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When you decide to launch a new blog site like Mobile Friendly, one of the first things that you are going to be confronted with is what theme and plugins to use. Your choice of a theme and the plugins for your site will make a huge difference in the way it looks and functions for your user. The better your site looks and the easier it is to use will greatly benefit you in converting visitors into subscribers and long-term readers.

I know what you are thinking… “What about great content, Gary?” Content is very important, and I will get to that in the next installment, but if your site turns the visitor off before he even reads one post then your great content is not doing you any good.

For the theme, as I mentioned in the previous article, I chose the Suffusion theme because of its flexibility and the fact that it is SEO ready so you do not need to add a plugin like the All in One SEO pack to it. It does take a bit of time to get the theme configured the way you want, but that is only because there are so many options available for you to choose from. There are several preconceived templates that you can choose from that will reduce the setup time dramatically, but I prefer the custom method myself.

After I installed the theme, I had to decide what plugins to use. The plugins added cover many areas including social networking, security, functionality, statistics, and additional SEO.

Security is always a major concern when you put a website online, so its a natural decision to look for ways to better secure it. WordPress is fairly secure straight out of the box but there are several vulnerabilities that can be exploited to get your site hacked.

One thing that all sites with an admin section face is a brute force break-in attack. With this type of attack, the login page is repeatedly bombarded with user name/password combinations until the site is broken into. This is easily preventable in WordPress by installing the Login Lockdown plugin to limit the number of attempts at the login page and then lockout the IP address of the attacker.

With social networking there are a couple of plugins that I always use. The TweetMeme button plugin is an industry staple and can be seen on nearly every blog out there. It is very effective in getting people to promote your blog to their Twitter followers.

The other social plugin that I like is AddThis. It allows your visitors to share your post with over 200 social networking and bookmarking sites. They can even share it with their friends and colleagues via email or print it out for sharing in a physical form.

There are many other plugins that I used in creating this site. Click here for a complete PDF list of them all and the reasons that I chose to use them.

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You may have noticed that I have been… maybe obsessing is too strong of a word… paying a lot of attention to mobile web developments lately. There is a good reason for this, plus its led me to build a new site… Which is good news for you. Here’s the story…

I was doing some research for a new article a few days back (August 30th to be precise) and was looking at keywords and what domains were available for them when I happened upon an excellent top level domain name for the mobile market. The keyword “mobile friendly” gets more than twice as many searches as “mobile ready” and the dot net name was available for it. Being a good marketer, I snatched it up and quickly put up a new site.

OK… This where it gets good for you.

Basically, I am going to outline from start to finish over the next thirty days the processes that I go through to make this site successful. You will be looking over my shoulder, so to speak, as I build this site into a money maker and receive step by step updates (and a bunch of other goodies) so that you can create your own.

So, let’s get started…

Why did I choose the mobile web niche?

It was a bit of luck, really. I know this niche is just starting to get hot, so I was already doing research and writing articles about it. When I discovered there was an excellent name with not much competition, I had to create the site. It was an AHA! moment… Plus the niche will be exploding in the next 12 months… guaranteed.

After registering the domain and adding it to one of my hosting accounts, I installed WordPress. To WordPress I added the Suffusion theme and an assortment of plugins including the WordPress Mobile Pack… Kind of pointless to have a blog about mobile friendly web sites and not being mobile friendly yourself.

I created a header and background image, it was the middle of the night and I wanted it done quickly so I did it myself instead of waiting for someone else to do it the next day. I then customized the Suffusion theme and added the header and background images.

I next added an article to the site and added my main keywords and meta description to the Suffusion theme. Another reason that I like this theme is that it is SEO friendly and doesn’t require you to add in a plugin for SEO purposes. A big plus there.

I did a little looking around on Clickbank and found some suitable items to promote through the banner ad zones that I had set up on the site earlier during my customization. I then went to a couple of my CPA networks and browsed for some additional items to promote. Affiliate monetization done.

Since that time I have added a few more articles and did some tweeking to make the site more productive. I’ve added in a special report as an enticement to join the sites mailing list, set up the autoresponder and created a few backlinks. I also added a product of my own to the monetization process for those 100% paychecks.

Today I added a couple of backlinks from a some of my Blogger blogs after adding a new article. I then created an article for a social networking site that includes backlinks to the Mobile Friendly site and to the sign-up page for the free report.

Tonight, I’m going to rest… Its been a long four days and I need to get busy on my next steps in building traffic for the Mobile Friendly site tomorrow. Also tomorrow, I will give you a link to a PDF file that shows all of the plugins that I am using on the site and what purpose each of them serves. Until then…  Just about forgot…

Check the new Mobile Friendly dot net site to see what I have done so far.

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In recent weeks I have been focused on having mobile-ready blogs because there is so much traffic coming to sites from mobile devices these days. Mobile devices, smart phones, internet ready tablets , etc. are all gaining in popularity for web browsing, so it makes sense to have a site that is viewable by those devices. If your site is not mobile compatible, you are losing a ton of potential blog readers and customers.

I’ve added the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin to all of my blogs which converts them to a format that is mobile friendly. It also supplies basic stats that show the percentage of mobile users that are viewing your site. To show proof of the traffic that you are missing if your blog is not mobile-ready, here is a list of statitistics from a few of my sites and the number of mobile hits that they are getting:

• 5% of your traffic is currently from mobile users. (this site first)

You’ve had 28941 desktop hits and 1780 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

• 10% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 10730 desktop hits and 1233 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

• 3% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 16185 desktop hits and 544 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

• 10% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 3267 desktop hits and 365 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

• 5% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 8045 desktop hits and 478 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

• 7% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 3922 desktop hits and 326 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

That is 4300 plus hits that I would have missed out on in just the past nine days alone!

Included in the WordPress Mobile Pack is the ability to link your mobile-ready blog to their Mpexo directory for mobile sites. Having your site listed in that directory helps, but all sites get mobile hits. Here are the stats for a new site that I am developing for a client and just put online a week ago:

• 1% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 1680 desktop hits and 25 mobile hits in the last 7.1 days.

This site has very little content (4 posts and 2 pages) and has not been added to the mobile directory but it has received 25 mobile hits in a week without any promotion.

Many popular websites like Twitter and Facebook are mobile friendly and actually encourage their users to interact with mobile devices. With the number of people using these devices on sites that you are (or at least should be) marketing your blog on, does it not make sense to have a site that they can move directly to and view while still using their smart phone or other mobile device?

Now you probably want to know how to monetize this traffic… Admob is a contextual ad site just for mobile devices. How big is the mobile ad market? Google recently paid $750 million for Admob! The money from your mobile ads is probably not going to be as good as your regular site where you have more flexibility in your ad types, but it is a way to profit from that traffic with relative ease.

To close I just have one question: “Is your blog mobile-ready?”

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There are many people who profess to being blogging gurus out there. They have all of the answers to every question and supposedly make tons of money with their blogs each and every day. Do they really make all of this money from their blog or is the main source of their income the blogging products that they develop and feed you through Clickbank?

I get proposals to be a Joint Venture partner on many blog related products and most of them I turn down. I turn them down because I take a look at the product and see that its just a bunch of old re-hashed garbage that has been on the net for years or because I read the salesletter and they are showing all kinds of “proof” of income, but they never actually show you one of their blogs that is supposedly producing this income.

This so-called “proof” of income is usually just a shot of a Clickbank account. Did this money actually come from sales on their blog or is it from their last product launch. I guess they can “legally” get by with saying that they made that money in the blogging niche because the product they sold was blogging related. But what I want to see is proof from the blog itself.

Show me traffic figures, click-thru rates on your ads posted on the blog(s)… Something that shows you actually that you possibly could have derived that  income from your blog… Hell, just show me that you actually do blog and aren’t just out there searching the internet and publishing ebooks from that info that you want to sell to me for $37!

Don’t get me wrong, there are bloggers out there who make tons of money every day. People like John Chow, Perez Hilton and others. They have built their brand and have tons of readers who visit their site daily, click their ads and buy their products. They don’t need to force feed their readers anything, the money just comes naturally from their loyal readers. Building one of these types of blogs takes a lot of time and effort… It’s not going to happen over night.

There are other, faster ways to make money in blogging. If you seek out niches that haven’t been overly exploited or do not have much competition, you can quickly build a profitable blog site.

You can also enter into niches where people are looking for answers to specific problems like; acne, migraine headaches, garden pests, etc. If you build several of these niche blogs, you can make a pretty decent living from the income they provide and it doesn’t take long to get each of them making money.

Don’t expect to make six or seven figures immediately. It will take time to build enough of  these niche sites into an empire that will make you that kind of money.

I’m not trying to scare you off from blogging… Just know this… You can build a profitable blog in a very short time, but if you are looking to get rich blogging, it is going to take some time, whether you are building one super blog or an empire of niche sites. There are plenty of so-called gurus out there that may tell you the opposite, but until they show you the blog(s) that they used to do it… Don’t believe them. Anybody can show you a screenshot of a Clickbank or Paypal account…

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OK… I included a link to my own blog… I think its cool that Zemanta is picking up posts from my site and I haven’t even submitted it for review, yet… SEO does work.