because I assume no one is reading but you never know.So kudos to Mark Joyner for giving me two things to sink my seasoned blog teeth into on Day 2 of the course. Can’t wait to see how different my blog is by the end of the course. I’ll take a snapshot for you here just in case things change.