Basic settings

INTRODUCTION
Blog creation is now successfully completed. I took a short brake from posting and you probably wrote that famous “Hello there” message. Good! That’s the way it should be with small businesses, just jump right into water and never over analyze. As they say, paralysis by analysis.

It is now time to tune up a bit. We are going to go to your blog and inside there into the settings. Settings have several sub topics as follows: basic, publishing, formatting, comments, archiving, site feed, email and members. We get into them one by one, but because of the length of this post, I have decided to divide the topics to separate posts. In this post, I will deal with the basic settings.


BASIC
Title says it all this is what others will call your blog. Depending on the template that you chose, title could have different sizes and colors. What’s the name of your blog? I will insert an important tip here, you can go over it, if you feel time pressed, but I think it is a relevant advice, so give it a try.


IMPORTANT TIP - title and description
This tip is rather lengthy, but that’s the way I write to make my points – long and winding. Remember what I said about the importance of the sub domain and domain names for a company big or small? Same thing applies here. Search engines and directories systematically use titles and descriptions to organize and present information. Now, do you remember that sheep farm up there on the highlands of Scotland – was it called MacLeod?

If you would type MacLeod to a search engine, I bet you would get all sorts of genealogy, family, clan and personal pages to your screen and I tell you – there would be lot of results, probably over million. It is hard for a sheep farm to get noticed from the crowd of a million, especially as the searchers would be looking for something more name focused, instead of a sheep farm. It would be only few people, who take this approach and they already know your business, because they know you by name.

Internet is essentially a place for you to be found by new customers and inform the old ones because of the information search and communicative nature of the Internet. Luckily business blogs can support both, so you have a winner here. Oh, one more thing, take a note that there really are no or very few sheep farms in the search results for the name MacLeod.

Let’s take a different approach. We were after a sheep farm, so let’s search for that. Looks like there are even more results, almost three million, but at least now we are on the right track, because all of the results have something to do with sheep farms.

Next natural step is to narrow down the location as I don’t want to fly all the way down under to New Zealand for mutton, I add Scotland to the search. Ok, now we are talking or finding... At the time of my search, Google informs me that there are about 383000 results for “sheep farm Scotland”, so we are slowly approaching our target.

However, Scotland is mighty large area so I add even further local information with the word Skye, which is an island and I also add my desire (at the time of writing this, it is Eastern, so lamb and mutton comes to my mind, I apologize if there are vegetarians reading this), now let’s see the results. About 400 results, now this is the kind of number that feels bit more manageable. At this point I would probably scan the results a bit to see if I can find the jackpot right away. If not I would try to refine or tune the search even further.

Now, what does this have to do with your title and description? Well, you have to make sure that they include some of this crucial search information not just a name. John Smith, who? Get my point? If you are an entrepreneur e.g. hairdresser located in downtown Miami, Florida and specializing in pointy anime hairstyles, then you just have to tell that to the Internet – this is how people are going to find you. Phew, lot of writing makes lot of reading I sure hope that you are enjoying your coffee ;)


Description is the place where you give the basic information about your blog and as it probably is about small business then this is a place to describe your business.


Add your Blog to our listings? It is a good idea to list and choose yes. This way you get some extra exposure. If you want privacy, choose no, but if your blog is business related there is hardly any reason to hide.


Show Quick Edition on your Blog? Just say yes, this gives you faster access into editing.


Show Email Post links? Yes again, some readers might want to use this to send your info to their friends by email. There is a small chance that this gives you bit bigger exposure.


Show Compose Mode for all your blogs? This is definite yes as it makes the post writing more intuitive.


After you have done all the changes, just click the save settings button. When the saving is done, you have the option to republish the blog to see the changes. It is good to learn a habit to republish after every change, so that all your posts have the same features.