This blog entry is going to be self-referential, because it is about what I did to get this site up and running and what I discovered along the way. I am brand new to this and I have never done most of the things I am going today, so all of it is new to me. I did have a website on Geocities ages and ages ago, plus something hosted by Comcast well over a decade ago. The only real HTML I had ever done was in notepad, and I cannot say I was all that skilled, but I did learn the tagging system at least.
A few years ago I received some form of Black Friday advertisement from GoDaddy.com for what was essentially a free domain for a year (you needed to pay some small ICAN fee, but otherwise no real cost). I reserved mgpotter.com for no reason other than vanity. It is my name, after all. I had some vague idea of using it for something, but I was pretty busy and never got around to doing very much.
About 6 months ago, after yet another month of intensive work to get a financing for a solar project over the finish line, I decided that I needed a little more investment into myself. I have already written a blog on starting to play D&D again, and taking the time to actually write was one of the things I wanted to do. I thought that I had enough experience as a CFO of public companies (12 years now) to add value in sharing my experience and I also wanted to write about the different things I do for fun.
The past Black Friday there was another sale email that came about hosting WordPress on your own GoDaddy site and I decided to try that. I had absolutely zero experience with WordPress but it looked like it was the leading blogging product out there. I now know that it is actually one of the leading website or content management systems in widespread use today, but it certainly is pretty powerful for blogging.
Once I had bought the WordPress option, I decided to start writing. I wanted to get at least a few weeks done in advance so if my schedule became too busy I would not lack content. I’m not a few weeks ahead now, but that is OK as I’ll have some time to bank some more blogs soon.
I decided to post Tuesday for CFO topics and Thursday for other topics. I decided on the very first topic while drinking some beers after an SCA fighter practice. One of the other knights there was interested in my put selling strategy and that was my first blog I wrote. Over the Christmas break I wrote most of the first month of content. This was just typing into Word on my iPad, I hadn’t done more than initiate the WordPress option at this point.
Now that I had some content done, I turned to actually getting the blog part working. I decided that instead of reading a book on how to set things up, I would just try and do it cold. I had deliberately chosen to host under my own name and to keep away from politics as a topic to write about because I spend about ½ my time in China and wordpress.com is blocked there.
There are many different hosts that support WordPress. GoDaddy has a nice and integrated approach called “managed WordPress” but I even could have hosted it on my Asustor NAS if I had wanted to. By using an external site, I was able to outsource the bandwidth and the maintenance of the WordPress program itself. Managed WordPress means that WordPress itself is always kept up to date. The releases for the major NAS are not as regular as WordPress itself, so you may have more security issues if you self host. If you just want a small, local version of a blog or a website, then hosting on a NAS could be a good solution.
The first step seemed to be choosing a theme which seems to be the look and feel of your blog site. I initially used one of the prominent starter themes called 2015, but I didn’t like the multi-column look. I searched through for something simple and found a theme called Lovecraft and decided that I liked it. There are thousands of free themes and lots of themes that you need to pay for as well. I have marked exploring themes down as something to do in the future.
My chosen theme used a horizontal picture across the top and I made my first design choice and picked a picture of the effigy of William Marshall that I had taken myself at the Temple Church in London. I have always been fond and interested in him and I was able to figure out how to upload the picture onto my site. WordPress uses a media repository and serves up pictures from there. You also can use a URL to a picture if you want that instead.
With a theme and a top picture chosen, I clicked on “publish” and now I had live content. I used wechat to get a colleague in China to check if my site would load. A quick test later and it did work. I puzzled and puzzled over how users were supposed to login to make comments. I even contacted GoDaddy customer service and they helped me to figure it out. Nothing appears on the main page, but there is an option if you go to the individual blog page (click on a headline on the front page if you did not use a link to go directly there).
A blog with no readers is not that useful, so I posted the link to my page on my Facebook feed. I did that manually, and noticed that the picture of William showed up as a preview.
The next thing I experimented with was publishing into the future. WordPress makes that easy with an obvious scheduling option. I tested it out, scheduling my post to show up the next mornings and, sure enough, when I woke up, there was the post published for the world to see.
I grew concerned that perhaps with the comment system turned on, that I might attract spam. So the first option I looked for was something to handle spam. There was a prominent option called “plugins” on the left menu when I signed in as the editor of the site (you can have multiple editors). Just like themes, there is a powerful built-in search I was able to use. A simple search for spam and I was able to find a plug in with a very large number of users called Akismet. It was pretty simple to install and I quickly had spam protection.
The next thing I wanted is something that would track users. I know that Google has quite an extensive suite of options to track visitors to websites called Google Analytics and I search for that in plug-ins . I found one called Google Analytics for WP Dashboard. I later found out that Yoast is probably the most popular, but the one I picked is near the top in popularity as well. That plug-in inserted the needed tracking code into my website and now I could see statistics on the tens of people visiting my blog.
I also knew that there was something called Search Engine Optimization of SEO, and I searched for a plug-in that does that. I picked All In One SEO Pack and it seemed to do what I would expect such a plug-in to do. There is a Yoast version of that as well. I am still not 100% sure what all the options do there, but I have slowly started using the different features.
By now I was several weeks into the blog being posted and was posting links on my Facebook and LinkedIn. This was completely manual at this point. I knew I would be travelling and I needed more options. I again did a little searching in the plugins and some Google searching as well, and discovered that Jetpack which is by the same company that does WordPress is a very popular option. It can automatically post to many popular social media sites but does have some limitations like it does not post to LinkedIn groups. Since the few groups I belong to have the broadest reach anyways, I thought a more manual touch was appropriate and that did not bother me.
Jetpack actually adds quite a lot more features than just posting to social media . It adds a much better commenting system but it is hosted on the WordPress site so it is not a good solution for users in China. It adds the option to subscribe to new posts but the final step to that involves the WordPress site as well. I may turn that on anyways. Is does add the sharing buttons which are now on my site and an optimized theme for mobile devices which I am trying out. If you are looking at starting a blog or a content-rich website, you may want to consider using all the other features of Jetpack.
The final thing I added to my blog was advertising. Google and Amazon seem to be the most popular advertising options out there. I did not want to make any advertising too obtrusive. Far too many posts on LinkedIn and Facebook are just click bait with ad after ad in the middle of the article you are trying to read. I am trying to keep the ads out of the way. Because Google is blocked, I decided to go with Amazon.com. I signed up for Amazon Associates which gives you a special ID and the ability to generate links with the ID embedded. I first used links for books and then tried to figure out how to post a more generic ad as well. There are plug-ins that help, but I found that using the text widget with the HTML in it is the best. I still have not figured out how to place the more natural link for products that is generated, online seems to refer to posting them in HTML mode but I seem to have visual and text as the two modes to post in.
I guess I am now a professional blogger as I have made $0.65 as of this blog being posted.
This has been my process so far, trial and error by someone that has seen some concepts mentioned (like SEO) but never actually had to do anything about it. I keep discovering extras like featured image which allows each of my posts to have their own image plus the SEO package has it’s own way of populating the OpenGraph (Facebook standard) excerpting.
If you are wondering if I really am a technical CFO, this blog and the process I just described is typical for me. I am fine with someone showing me what to do, but I like to struggle through things myself to learn. It really is not that hard or expensive to do. You can write only on social media, but I feel you have more control and reach on your own website.
As a quick summary – find a host that you trust that can provide the WordPress program. If you use WordPress itself you limit yourself to non-China visitors but maybe gain additional functionality. Pick a theme and add in the plug-ins you need. Publish and publicize. Don’t be overly annoying when you do the publicity. Unless you are a large and well established blog, you are unlikely to make any real money from your writing, but there are easy to use ways to monetize yourself a little.
Next up for me is to turn my blog posts into podcasts. Something else for me to learn from scratch.