A Step By Step Approach to Building Your Own Blog
THE PROCESS OF BUILDING A WORDPRESS BLOG
Building a blog is like building a house. There is a systematic approach to doing it. Now, others may do it a little different here and there, but at the end of the day, it is supposed to all work pretty much the same way. In this article I will walk you through the general process involved in building a blog that also contains some ways you can make money blogging. I will do it in bullet list form for simplicity sake. This process is what I recommend and what I have found that works for me. I have multiple Wordpress blogs on the web and I have built several more for other people.
There are two major things you need to know up front.
First–This blog site focuses on Wordpress based blogs which are user hosted. This blog site you are now own is a Wordpress based site. I have a variety of others. Here are a few samples:
Sermon Seedbed
Mikki’s Memos
Babyfor.US
FlashBackYear.com
GreenConversion.us
Captureme.us
I think Wordpress is the best.
It is what I use.
It is what I know the most about.
I say user hosted because there are so many advantages to you being more in control of what you can do with your blog. If you just want to blog your thoughts, then just sign up for a free blog account. Other people will post their ads on your site and they will profit from it. You can control what is on your site much better with a minimal investment of a few dollars per month.
Secondly–I am an affiliate of some of the vendors I recommend. If you decide to use those particular vendors then I will personally profit as an affiliate of theirs. Please understand, however, I do not recommend them because I am affiliate. I am an affiliate because I use them and can recommend them. It costs you no more whatsoever to purchase through my site. In some cases, you will save money by doing so. I just want to be honest with you right up front. Now let’s get started.
1. Purchase Hosting with Wordpress Install Available
Hosting refers to renting space on a server from someone else. You pay them to make the space available to you. You pay depending on how much space you need. It’s like using a mini-storage company for your unused furniture. You pay by the month. If you plan on needing a while, you can save some money by paying a year at a time. For most bloggers, you will just need a basic hosting plan. Lots of good hosting services can be found on the world wide web. I have used several different ones myself. I even own a hosting reseller business which offers some great services. However, for hosting a Wordpress based blog or website, I would violate my conscience if I did not make as my first recommendation HostGator. I love HostGator. There are several reasons why:
-They use cPanel. There are a lot of tutorials on the web to help you learn cPanel. I bought a good set but honestly you can just go to YouTube and do a search on cPanel and you’ll find lots of free help. By the way, cPanel simply refers to the type of control panel that is used to help you navigate and do things at the server level to your site. Want a peek, here’s a look at their free demo of cPanel. Play with it!
-They have Fantastico which contains Wordpress. Fantastico is a feature where a bunch of good software applications are made available to be installed on your site with just a click or two of work. It really makes things simple and easy.
-It is easy to add a domain name and install Wordpress (I can buy a domain name from another vendor, route to my hostgator account. Set up the new domain on hostgator, load wordpress and be blogging in a matter of minutes—literally. And you can too if you just keep reading).
-In addition, Hostgator also can instantly install a greaty forum, classifieds site, and other great features through Fantastico. These are awesome scripts for you to use.
There are other good hosting services too, for sure. But I recommend HostGator hands down for the topic of this article which is building a Wordpress based blog or website.
To get your own account set up quickly, just click on any of these HostGator links. Once you click the link, look at all the features, and then click the order now button. I recommend you buy the $7.95 per month version call BABY. Why? With it, you can host unlimited domains. This means you can add a bunch of sites on this one package instead of having to buy a package for every site you may build. You may be thinking, "But I’m only going to build one site." Yeah I thought that two. Now I am over a hundred sites in. Trust me. Pay the extra 3 bucks a month. You will be glad you did when you want to add a site for your spouse or child or friend. You can also buy your domain name through hostgator as well when you go through the order now process.
To learn to access cPanel through your new account, just watch this HostGator tutorial on using cPanel.
WANT ME TO LOAD YOUR BLOG FOR YOU–CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS!
2. Selecting and Purchasing Your Domain Name
What is a domain name? Well think of it like the United States and its 50 States. The whole United States would be like the World Wide Web. The Domain Name would be like the name of one of the 50 states. The domain name describes what is occupying a certain space on the world wide web. This site is called www.EddieBlogs.com. It represents Eddie’s Blog Shop. It is the street address of my site on the web if you will. We use domain names to find a particular site on the internet. The computers read numbers but we humans do better with letters. Your domain name will be the biggest part of your URL. Uniform Resource Locator. It helps you to be easily located on the web. Anyway, in order to have a website that can actually be found, you have to an address–a domain name. Domain names are basically leased out for a certain period of time. One -two years is the most common purchases. However, you can pay for up to 10 years at a time if you like. You usually will save a little bit by buying longer.
Where do you buy domain names? Again, there are several really good places to buy. As I wrote above, you can buy your domain name along with your hosting at HostGator. I buy all of my domains through Red Pepper Domains. I own Red Pepper and it uses the same system, infrastructure, and support as the biggest name in the business. The site is clean, simple, and the prices very competitive. I appreciate your business. What is neat about Red Pepper Domains is that you can go to the homepage and search for available domain names. It will keep up with the ones you like and then allow you to check out.
3. Installing the Wordpress Site
I am assuming you have purchased HostGator account and have your domain name added. If you did, thanks for using my link. It helps me pay the bills and write these articles.
First watch this briief HostGator tutorial on using Fantastico where they show you how to install Wordpress. How cool is that?
I encourage you if you are planning on a pure blog site, then load Wordpress into the root directory. In other words, do not type in a sub-directory like they do on the example. Just leave that portion blank. It will only take you a few minutes to load your Wordpress site. Then the fun really starts.
4. Check out your new blog
-Type your domain address in the browser. Example — http://www.yoursitename.com
-In order to access the administrative panel of your Wordpress site, add /wp-admin to the address of the site. Example– http://www.yoursitename/wp-admin
-You will be asked for the username and password. This is the username and password you chose when installing Wordpress to your site.
-Browse around the dashboard and familarize yourself with how Wordpress is set up.
-There are tons of tutorials on the web you can access to learn your way around Wordpress. Try YouTube again for these.
5. Begin customizing your blog by learning to use FTP
Once you are to this point, you will need to learn how to use FTP to load the files to the server that you need to customize your theme and add plugins to enhance your site. FTP is file transfer protocol. It is software you use to upload files from your computer to the site that is on your hosting account. Don’t let it scare you. It really is not that hard.
AceFTP 3 Pro
is the FTP software I recommend to you. Click on the link and when you get to the site, click on the AceFTP 3 Pro tab. Once you arrive, you can sign up for the free trial. You may never need more that the trial usage, but if you do, you can get the software permanently fairly cheap. Setting up and using FTP is fairly simple. The information you need to hook your computer to your site files on your hosting account will be found in your HostGator email that was sent to you when you set your account up. Again, just latch on to one of the many video tutorials available if you learn more visually.
WANT ME TO LOAD YOUR BLOG FOR YOU–CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS!
6. Find a Wordpress Theme you like and upload it
Simply type "Free Wordpress themes" into Google or whatever search engine you use. It will bring up tons of places you can go to see freely available Wordpress themes. I would suggest you pick out several and load them to your site. Following is pretty much the process for getting the theme you find from the site where it is to your site.
-Once you find a theme you like, click on the DOWNLOAD button. It will pop up with open or save options. Save it to your desktop.
-Once it is downloaded to your desktop, click on it. It will open and you will need to unzip it using whatever unzip software you use.
-I suggest you create a folder on your computer to save WORDPRESS THEMES. Save the unzipped version to this folder and close it all out.
-Now use your FTP program and connect to your server.
-Once connected, look on the right side of your screen which shows your server files.
-Click on PublicHTML file folder
-Then you will see in it, the name of your site –example– yoursitename.com
-Click on your site name
-Click on WP-Content folder
-Click on the themes folder
NOW
-On the left side which is your computer files, find the folder where you stored the theme you want to upload.
-Highlight the particualr theme folder (this contains the files of the theme)
-Now click the little blue arrow that points from the left side to the right side and it will upload the theme file folder on your computer to the theme folder on the server.
Once this completes, you can repeat the process to upload other themes. You can then log in to the admin on your Wordpress site. Once there, go to "Appearance." Once there click on "Themes." Once there, you should be able to see the options you have. Click on your new theme. Press activate when it comes up. Then visit site and check it out!
7. Plug Away with Plugins
There are tons of plugins available for Wordpress. These little wonders are remarkable and enable you to transform your site into a virtual office place of possibilities. These are uploaded in the same way as the themes except they are uploaded ot the "plugins" folder. More information about plugins will be made available in other areas of this blog. I think that’s enough for now.
WANT ME TO LOAD YOUR BLOG FOR YOU–CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS!
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