How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog

If you want to set up your own website, or specifically, a blog, then I cannot recommend Wordpress highly enough. Over the past few years nearly every website I have set up was built on the Wordpresss platform. Indeed, even AffiliateDragon.com uses it!

If you do not yet have a company website, or are thinking about your next website project, then you should give serious consideration to setting them up as a blog. The search engines love them and you will find the pages get indexed a lot faster than regular web pages - meaning customers can find you that much quicker!

Once you have sorted out a domain name and have a hosting package which has at least one MySQL database, setting up a Wordpress blog is fast and quite simple even a beginner. Here are five basic steps you need to take to get your new blog up and running!

1. Installing Wordpress

A number of hosting packages now offer one-click installation of Wordpress, especially if your host supports cPanel or Fantastico.

Or, if you would prefer to install it the old fashioned way, visit the Wordpress website, download the latest version and upload it to your hosting via FTP.

2. Find a Suitable Theme

Wordpress comes with a couple of basic themes but to make your blog stand out you need find a design which is relevant to its subject matter. There are a number of free themes you can download, while other talented designers are cashing in on the popularity of Wordpress and are offering paid themes. Brian Gardner’s Revolution Themes are particularly good and AffiliateDragon.com is a customised version of his ProMedia theme.

Once you have downloaded a suitable theme, you need to upload it to your blog installation via FTP and then activate within your Wordpress control panel.

3. Find Useful Plugins

The fantastic thing about Wordpress, is there are a number of plug-ins which enable you to get the most out of your blog. Once you have downloaded them, like the themes, you need to upload them to your blog installation via FTP and activate them in your Wordpress control panel

For example, if you created a football blog and wanted to display video highlights of recent matches, there is a video plug-in which makes adding videos from Youtube, Daily Motion and MetaCafe a breeze. If you want to optimise your website for the search engines, there is a plug-in which allows you to add custom titles, descriptions and keywords to every new article you create.

AffiliateDragon.com uses numerous plugins, such as the video and SEO ones already mentioned, to those which display Twitter postings and recent comments in the sidebar, to allowing readers to submit an article they like to the top social bookmarking websites and pulling in a list of related posts at the bottom of every post I make.

4. Write Your First Post

With your blog now looking how you want it and the plug-ins installed, you are now set to write your first post!

You can also create categories to file your posts under, to keep them all together in relevant topics. As you can see, AffiliateDragon.com has categories relating to affiliate marketing, internet marketing and content creation (where this post is filed!) among others.

5. Keep Your Blog Updated!

Depending on your writing ability, you may find it easy or difficult to create articles to fill your blog. However, it gets easier with practice. Just get stuck in!

The key to a successful blog is to keep it updated often. You may not be able to add something new to your blog every day but two or three updates a week should attract a growing readership over time.