Get Started with WordPress
I have a question for you.
Do you want to spend a little money or do you want to do it for free?
If you want to do it free then you have a ton of places you can do it. But it will be a little trickier to make money if that is a goal for you. But you will still need a site if you want to make money. And there are plenty of those for free too. But my purpose for this article is to get you going at spending money and getting your blog up and running.
Why spend a buck on this? Well it is not expensive and you never know where it may take you, so i suggest to take the leap and spend a hundred bucks on yourself. It is the beginning to an investment into you and will be a baby that will need love and care and through t he years will become easier to take care of, who am I fooling, and may come a day when you can watch it grow on it’s own and take care of itself. Sounds like raising a child, but it is a good analogy.
Anyways there are some things you are going to need to get going. Did I mention around a hundred bucks. Why a hundred? Because that is for one year. A year of commitment, a year of investment, a year of creation. Some run, some walk and some crawl, it will be up to you.
After saying I have the hundred, what’s next?
That is even a bigger question.
What is your domain name going to be?
Do you want to brand your name?
Do you want to be more niched to a service or product?
Do you want to be a little South Park?
Do you want to have a newsletter niche?
No matter what it is it will be okay. Look at it this way, since when did the books title tell the whole story, but the title may have enticed you to pick up the book or even buy it and read it. Just be as relavent as you can be .
Now that you have a domain picked out lets see if it is available and why not do it at one place. May I suggest using this service,
Mattie Blaze. There are other services and you may have one you already like but I find Mattie Blaze to be a great service with some really powerful marketing elements for any expansion you may need to do. The service was designed with the marketer in mind. Other services do not even come close in cost or service.
Once you have your money, your domain name that you have checked for the availability you are ready to spend that money.
Your next step is to register your domain name and host your domain on a server that is connected to the world wide web where you will be a public domain and anyone can look at you, or your site, also called a blog or even a page. No matter what you will be ready. Now you have to wait, don’t worry it takes about a day to get your site up and propagated to the www.
In the mean time you may want to go grab a this valuable piece of software so you can take things from your computer and transfer it to your hosts server where your domain is at. This process is called FTP. Also known as File Transfer Protocol. This is another topic but you will find it useful if you ever have a digital product like a book in pdf format that you may want to give away or even sell. There may be special graphic images you may want on your site and here is where you may transfer them to. You can get a copy of File Zilla here and it is free. For an HTML editor I like using Sea Monkey a mozzila supported software, and that is free to.
You do not need the above stuff but to know how to use it will give you that much more flexibility in your creativity.
Another free piece of software I like is GIMP. A great graphics manipulator. Get Gimp here and have fun.
Once you get your email that gives you access to your cpanel, control panel through the link your host will send you you will be able to set up your blog.
Go to your cpanel. Once you are there you will see a ton of icons broken down into sections. Down at the bottom you will see an Icon called Fantastico. When you open it you will see a huge drop down of all sorts of programs you can install on your site domain. Find Word Press. Start the process and I suggest using the same log in as your site. Once you get everything approved you can play with the dash board on your WordPress Blog.
Thats about it for this section and I hope you found it helpful. I am only sharing what I have learned the hard way.
