Starting your blog on your own hosting involves a little setup. It’s really not overly difficult and there are even some hosting companies that will set up your blog for free. Here are step by step directions on how to start your own blog with an email host using WordPress.

Step 1: Install Blog

Install blog using Fantastico or Simple Scripts available in your hosting control panel.

If you host has Fantastico or Simple Scripts then installing a blog is a fairly easy and quick thing to do. What you do is login to your web site’s control panel, and find the smiley face, the Fantastico Icon, and click on it. You’ll see a section in most control panels for WordPress, click on it.

Then you click the ‘install WordPress’ and fill in all the information that it asks for. An important step to remember is the location that says ‘install in directory’. If you want the blog installed on your main ‘index’ page you’ll want to leave the box blank. If you want it to be installed in a different location, such as [http://www.yourdomain.com/blog] then you’ll need to put ‘blog’ in the box.

Step 2: Add Theme

Choose appropriate theme and upload to server using FTP. You upload the unzipped theme to: blog location/wp-content/plugins.

Go into WordPress dashboard and activate the theme. Activate them by going to Presentation and then scrolling down until you see the theme. Click it and it will be activated on your blog.

Step 3: Customize

Customize blog by
– adding appropriate header – edit the ‘header’ section in ‘Appearance’>’Editor’
– changing colors in stylesheet ‘style.css’
– editing sidebar – remove/edit blogroll/links, adding RSS links, add opt-in form
– set up categories

Some premium themes such as Thesis and Headway make the directions above unnecessary as customizing is as easy as filling out the options you’d like and clicking what you want.

How to change the header:
Go into the header section and look for the files that make up the header.

Feedburner.com:
Go to feedburner and ‘burn’ a feed. You’ll want to use that feed to allow people to subscribe to your feed so that you can track the sign ups and also get statistics on your feed.

Step 4: Add Plugins

WordPress plugins are available on the WordPress website.

Plugins I like to add
– Akismet – to prevent spam
– Action Popup – this is a premium (paid) plugin
– Podpress
– All in One SEO Pack
– Broken Link Checker
– Comment Luv
– DISQUS
– Feedburner Feedsmith
– Search Meter
– Tweetable
– WordPress Related Posts

Step 5: Posts

You’ll want to get a good number of posts 10-25 before you start promoting your blog. The idea here is that you don’t want to send people to an empty blog or else they’ll never return. You want to have a blog full of useful information that you can then start promoting.

You want to create some solid content and some really good articles that you can refer to. Create a category for this but it is also a good idea to include it in a header menu so that people can find it fast. Include it with the normal content listings such as ‘about’, ‘contact’, etc and label it ‘articles’.

Step 6: Marketing

There are many ways to market a new blog:
– post to other blogs and leave a ‘signature’ when allowed
– add your signature to forum posts when allowed
– submit articles to directories – do this once a week with targeted directories
– send messages to your list when you post a new blog post
– pay per click marketing
– advertising
– guest posts on other people’s blogs

Blogging can be seriously advantageous to your business. It allows you a place to connect with your potential audience very frequently and get your message out there more often. While it may take some time and effort to get your site up and running in the beginning, you’re sure to enjoy the many benefits that blogging can offer in the long run.

Blogging and Advertising

Using AdSense to Generate Revenue

Using AdSense is one of the most popular ways for bloggers to generate revenue from their blog. This method is so popular because it is also very simple. AdSense is a program offered by Google where bloggers agree to have advertisements on their website and are compensated when users click on these advertisements.

Bloggers simply have to create a blog and submit the website address of the blog as well as some other information to apply for participation in AdSense. Once a blog is approved the owner is given code they can simply copy and paste to have advertisements displayed on their blog.

Google then serves appropriate advertisements each time the blog is accessed. Whenever possible, the advertisements served on the blog are closely related to the content of the blog because Google crawls the website ahead of time to determine which advertisements are relevant to the content. Blog owners do have some ability to place restrictions on the types of advertisements which may appear on the blog. For example the blog owner can specify adult advertisements are not to appear on the blog and Google will filter these out.