Your Benefit from the eBook

Following the steps in the Start a Movie Website: WordPress Edition eBook, you can have a movie website online far quicker and with less hassle than if you wing it by yourself. The eBook is also a great introduction to movie blogging, running a movie website effectively, and is completely free.

What you get in the eBook

The Start a Movie Website: WordPress Edition eBook is a compilation of updated posts I’ve made about starting a movie website through the WordPress content management system. We get emails weekly asking questions that ProMovieBlogger.com has already delved into ad nauseam. The Start a Movie Website: WordPress Edition eBook lets us answer those already asked questions in addition to giving the reader a wealth of tips on starting a movie website and WordPress.

Why is it not for sale?

Why should it be? This site was created to fill a void, to help people create a movie website. The Start a Movie Website: WordPress Edition ebook is one tool to help accomplish that. By making it free, it can help far more people.

How do you get the eBook?

Ask for it by signing up for the ProMovieBlogger newsletter it is attached to and confirming that you want it via the confirmation email that will be sent to you. The Start a Movie Website: WordPress Edition eBook will be emailed to your inbox right after you confirm.

 

Your Thoughts and Ideas

What do you think of this eBook? Was it a good idea? Will you tell newbies about? Would this have helped you when you were starting out? Reviews on it are welcome.

Sara Ziff, Picture Me

Here are some ways to ensure that is the case.

The Font

Use a black font for the words in your post. This shows up best on the web, is the most common, and is the most easily read by site visitors. Don’t worry, your font is black by default in Blogger.

Related Posts

No matter the Blogger theme you choose to use, you will most-likely be able to use some related post gadget or be able to implant a related posts java script of some kind. Two such script choices are LinkWithin and nRelate, written about here: LinkWithin and nRelate: Related Posts Comparative Analysis. Once you have chosen which related posts code to use, locate the script as close to the bottom of your post content as possible. This immediately gives your post readers somewhere else to go after they finish reading your post, something else related to the post that they might be interested in. If you wish to uses the media thumbnails generated by Blogger for each post, read this post: Related Posts Widget for Blogger with Thumbnails.

A word of caution: Using a related post gadget or script of the main index (the home page and its subsequent pages) will cause that page to load slower than it normally would. This happens because the code will have to load related posts for each post in your main index. Here is an example: http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/.

One more thing, do not have anything between the bottom of your post and the related posts plugin. Send your reader right into your other content using the gadget or script as that launch pad. Show it to them right after they are done reading your post. Place your social bookmarking gadget, your ads, etc. after your related posts or somewhere else.

Social Media

Have Twitter, Facebook, RSS, and other social media buttons present in your posts and on your site so people can access your information, get updates on it, and share it with their friends and followers.

Blogger Dashboard, Design Tab

In your dashboard under Design, then Add A Gadget, then Featured is the gadget entitled Share It. There are other gadgets and services beyond Twitter and Facebook for sharing your posts as well under Add a Gadget. Here is a another way to implement a Facebook Like / Recommend Button in Blogger. I would suggest implementing any buttons you choose to use into the code of your pages manually. The more plugins you use on a page in WordPress, the slower that page will load. I am not sure how loading a gadget effects the load time of a Blogger page. Twitter button code can be found here and a Facebook button code can be found here.

The Sidebars

You will find some useful info about keeping readers hungry and coming back for more with your sidebar content in this post: How to Set Up a Movie Website Sidebar: For Content.

Recent Posts

I would suggest showing your website’s recent posts somewhere on one of your site’s sidebars. It lets people that are not on the front page of your site see that you have newly posted articles. Use a recent posts gadget or script with pictures: visuals with words get a higher response (clicks i.e. pageviews) than words alone. There are multiple Recent Posts gadgets in Blogger. In your dashboard under Design, then click Add a Gadget to the right side of the Blog Posts box. After that,  type Recent into the search box. The results will show the Recent Posts and Recent Posts gadgets. There are other gadgets for Recent Posts for your posts as well under Add a Gadget.

Popular Posts

You might want to try displaying popular posts on your sidebar but it is not a necessity. Starting out, you will probably have little to no popular posts. To add a popular posts gadget, click Add a Gadget on the right of the Blog Posts box (You don’t have to add the gadget there. You can add it anywhere you please). Under Basics you will see Popular Posts.

The Date

Use a theme that shows the date somewhere when the post was published on the home page of your site. If you are updating your site every day, this is a nice feature to have for your posts, especially in your main index.

Increased Pageviews by Other Means

Here are 5 Steps to Get Your Movie Website Indexed by Search Engines and tutorial on Using SEO optimized Images in your Posts to Increase Pageviews and 5 Ways to Optimize Images for Increased Pageviews and SEO.

In Conclusion

As you can see, content presentation for its own sake, for increased pageviews, and SEO can be visually attractive and achieved easily through a myriad of different ways. It can also be made easy through the information found in this post: Movie Review Writing Strategies.

bake your keywords directly into your domain name. By incorporating your keyphrase into your domain name, you can guarantee that inbound links will contain your primary keyphrase, and make it more likely that the link text will contain your primary keyphrase…Avoid very long domain names containing keywords, however, because these make your listing look bad, and make it difficult to type. Ideally, acquire “your primary keyphrase dot com” (e.g., primarykeyphrase.com)

As you will see later in this post, I choose Movie Exempli Gratia for the name of my example Blogger movie website.

Step 1

Go to Blogger.com. You will be prompted to either log in or create a Google Account.

Step 2

After your done with that, its time time to name your blog. Like I said before, I choose Movie Exempli Gratia for use in this series. Once you’ve chosen and typed in what you want for your site’s URL (Note: the drawback to using a free blogging service like Blogger is that they brand part of the URL with their name, in this case .blogspot and the Favicon for your website is an orange B), the automatic system will check to see if that URL is available. If it is, enter in the Captcha and click Continue. If it isn’t you will have to pic another URL.

Once that is done you’ve succeeded. You’ve created your first movie website. Take a gander: Movie Exempli Gratia

Step 3

Now its time to choose a theme for your Blogger movie website. Blogger immediately offers you many stock themes for your newly created movie blog.

You are also given the option of uploading a theme from your hard drive in your Blogger dashboard. Once you have chosen or uploaded a theme, it is time to start posting.

In Conclusion

As you can see, it is very easy to start a movie website with Blogger. It takes about 8 minutes if you already have a Google Account and have pre-brainstormed possible domain names to use on Blogger.

]]> http://promovieblogger.com/starting-a-movie-website-blogger-edition-domain-name-online-steps/feed/ 2 http://promovieblogger.com/starting-a-movie-website-conclusion/ http://promovieblogger.com/starting-a-movie-website-conclusion/#comments Sun, 23 May 2010 09:35:07 +0000 ProMovieBlogger http://promovieblogger.com/?p=1946 In the Starting a Movie Website series, you have learned how to start, setup, and bring online a movie website. Popular online publishing platforms, found at the bottom of this page, have made it extremely easy for anyone to get into the game and bring their own movie website to market. Starting a movie website is an exciting adventure. I hope this series has given you the tools to make it more exciting, easier, and rewarding. Its up to you to use the steps outlined in this series in the order and the way you see fit. Maybe your movie website is already established and you have used the info in the latter parts of the series to augment your site offerings and/or its back-end mechanics. That is fine by us. We never intended for this series to be just for green horns. We believe the order in which we have outlined the steps within Starting a Movie Website: Introduction is best. If you think you have found a better order for the steps, let us know. There is always room for improvement. If you have used the Starting a Movie Website steps to create a movie website or to augment an existing one, please post the name of the site in the comments section below. We look forward to seeing what we have helped others to achieve. Good luck and be persistent.

*Updated on 10/11/11

All in one SEO

Official Shpiel: Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

My Take: You see at the top of the home page of ProMovieBlogger where it says “Create a Movie Website, How to Write a Movie Review – ProMovieBlogger”. This plugin allows you to create and manipulate that message with ease. That message is important because you can load it with keywords. Search for ProMovieBlogger on Google. What tagline do you see for it in the results?

Or

W3 Total Cache Plugin

Official Shpiel: The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

My Take: I was using the WP Super Cache plugin but when I started using this plugin, my sites noticeably sped up and loaded faster. Be sure to use Google’s Page Speed add-on for Mozilla Firefox to find out what CSS and JavaScripts to add into the plugin to condense them into one file so that your site loading is even faster.

Robot Meta

Official Shpiel: Add meta robots tags to WordPress pages.

My Take: By using this plugin, you can tell search engines what to spider on your website and what not to. The best part is that it allows you to setup your own Robot.txt file with whatever Allows and Disallows you want. A good tutorial on the program can be found here.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Official Shpiel: Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.

My Take: This plugin lets you see what your post will look like in a Google SERP while writing the post, shows you your posts’ keywords, and has a gaggle of meta information options. I wrote about this plugin extensively here: 4 WordPress Plugins: SEO, Google Analytics, Image Resize, Contact Form.

Akismet

Official Shpiel: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

My Take: Less spam on your website. Nuff said.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

Official Shpiel: Automatically redirect your feed into FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

My Take: It collects all your feeds and automatically redirects so that you do not even have to think about it afterword. Every RSS access point you have is redirected to the same place.

Google XML Sitemaps

Official Shpiel: This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

My Take: This plugin helps your movie website get indexed by search engines.

No Self Pings

Official Shpiel: This plugin disables intra-blog pinging.

My Take: When you are linking in your posts to another post on your site, this plugin stops WordPress from pinging and displaying the linking post in your comments.

Optimal Title

Official Shpiel: Optimal Title mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before. This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first.

My Take: It makes your post titles look more professional, e.g. How to Start a Movie Website | ProMovieBlogger.

Jetpack by WordPress.com

Official Shpiel: a WordPress plugin that supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com, including the now defunct  WordPress.com Stats. On its stats function: Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server.

My Take: This plugin comes with a slew of other options but I only use it for its Stats function. I use this more than Google Analytics to track website traffic and what search engine terms are bringing people to my websites. Actionable info on one page.

WordPress Related Posts

Official Shpiel: The WordPress Related Posts Plugin will generate related posts via your WordPress tags and add the related posts to the bottom of your posts.

My Take: A must for showing other posts at the bottom of an article you have written. Another option is the LinkWithin script for your single post php file.

Digg Digg (the plugin)

Official Shpiel: All-in-One social vote buttons – Digg, Reddit, dDone, Yahoo Buzz, TweetMeme(twitter), facebook share, facebook like, Polladium, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Sphinn, Post comments, Google Buzz, Designbump, Designfloat, WebBlend and BlogEngage.

My Take: A very good plugin for adding social buttons anywhere in your post or having them float along side it as you scroll down. Adjustable button sizes as well.

WPtouch

Official Shpiel: WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.

My Take: A mobile presence is essential (written about here: How a Smart Phone improved a Website’s Mobile Presentation and Ad Revenue) these days and WPtouch solves that problem. I use WPtouch Pro as it comes with the ability to brand your mobile site with a logo and grants you the ability to use advertising on it  like Google AdSense. The regular version has neither of these options.

Well there you have it, a starter WordPress Plugin pack for your movie website. Did you find this section of Starting a Movie Website series helpful?