Last time around, we looked at the first five essential steps for blogging. Steps 1-5 are all about laying a good foundation. Now we’re ready to move on to actually setting up the blog and putting in the first post.
Last Time Around: Steps 1-5
Let’s quickly summarize our first five steps from the first article:
- Identify Your Niche & How You’re Going to Be Different
- Research the Keywords that Drive People to Your Subject
- Brainstorm Your First Ten Post Titles
- Write Your First Ten Posts
- Organize the Ten Posts into a Logical Order
Steps 6-10
Now, let’s move ahead with the next five steps:
- Brainstorm Your Domain Name – Now take a look at your titles, and read through your posts. Going back to the keywords that you researched in step 2, you now want to figure out what the name of your site will be. You’ll need to walk a balance between being sharply focused with your theme (“natural-tomato-beetle-defense-strategies.com”) versus allowing you to create a broader range of content (“protect-your-garden-from-insects-naturally.com”). Once you’ve settled on your domain name that will work for both the short- and long-term, it’s now time to…
- Sign up for Hosting – Now that you have a solid idea, keywords, some solid content, and a great domain name, you’re ready to set up your blog site. Now that you’ve settled on your domain name in the previous step, it’s now time to sign up for a hosting plan with a quality provider. I have found Bluehost to offer a great program at a very competitive rate. After you’ve signed up, you’ll have to wait for your account details. Once you’ve got them, log into your control panel (cPanel), and click on the WordPress link to set up your blog.
- Set Up Your WordPress Blog – Once you’re in the Bluehost cPanel, just click on the WordPress icon, and you’ll be taken through a series of steps on how to set up WordPress. You’ll be asked where to install it, what your username and password should be. For the most part, you can just go with the default options. You can also have the login information sent to the email address associated with the Bluehost account. Now that WordPress is set up, you can start posting content!
- Put Up Your First Post – Although you’ve taken more time to get your blog going, you’re starting with a plan and a goal, and you’re now ready to take the posts that you wrote in step 3 above, and put them up. The key is to space out the posting, and then continue that schedule.
- Let the World Know That You’re There -You’ll want to email your friends, and let them know that you’ve published your first post, and to have them come and check it out. You’ll also want to develop relationships with other blogs in your niche that you read on a regular basis, and leave comments about your new blog, and invite people to click through and start reading. You’ll also want to put some effort into optimizing your site for search engine optimization, so you can start to get traffic flowing in from the search engines for the keywords you targeted back in step 2.
Simple, But Hard
The more of the five steps noted above and the five from the previous post you do, the more likely you’ll be to start off with the best chance of success.
I’ll be delving into each of these posts more extensively in the future – feel free to let me know what’s unclear, or what I’ve missed.
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