Check it out--I'd love to have you pay me a visit. And I promise to respond to all comments posted here regarding site build, site content, site indexing, WP plugins, etc.
Time to retrace my steps and outline some of what I did to build this site. I found some goodies I'm eager to share, but it won't make a whole lot of sense unless I walk through the process with you.
Oh heck! I'm just going to have to cheat a bit and talk about Animoto. (Yeah, I'm an affiliate--I became one once I saw my first video. It's that rockin' vid on the homepage of the Andy poster site.) Here's my official Animoto affiliate image. Nice, isn't it? $30 for an annual membership--and I swear making a professional-looking video takes all of 5 minutes. If that.
So first of all--how did I choose AndyWarholPoster.net?
Well, because I have college-aged progeny, I'm well aware that it's just a matter of weeks before the college kids will be adorning the walls of their dorm rooms and apartment spaces.
My daughter (or one of her peers...can't quite remember now) made a comment to me about the quest for unusual--and cheap--posters. The best thing is to avoid the stock college bookstore selections and do some searching online. Stuff that's a little off the beaten path. She said she wouldn't do Warhol this year because "everyone does Warhol."
Secondary translation: Every college student likes to feel they're expressing themselves in highly individual ways. Not cool to have soup cans on the wall. It's like...oh, look how much I know about Pop Art. I'm a COLLEGE STUDENT after all.
No, the mission is to go with Warhol and take advantage of that traffic. (If I can get ranked quickly, that is!). And then to make the focus, "Hey, here's some Warhol that's really kind of unusual. Warhol you may never have seen before. Edgy, boundary-pushing Warhol."
And you don't have to look very hard for that. My goodness, the man was prolific--and joyfully experimental at every phase of his career.
Oh yes, and quotable too. Let's not forget the Andy Warhol quotes posters. They make for nice groupings over the sofa or bed.
So, I rigged up the site using the same old template I'm going to use for each of my sites. A good basic 2-column premium theme by iThemes. (Blogging Success, which they have now discontinued--but which makes things like header loading and homepage video embedding nice and quick.)
Installed the same plugins I'll be using across my 100 blogs as well. I used the File Manager of Hostmonster (I've been a customer of for 4 years now and for which I have nothing but praise) to install those files.
I just went into the File Manager, selected all of my plugins from portablecarheater.com, and moved them to andywarholposter.net. Took all of 5 seconds. That's what I'll do every time going forward.
I created a new file for all the andywarholposter stuff. And an image file within that folder.
I did my header in Photoshop. A quick search on Velvet Underground font yielded a free font that was pretty close. I'm keeping headers simple: 3 elements are typography, one single relevant image, and the lower text for the full domain name.
I created a new Google Analytics profile for the site and entered the UA number in my Google Analytics plug-in.
I created my Animoto video with a bunch of the poster images I planned to showcase. Oh, I had such fun with that! My kids watched me do it and then spent much of the rest of the afternoon creating their own videos and uploading to YouTube.
I wrote content. And wrote and wrote. And pasted and pasted affiliate code from AllPosters. Hard work--but fun.
This time I was smarter about EzineArticles, and I submitted an article for my primary keyword before even finishing all of the initial site content. Gosh, it takes those folks awhile. Don't they know how much value my content is adding to their site? Sheesh.
Once the content was created, the next order of business was to do everything possible to get indexed. Submitted to feedest and feedage (That's my PotPieGirl habit now.) Did a Digg submission. Used MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin to ping my content. Tweeted very prettily also.
Once I'm indexed, I'll begin the bookmarking submissions and blog commenting. And a service I've joined called 3-Way Links. We'll see--they were offering a $7 intro subscription (for the first month, that is) to get the link-building going efficiently. I'll report back on that later--but supposedly it's not all that hard to get ranked #1 for an exact-match domain when you've got 3-Way Links or Neurolinker helping you out.
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