Postcards from the Funny Farm

1. Understand the difference between Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com

.com is a free blog service like blogger, Yahoo! 360, or Livejournal (there are many many more). You have very limited control over the files apart from the post content. Furthermore, most ad campaigns will not pay out to free hosted blogs such as these. These are free but they have many limitations.

.org is a self hosted set of templates that you install yourself on your own server. You have complete control over all the files that make up your blog. If this tutorial fails to help you 100%, try the support at Wordpress.org They have a lot of material and recommendations there. Most blogs with large readerships and who are making money have this type of a blog platform.

This walk-though is for a self hosted Wordpress.org install

2. Start an account with a hosting service like Topclasshost.com

You need to get the credit card out for this. There is no free lunch when it comes to serious blogging … well, not at first anyway ;) NOTE: there are many other recommended hosting services at Wordpress.org I like Topclasshost because it’s cheap, they have excellent customer service and you can install unlimited Wordpress blogs in a couple clicks through “Fantastico” in the control panel.

3. Download FileZilla (free) from filezilla-project.org/

4. Enter your ftp information that the host emailed to you into File-Zilla. Connect to make sure it works.

5. Go to your control panel, usually located at domainname/cpanel and select “Fantastico.”

6. Select from the blog choices “Wordpress” and go through the steps to install your own ass-kicking Wordpress.org self-hosted blog!

Voila! Congratulations … You’re done.

Of course, after that there is still a ton to do along your journey but that’s where the fun begins. Mine began in December of 2006 and what a ride it’s been! There is so much “accessorizing” and optimizing to do at this point.

For example, you can install themes by finding them online, downloading, and dragging them into Filezilla into your Wordpress folder wp-content/themes and for plugins wp-content/plugins

At this point, you need to bookmark Wordpress.org as you are learning all the “tricks of the trade.” They have an amazing forum there for help. Of course, you may always email me for support. The Wordpress blog platform exists because of people willing to help others. I’m always eager to help my readers because so many have helped me. Even if you don’t need help, please leave me a comment letting me know if you have questions and if you found this walk-through useful.

Have fun.

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NOTE TO THOSE WITH NOT MUCH TIME to wade through all this : For a very reasonable one-time fee, I will set you up your own blog and get it the way you want it. Of course all plugins and settings will be seo optimized and I can also add custom graphics to the job as well. My wife and I have a small graphics company. I also give “Wordpress” lessons. Let’s chat.

Blogging right can mean the difference between beer pong tables and a million bucks.

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It used to be around the year 2000 or so that blog platforms were scant and outside the mainstream. I remember Blogger.com. I used it to start a blog something like a personal website with photos and written vignettes of family experiences and such. It was free, and since I didn’t know much about blogging, I thought every color and feature I saw was a really cool bell or whistle. Still, I found the interface cumbersome in comparison to my Geocities account, so I let the blog lie dormant . . . as did millions of others I might add.

It became commonplace to find “dead” blogs in searches. It’s getting better with Google technologies, but when Technorati exclaims there are 71 million blogs, I would wager a bet that at least half of those are dead or should be killed because they make no contribution to the blog community.

In addition, most of those are just journals that aren’t trying to make money and aren’t trying to provide quality “authoritative” content.

So that long introduction brings us to the title of this part of the series: “Platform and Essentials.” There is nothing telling new bloggers what the essentials of blogging are. At the same time, every free blog host or paid tells the user that their service is the best. I won’t claim to say I know the best, but I’ll give you my opinion after 7 months of trying virtually all of them.

Free Blog Hosts limit the blogger. Not only do they lack the ability to hack the internal and external aspects of the blog, but they also turn off some readers who know what their free templates look like. Now I’ve written about this already and taken some flack about it by good bloggers who choose to remain on them. People should do what they want. If you spend a long time making an authoritative blog you will get your feathers ruffled if you’re told it has problems. One problem I’ll mention real quick is the fact that free blogger domains are easy to blackball at schools and libraries or even by isp’s for that matter. Your blog may not be accessible to you rreaders if you are on a free host. This doesn’t mean the content is bad.

This is an important point. I will keep a blog on my reader if it has good engaging writing whether it has a paid platform or a free one. Having said that, I think (and this is just my opinion) a writer who feels she/he has something to say would invest the 6-10 bucks a month to produce a higher quality blog product and avoid alienating readers turned off by free platforms. If you must go the free route, I’d recommend one:

1. Wordpress.com

Notice I put Wordpress.com, this is COMPLETELY different from Wordpress.ORG which is a pay for host, aka “self-hosted” free software. In other words, you buy the server space and install the free software from Wordpress.org on your computer.

That leads me to my true recommendation. There are hundreds of host servers out there vying for your business. Most are $6-10 a month for a ton of cool services. The Host I use is “TopClassHost.com” They are awesome, and at $6.95 a month, they can’t be beat. GoDaddy.com is also an amazing company I recommend for domain name purchase as well as storage.

Getting on board with your Wordpress.org software will be the most exciting part of your blogging journey. You can search thousands of free themes (aka templates) on the web and change them several times until you find the one that suits you. Wordpress.org has tons of tutorials to help you learn the interface. My advice is to install 2 blogs: one to practice on that won’t “ping” your practicing to the search engines.

Next, you can start perfecting the look of your blog and energizing it from within through plugins. (41 of which I recommend in this post) But, as with many things in life, you’ll never have success without the proper planning.