This was originally posted on HeadwayHQ.com. David Wang has been doing a great job with his site and walkthroughs! Check out his site and make certain to subscribe to his RSS feed to keep up with Headway happenings. Hit him up on Twitter @blogjunkie too.

We’ve got a great thing going with the Headway theme, but there is a little bit of external setup that needs to be done in order to get things working as smoothly as possible and have the ability to track your progress.

After you have installed Headway and activated it, you’ll notice that you have a few new options in the Appearance tab.

Headway Configuration – SEO, Twitter Integration, Backend Options

Headway Design – Colors, Typography, Size, etc. IE: Look & Feel

Headway Layout Editor – Llay out pages and elements. Headway’s bread and butter.

Headway Easy Hooks – Great explanation at HeadwayHQ.com.

These tabs let you control virtually every aspect of Headway and its functioning. I want to focus on the Headway Configuration tab to get you started with the backend options that will make your site very useful. Many of you who have a site already have this information at hand, but to those newbies out there, this is your guide.

When you first click on the Headway Configuration tab, you are greeted with a page full of empty boxes under General Options.

For the Feed URL, go to feedburner.google.com log in with your current Google account or get a new one, and follow the steps to set up a new RSS feed. When you are done, copy the feed URL and paste it in this box.

If you have anything special that needs to run in Header Scripts, paste that in here.

The Footer Scripts area is where you want to past your Google Analytics tracking code or any other statistics software code. If you don’t have a Google Analytics account go to google.com/analytics/ and, again, sign in or sign up with your Google account. Follow the directions to set up tracking for your account. When you get to the end, copy the tracking code, then paste it here.

GZIP Compression is usually fine to leave on unless you know your host does not like it.

Favicons are the little avatars or logos that show up next to your site’s URL in web browers. If you have one, link to its URL location here. If not, follow the Headway instructions and get one at favicon.cc.

The Affiliate Link section is if you want to make money by people clicking on your Headway footer link and purchasing the theme at the Headway site. Make sure to put your correct link here. If you don’t have one, you can always use mine.

We’ll move on to the SEO tab.

As the note says, you can pretty much leave everything alone unless you really know what you are doing. The only sections that you must be aware of are near the bottom. Under META Content make certain to fill in the Home Description and Home Keywords boxes.

Search engines and social media sharing sites (like Digg and del.icio.us) use this information to help disseminate your site. It’s important that you choose a concise description for your home page. Think about what humans will search for when looking for your content. Enter that hear and keep it around 150 characters.

In the Keywords section, utilize the same principles as above. Short, concise and relevant. Enter 10-15 keywords that people will search for. The description and keywords box should have some overlap in their content, but don’t just copy and paste your description into your keywords box.

That’s it. That should help you be able to attract and track visitors to your site. Now the rest is up to you with content and networking.

Jason Wietholter is an entrepreneur and social media/multimedia specialist. You can find his personal website at http://jasonwietholter.com and lurking about the interrnets on Twitter @jasonwietholter.

In person, you spend time asking questions and developing an understanding of what exactly is being communicated. Online, you can spend time leaving comments on blog posts, following up via Twitter and discussing topics in forums. This is great as it helps you get to know the meaning of specific posts, and others can join in on the conversation providing real community involvement helping you get noticed.

How does this help my online reputation and SEO?

It helps your reputation and your own SEO by providing a useful resource for others to read. Think about it. You leave a comment and leave a link to your site. If you provided something of value to the conversation, either by posing a clarification question or expounding on the original post, you’ve provided something of value and other readers will consider checking up on you. Now, this won’t necessarily, directly increase your SEO performance just by posting a comment, but, it will likely get you visitors, if you provide enough value, the blog owner may get in contact with you or even write a post about your comment and link to your site. Now we’re talking.

Take it one step further and get involved outside of blog posts on Twitter or Facebook. Even though not everything is indexed by Google and others, the conversation value and pass-along value transmitted through these services offers a significant amount of benefit to your online reputation. And, as always, more hits means better SEO and more publicity across other people’s blogs and Twitter accounts as well as their Facebook pages. That brings me to another point which I will cover in another post in the near future: Social Networks pass information based on trust.  A link or piece of information passed through a trusted friend is much more likely to get clicked than a link all by itself. Social networks hold massive amounts of power in this respect.

So get involved!

Read blog posts, post comments, share information via Twitter. Become a fan of something on Facebook and create content that is valuable to others. If you give you will receive. It will take some effort, but the internet is a world-wide community of people looking to share something. Content is king. Contribute and get noticed.

That’s a humongous amount of people. Now don’t make the mistake of reading those two statistics as the same. Three out of four of all Americans use Social Technology. Two-thirds of the global base of internet users visit Social Networks. 230 million people in the U.S. and nearly 4.5 billion people worldwide visit and interact through Social Media. That is your audience!

That’s right, email has come crashing down as the number four behemoth of online activities. Social Media is more active and more instant, growing at 3x the rate of every other activity that you and I do online. Forwarded emails are now being replaced by ReTweets. An unlimited text box full of spaced out text and attached files has been superceded by 140 characters and instant upload and commenting. We’re all about instantaneous, efficient exchange of information. It’s only been recently that Viral marketing has become a major marketing outlet. Browsing endlessly has been replaced by searching Google and Social Media sites.

We’ve advanced throughout history in our abilities to communicate. Social Media is one more advance because everyone has a voice. It used to be that just those with the resources to write a book or the ability to cover the news could have any opinion that would reach any substantial number of people. Now, you and I can reach millions at any time without bounds. Social Media really is a beefed up form of word of mouth. Think about it: If you share with 10 friends, who share with 10 friends, who share with 10 friends, all in a matter of one or two minutes, you’ve reach a crowd of 1000 people. It only took you 100+ characters and thirty seconds. That is power.

Yes, Yoda is the wise one. Social Media is a force. Don’t mess with it, don’t defy it, embrace it. Now you know what Social Media is and why you should care. Stay tuned to for more in depth analysis and explanation. I want to hear what you have to say. Let me know by leaving a comment or Contacting Me. Don’t forget to read Part 1 or watch the entire presentation here.

Wikipedia’s definition, while broad, is accurate. Social Media is a very broad arrangement of services and channels that make up most of the interactions online. Most people think of Social Media as Twitter or Facebook, and they are right, but to assume that those are the only forms would be a huge mistake. Take advantage of every opportunity you can. Location, location, location is now Exposure, exposure, exposure. If you are overwhelmed by the massive capabilities, good. Most important piece of advice: Start Somewhere!

Like I said, start somewhere. Get involved. The way that you build up a following is not by sitting on the sidelines and holding up a sign that says “Call Me”. You have to get involved in the conversation. People are looking for information sharing when they get plugged in to social media. It isn’t enough to hang up a shingle and call that your social media effort. You’ll become stagnate and ineffectual. Continue to stay involved in the conversation and contribute.

Social Media is a lot like running. You may hate it at first. It may hurt, it may take time but, if you work at it every day, it’ll become easy.

If you own a company and you don’t yet have a Twitter account or have a grasp on other Social Media outlets, this presentation and series of posts is for you.

I’m going to break down each portion of this presentation and explain the importance and relevance it has to business. Whether or not you have ever opened a Facebook account or looked at someone’s Tweets is not important. It’s important that you get involved in the conversation now.

If you have questions, leave a comment or contact me. Let me know what has and has not worked for you. Subscribe to the blog’s feed and stay updated.

Quality over Quantity – ALWAYS!

Like I said, I was following the steps, but I wasn’t being choosy. I was just hammering away at followers, but not really getting anywhere. This program works, there is no doubt about it. I’ve gotten my fair share of relevant gurus and followers, but I need to be more selective.

For those of you that may not know exactly what I am talking about, Twitter Rocket is a step-by-step guide to reaching more people using Twitter. It isn’t some scam or a purchased block of followers. It’s a real program that guides you through the process of attracting attention by being useful to the Twitter community. I think I have been useful, I just didn’t choose the best people to follow and I have learned my lesson.

Here’s to a new start with Twitter Rocket and finding the quality people to follow!

Now, Twitter is an awesome service and an awesome resource, but Project ReTweet seems like a bad idea when all is said and done.

Dan Zarella has a good writeup on the project at his blog. And Mashable has two writeups to help you understand the project better as well, details and analysis.

I agree with both of these writeups in that it doesn’t seem like this is a problem that needs fixing. It would be great to be able to see ReTweets directly in your Twitter feed for quick overview purposes and it would be great to have them formalized, so to speak. But if that shatters the way that information is exchanged, someone should step back and take a closer look at how to implement Project ReTweet.

My suggestion: Essentially the same as Dan’s. Add the APIs, formalize ReTweets, but don’t change their behavior. Twitter is and always will be about democratically disseminating information. That importance of that information is given weight based upon who ReTweets it. I would much rather read a link from one of my friends than from someone I have never seen on my feed before, which is what this formalization intends to do.

What do you think about Project ReTweet? Is it a good idea to formalize ReTweets? Would you more or less likely to read something new from someone you never heard of as opposed to your friend?

This was originally posted on WPBlogger.com. Ben Cook over there is a good friend of mine and one of the brightest guys I know. Check out his site and make certain to subscribe to his RSS feed to keep up with Wordpress happenings. Hit him up on Twitter @wpblogger too.

You may have heard of this little Wordpress theme called Thesis? Well, if you haven’t, you obviously haven’t been reading this blog, so get on board. Thesis finally has some competition in the market in a new Wordpress framework/theme called Headway.

Headway is young and has a lot of competition in the premium theme market (Thesis, WooThemes, etc), but there’s already a lot of buzz about the theme and it’s being used by Jay Fleischman, Chris Cree, John Haydon and of course Jason Wietholter (yours truly).

Now, I’m not a Wordpress genius like Ben and I’m not an SEO guru either. I know business and I know enough about the web to be dangerous (mostly to myself), which is precisely why Headway has been so incredibly helpful for me.

But instead of continuing to gushing about how it’s the best thing since sliced bread, let me give you my take on the Headway theme.

Design

The “out of the box” layout is strictly text and doesn’t feature any really special features that are offered in the backend. As noted in Ben’s review on Thesis, the same applies to Headway, the title and description are actually text and not an image you have to create, although you do have the option to include an image and it is exceedingly simple.

a default install of the Headway Theme

Flexibility

I’ve not used the Thesis to be able to compare, but Headway’s flexibility is second to none for me. I can redistribute items as I see fit. Create new sidebars and duplicate them across pages. I can even customize the 404 page directly in Headway.

Headway let’s you customize the layout of each page in the Layout Editor. You can add what they title “Leafs” for different types of content, such as: Image Rotator, Featured Post rotator, Widgetized Sidebar, RSS Feed and Content or Text/HTML and a few more. It’s infinitely customizable and each Page or System Page can be customized with a drag and drop layout.

a glimpse of the Headway theme's options

If you move to the Design item in the Appearance tab in the WP Sidebar, you get a plethora of options to re-design everything in your site. There is even the capability to add your own custom.css file or download/share “skins”. However, the Headway community isn’t as big or well-established as Thesis, so you won’t find a lot of shared skins yet.

One more thing. Headway allows you to move the Meta tags for posts and pages around and also has “hooks” for adding content after every post, after the header, before the footer and on and on.

With all the ability you have to customize every single page of your site, Headway makes a gymnast look tight and stiff.

Ease of Use

Headway was extremely easy for me to figure out and use. If you follow the new Headway items in the Appearance tab in the order they appear, you can set up all the options of your site very quickly and easily. Just like with Thesis, you can customize every bit of CSS, but unlike Thesis, there is no PHP to learn unless you really, really want to.

As I stated before, I’m not a SEO or CSS guru, but Headway helped me design a fairly nice site with minimal effort and I got it on the first page of Google in just a few days. While that may not be a big deal for some of you, it is huge for me and I attribute that success directly to Headway’s easy to use SEO options.

Headway features drag and drop simplicity, offers slew of options, and is infinitely customizable. You really get to choose your own level of difficulty, but 90% of the functions are right at your fingertips in the WP Admin pages.

Support

This is hard for me to review as I haven’t had any need to use it. From what I have seen, the documentation is available and there is a forum for users to discuss any issues and share ideas, but I just haven’t needed it. Obviously, with Headway being so young it doesn’t have the same number of users as Thesis, so community support will be lacking in terms of shear size.

Total Rating

I’ve used a lot of themes from designers and theme brokers, but Headway is the first one that really allowed me to get what I wanted out of a theme and I haven’t even scratched the surface of its total capabilities. I mean, take look at my site: jasonwietholter.com. It has no custom.css and I only broke away from the built in options by adding an image as a header (which is arguably, built in) and the image in the sidebar.

In all honesty, I haven’t even scratched the surface of what Headway is capable of and I think you could write a book to cover and thoroughly explain all of the features. I would absolutely recommend the theme.

Final Note: This entire site was built on Headway with ZERO custom CSS. It’s all built in to Headway and it only took a few hours to get up and running from install to final design. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me or the guys at Headway. It’s awesome!

In summary, Jason talks about how, initially, he began using Twitter Rocket to just boost his design business. His business instantly jumped and he was working 12-16 hours just on the design work. He started to use Twitter Rocket to generate passive income and made over $2000 in just 4 short days.

Jason does make a great point in one response about why Twitter Rocket works:

Well, I already had a couple thousand followers from linking my twitter account up on every previous blog I launched, but Twitter Rocket really helped me increase that number exponentially, and helped me to not just get followers, but meaningful, targeted followers. 100,000 followers is absolutely nothing if they don’t care what you have to say. Twitter Rocket really hits this nail on the head with it’s strategies on acquiring followers in and around your niche.

It’s all about real, target followers. Go read the interview here or learn more about Twitter Rocket. If you’re ready to jump straight in, pick it up at Upstart Blogger.

I’m going to walk you through getting your website up and running to reach your customers.

1. Get a domain name! Go to mydomain.com, networksolutions.com or any other domain name registrar you can find through Google. Begin to check for domain names that are appropriate for your company. You might have to get creative and think laterally to find one that is available for you. Add your city or blog or something else to the name to make it unique and easy to find/remember.
2. Now you need website hosting. There are dozens of places to use for web hosting, but some of the best that I have worked with are: HostGator & AN Hosting. I highly recommend both of these sites for their uptime, large servers and ease of use.
3. Next, you need to design a site and get it filled with some content. I would suggest using Wordpress for your site’s backend management. Go to Wordpress.org to learn about it. Search on Google or hit up a good friend of mine at wpblogger.com.
   • If you want to jump right in to setting up Wordpress and playing with the features and if you used one of the hosts I recommended, it is really simple. Login to your control panel and look for Fantastico. Click on it, then on the left side of the screen should be a list of applications it can install. Click on Wordpress and follow the instructions.
   • Now that you have Wordpress installed, we need to find a theme. For ease of use, I would suggest looking for themes over at WooThemes. They have great support and spend a lot of time making their themes extremely user-friendly. A second option is ThemeForest. ThemeForest is a site where multiple developers come to sell their designs. Since ThemeForest is more of a broker, the support isn’t quite as good, but I have used some great themes there. For the more adventurous out there, Headway is a great theme for Wordpress that allows you to customize the site yourself.
4. Phew! Domain is registered, we’ve got our hosting set up, Wordpress is online. Now we need to add some content. Login to your Wordpress site, click on Posts and get to work.
5. Good news, your site is up, bad news, it’s still hard to find. Subscribe to our blog to get constant updates and new tricks to get your site to rank higher in Google, Bing and other search engines.