Write Your First Blog – Revision Update

Donate for a cup of coffee

I want to share with you how I built this blog using wordpress.

Revision Update: Added some more plugins Step 7 and updated more information Step 13

My host is Justhost, although some of the most common Host that work very well with WordPress are Bluehost, Hostgator. Bluehost is at the top of the list of host that wordpress.org recommends. I am currently using the latest WordPress 3.3.

WordPress in my opinion is the simplest CMS “Content Management System” most widely used blogging platform in the world.

In this tutorial you are going to concentrate on setting up a blog for the first time following all these instructions. The more blogs you create, the better you will become. The more you use wordpress the more you will get to love it like I do. Experience will give you knowledge and the ability to develop very powerful blogs and in return you will become popular as a blogger. This is a learning curve and I am sure that you will enjoy it very much. That is why you are here reading this tutorial.

The following list applies to this blog and it is the same instruction I follow to develop my other blogs.

The following are my steps which might be familiar to some of you.

1. Think of a domain name
2. Sign up with just host and register a domain name
3. Install WordPress
4. Setup your theme
5. Add Categories
6. Change permalinks structure
7. Install plugins
8. Create a Twitter account, a Facebook Page, and a Feedburner account
9. Add links to these accounts on your sidebar.
10. Start adding some post
11. SEO “Search Engine Optimisation”
12. Change your privacy settings
13. Backup and Maintenance

#1 Think of a domain name

Buying a domain name using the correct keywords can be tricky at first but if you do it right from the beginning it can take you to the top in Google search and in time be ranked top 10. If you build the right foundations from the beginning using the correct keywords in your domain name people will find you much quicker.

Let me give you an example. Lets say you wanted to sell tomatoes at a special price and your name was Bob, the domain names that I would consider might be:

1. www.bobstomatoes.com
2. www.bobsspecialtomatoes.com
3. www.specialbobtomatoes.com
4. www.specialtomatoes.com

The above would be based on a search on Google and see how many searches come up with the words bob special tomatoes or any other combination. The results was astonishing 13,800,000 which tells you that you have a huge competition ahead based on that particular search query. This would mean that you might reconsider selecting another domain name to make life easier.

These are just examples, I think you are starting to get the message and remember that if you live for example in Spain then you might consider adding the .es domain especially if you only sell in Spain.