Ennui Blog

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I’ve seen it again and again, Blog Misunderstanding Syndrome. It’s very common. A company gets convinced by someone, probably on their staff, that they should be blogging. Not wanting to spend money on the medium, said person starts a blog on a free service such as Blogger or Wordpress.com.

Great! They started a blog! But wait. When you read the snazzy new blog you see that the URL address is http://company.blogspot.com. Your eyes screech to a halt. Whatever blog you were about to read just completely lost credibility. It automatically gets lumped into the same category as ‘Joan’s Period Blog.’

Folks, not having your own domain name hurts your credibility and shows your inability to understand Web 2.0 mediums.

It does not take much work or internet knowledge to use your own domain name on Wordpress or Blogger. Both platforms allow you to use your own domain name. I think many people would agree with me that http://blog.company.com looks a hell of a lot more professional than the alternatives. Wordpress charges $10/year for this. Blogger charges nothing.

You may think, “oh, I’ll just use this until the blog is established, then move it.” Bad idea. Moving domains, unless you are an SEO expert, will destroy any search rankings your blog may have had.

But nothing destroys your corporate credibility more than hosting your shiny new blog on Blogger or Wordpress.com

Don’t have a domain? Get one, they aren’t that expensive. As soon as you start a compnay you should buy the related domain names to prevent the chance for squatters to steal them first.

How do you buy a domain name?

It’s simple, you use an easy to use service such as GoDaddy and register your domain for as little as $7.49
. You can even get a cheap hosting package with them and roll your own blog hosting. It’s really not that hard and they’ll hold your hand through the whole process. Read my article on How to Set Up your Own Self-Hosted Wordpress blog for more detailed information.

If your company is going to blog, buy the domain name and host it there!

The blogging revolution has changed the way content is published and shared on the world wide web. Everyone is an expert on something and free tools are now available to allow people to share that knowledge with the world and well a profit from it. This guide is how to set up your own self hosted Wordpress blog in 17 easy to follow steps. Also, Consider this an excellent primer on how to make money blogging.

Why Wordpress?

If you want to take blogging seriously, I highly recommend avoiding the use of Blogspot/Blogger and even the free Wordpress Hosting. To become a distinct voice on the Web, you should have your own domain on your own hosting. If your blog becomes popular and generates too much traffic, the free services may cut you off; forcing you to lose revenue.

The free blogging services make the process ridiculously easy to start a blog, but you lose credibility in that ease. You’ll have to conform to Blogger/Blogspot’s content guidelines. Basically you should be as independent as possible so that no one can shut you down, especially if you have a controversial blog topic. Blogger is not nearly as customizable at Wordpress and that can tie your hands when you want to take your blog to the next level.

Wordpress is a fantastic platform blogging. It’s designed well, it’s infinitely customizable and just all around looks great. People are doing some amazing things with Wordpress. There is a vibrant developer community and as well as a vibrant theming community. You’ll always have plugins and new themes to play around with. Wordpress is robust and powerful. You’ll find that Blogger/Blogspot to be very limiting once you have played around with Wordpress.

If you want to see some Wordpress Blogs, check out all my sites. This site itself uses Wordpress as well as Anglotopia, Dunesblog, Jon’s NWI Photoblog and Austerity Blog.

1. Come up with idea for a Wordpress Blog

This is the most important aspect of wanting to start a blog. Do careful research and identify what you want to write about. Make sure there is not already a blog about it out there and if there is, how can you blog about it better? How can you add to the noise of the internet? Also keep in mind what topics and keywords you want to target, this will help you when it comes to Wordpress search engine optimization.

When you’ve come up with your brilliant blog idea, sit down and summarize it. You will use this information later to submit your blog to various directories and blog aggregation services. You can also use it for your Wordpress Blog Meta-data.

Write out the following:

Blog Catchphrase - “The Ultimate Pog Blog!”
Blog Synopsis - Summary of the overall content
Ideas for Entries - Brainstorm as many ideas for blog entries that interest you
Blog Domain Name - Domain Name Ideas
Blog Keywords - Keywords you want to target with your blog

2. Research and Buy Domain Name

Put careful thought into the domain you choose for your Wordpress Blog. I chose to buy my own name and put each blog under a subdomain. Putting blogs on subdomains does not penalize you with SEO. Google could care less. Each sub domain is considered a separate site unless you tell them otherwise.

For example, I run several blogs under a subdomain:

Ennui Blog - http://ennui.jonathanwthomas.net
Austerity Blog - http://austerity.jonathanwthomas.net
Dunesblog - http://dunesblog.jonathanwthomas.net
Photoblog - http://photoblog.jonathanwthomas.net

I also have a couple blogs operating on their own domains (but using shared hosting, more on this later).

For example, these sites that I have set up have their own domains:

Anglotopia - Anglophile Blog - http://www.anglotopia.net
UK Points System - UK Immigration - http://www.ukpointssystem.com
Global Citizen Wiki - Worldwide Immigration - http://www.globalcitizenwiki.com
Transatlantic Travel Blog - http://www.transatlantictravel.info

Once you have found the right Wordpress domain name, purchase it immediately before someone else does. I recommend buying domains from a place such as GoDaddy.com,
you can get domain ridiculously cheap. Currently, new GoDaddy.comcustomers can get their own their own domain name for a $1.99.
I’ve bought all my domains from GoDaddy and have all these sites hosted under one hosting account.

3. Purchase Hosting

There are many cheap ways to get hosting these days.

Cheap Hosting Sites:

GoDaddy.com

Bluehost
Dreamhost

I recommend GoDaddy.com.
A lot of people hate them but they provide an all inclusive package that really can’t be matched. When choosing a hosting plan, I recommend a mid range plan which currently runs for $6.99 a month, especially if you plan on starting several blogs. You will be able to manage all your domains, websites and your hosting account from one place. It’s really the best way to use shared hosting for Wordpress multiple blogs.

If you don’t want to go with GoDaddy.com what are some blog hosting plan features you should look for?

Look out for this:

Allows Multiple Domains/Sites
Allows SubDomains
Has multiple MySQL Databases
Has excellent Bandwidth
Linux Hosting
PHP, MySQL, Etc.
FTP Access

4. Set-up Primary Domain

You’ll need to pick a domain which will be the primary one for all your websites. For example, all my sites are hosted under jonathanwthomas.net; even the sites with their own domains share the same FTP server hosting account; each website has it’s own individual folder which you will need to setup yourself.

For the blog you want to start, be sure to use Domain Manger to direct it to it’s corresponding folder. For example, my site, Anglotopia directs to the /anglotopia folder.

If you are only starting one blog then you don’t need to do this.

5. Download Wordpress Install Files

You’ll need go to Wordpress.org and download the latest installation of Wordpress. Download the compressed file and unzip it.

To help you get up and running faster, I’ve put together a custom installation of Wordpress that includes the latest Wordpress installation, the best starter Wordpress plugins and the best starter Wordpress themes.

Download my Custom Wordpress Installation by Clicking here.

6. How to upload Wordpress to Your FTP Server

Now, upload those unzipped files to the root folder on your FTP Server. Don’t just copy the folder, you must copy the CONTENTS of the folder to root folder of the FTP server. This will take a while to upload. While it’s uploading you can go on to the next step.

7. Setup MySQL Database for Wordpress

Log into your hosting control panel and setup your included MySQL Database for Wordpress. What is a MySQL Database? Basically it’s where all the content in your blog will be stored for easy retrieval whenever a page is loaded. All content management systems take advantage of databases. Pages are dynamically generated when they are called upon. It’s much better to use a database system than have to manage hundreds of raw HTML pages, like in the old days.

Name your database whatever you want. Your password will need to contain a capital letter and numbers. DO NOT FORGET this password. Once the database is setup, copy all the hosting access data to Notepad (windows) or TextEdit (Mac OS X) for easy retrieval later.

8. Run Wordpress Installation

Once the Wordpress database is setup and Wordpress FTP upload is finished, you’re ready to begin installing Wordpress. If you’ve done everything correctly, you should be able to just type in your domain name and you will be prompted to run the installation. Follow the prompts. This is where you’ll need the information for the database. In most cases, your Database hosting path WILL NOT be ‘_localhost.’

9. Setup Your New Wordpress Blog

Once you’ve run the initial Wordpress install, you can begin setting up the nuts and bolts for your blog. You’ll have to give it the web address and the name. Then you will set up the first username. When it gives you the password, you must copy and paste this into a text editor, it’s randomly generated.

Once you login for the first time, immediately go to the users panel and change the password to something you can remember. You may also want to setup another username instead of just ‘admin’ so your posts show up with your custom name.

From now on, if you want to access the control panel for your blog, the URL to do that will be:

http://yourwebsite.com/wp-admin

10. Pick Your Wordpress Theme

Browse the included themes and pick the one you want to choose the best Wordpress theme for your needs. Once you choose your Wordpress theme, simply go to your own domain in your web browser and you can see the test blog. You will see a test post and stuff to show you what everything will look like.

Check out the official Wordpress Theme Direcotory

Also Check out these Cool List of Wordpress Themes:

15 High Quality Premium-Like Wordpress Themes
30 Free High Quality Wordpress Themes - Smashing Magazine
Guide to Minimalist Wordpress Themes - Plaintxt.org
21 Mindblowing Premium Like Wordpress Themes - Smashingapps
30 1 Column Wordpress Themes - Mashable

11. Install Wordpress Plugins

In the custom Wordpress Installation on this page, I’ve included the Wordpress Plugins I recommend when starting a blog.

Top Recommended Wordpress Plugins:

All-in-One SEO Pack - Helps make sure every page and blog post is SEO’d to the max.
Do Follow Activation - Makes all your comment do-follow crawlable links. See more my Guide to do follow blog commenting.
Google Sitemap Generator - Generates an XML sitemap which you will need to submit your site to the Search Engines
One Click Plugin Updater - Make updating all your plugins much easier and streamlined
Socialable Zyblog Edition - Puts a custom social networking bar on all your blog posts, so they can be submitted to Digg, Reddit, Facebook, etc.
Wordpress Related Posts Plugin - Puts a list of related blog posts at the end of your blog entries to encourage readers to check out other parts of the site.

Wordpress Automated Update Plugin - Automatically upgrades your Wordpress installation follow easy steps.
Google Analytics Plugin - Installs Google Analytics Tracking sitewide, requires separate Google account.
WP-Statpress - Internal Wordpress traffic analysis. Adequate but Google Analaytics provides much more data.

If you find Wordpress plugins that you want to install on your own you install plugins by copying them to the wp-content/plugins folder on your webserver.

Once you’ve done that, be sure to go into WP-Admin and activate them.

12. Setup Wordpress Widgets

The Widgets are the items that will appear in the sidebars of your blog. They show data such as categories, blogroll, tags, calendar and any type of HTML code you want to put into it.

Sidebar items are generally also where you will put your ads.

13. Set up Google Analytics for Wordpress

The best, free tool to track traffic on your Wordpress blog is Google Analytics. Installation is easy, all you need is a Google Account. Sign up for Google Analytics and setup a profile for you new website. Once you do this, they will give you Javascript Code that you will take and insert into the Wordpress Google Analytics Plugin in WP-Admin.

14. Set up Google Adsense

You’ll need to register for a Google Adsense account. It’s free. Once you’ve done that, follow the steps to get your first ad code.

Put the ad code in your sidebar widgets or use the Adsense plugin to automatically place them in your posts and elsewhere on the blog.

You don’t need to do this right away. It’s better to do it once you have some traffic and you have more experience dealing with the intricacies of Wordpress.

15. Set up XML Sitemap

For your websites to get crawled by Search Engine, you need to tell them what kind of pages are located on your site. Use the XML sitemap plugin to create the sitemap the first time. When you submit your websites to the Search Engines you’ll need to give them the address of the sitemap. Which will be:

http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

16. Submit Sites to Search Engines

Submit your new blog to all the search engines. Most of your traffic will come from search engines so it’s important to get indexed as quickly as possible. Submit manually for them to be crawled but also set-up each Search Engine’s Webmaster tools.

Submit Wordpress Blog to Google
Google Submit URL Page
Google Webmaster Tools

Submit Wordpress Blog to Yahoo
Submit Your Site to Yahoo
Yahoo Site Explore Webmaster Tools

Submit to Wordpress Blog to MSN Live Search
MSN Live Search URL Submission
MSN Live Search Webmaster Tools

Submit Wordpress Blog to Ask.com

17. Write Content Regularly

This is obviously the most important aspect of blogging. To post a blog entry, you simply need to click ‘Write’ in the WP-Admin Menu and start writing. Wordpress has excellent text editing tools built in so you can format your entry any way you want and insert pictures. It’s all pretty straightforward.

Other Wordpress Blog Information:

Download Wordpress - My Own Custom Wordpress Installation including plugins and themes download here.
Recommended FTP Program - For PC and Mac, I recommend using Filezilla, it’s free and does everything you need for managing your custom blogs.
Recommend Hosting Company - I recommend GoDaddy.com
for Hosting and Domian purchases, they’re the best all around package around and they’re dirt cheap.

Future Wordpress Blog Articles:

I plan to write article in the future on the following topics:

How to Customize Your Wordpress Theme
How to SEO Your Wordpress Blog
Which Wordpress Plugins are the Best?
The Best Free Wordpress Themes

Backlinks are the most important aspect of building a successful website. To those that don’t know, your search rankings are partly based on how many website link back to yours. So, here’s your guide to do follow blogs.

There are many ways to build backlinks, which I won’t cover here. But there are good way and bad ways. A good way to build backlinks is by commenting on blogs.

However, many blogs (especially Wordpress by default) have a ‘no-follow’ tag attribute on by default. This means that any links in your comments will not be counted in your search rankings. So, you shouldn’t waste your time commenting on these types of blogs (that is unless they genuinely interest you).

How do you find so called ‘do-follow’ blogs?

The fastest and easiest way is to use a new tool called Do Follow Diver. This tool is great, it is a database of blogs that have removed the ‘no-follow’ attribute from their blogs. That means that when you comment and leave your web address, it will be counted as a valuable link to search engines.

All you need to do is search for things that interest you or things related to your blog, read the blog entries and make relevant comments. Keep in mind, you should not spam comments and just post your links. You should participate on the blogs and add something to the conversation. If you needlessly spam, chances are your comments will be removed and you wasted your time posting to begin with.

How valuable are these do-follow backlinks? 1 hour spent building links for your blog through commenting will help your search rankings greatly and eventually increase your Google Pagerank.

My only complaint about “>Do Follow Diver< is that it only allows you to search these blogs, it doesn’t provide a straight list of all the blogs in it’s directory.

There are other directories of ‘do-follow’ sites that aren’t as useful but here they are listed below:

Do Follow Diver
Do Follow Blogs Directory
Blogs That Follow: A Do Follow Blog Link Directory
424 blog backlinks
Do Follow List | Nickoo Shore
Phoenix SEO Do-Follow Blog List

Sometimes going through Google Analytics reports is like looking at porn. I could spend hours pouring over the figures and seeing what far flung parts of the globe that traffic comes from.

I recently ran into a problem though, on this blog actually. It appeared I was getting no visitors. This saddened me greatly because of all the work I’d put into it and SEOing it correctly. Something was fishy.

I double checked everything and everything appeared to be set-up correctly. I decided to install a Wordpress Plugin and compare the two. I installed the Statpress Wordpress plugin. I immediately discovered that something was terribly wrong.

Google was not tracking the site at all, despite everything being set up correctly. I was actually getting more than a hundred pageviews a day and Google wasn’t picking it up! I did have readers, by golly!

I re-installed Google Analytics and now it appears to be working correctly.

This raises an interesting point that I want to share with everyone. Don’t rely on one web traffic statistic platform. If you’re running Wordpress, it would be a good idea to install both Google Analytics and Statpress, that way you have redundancy and can have fun comparing the two data sets. Google does not pick up everything, especially since a lot of people block javascript and their visits would not be read. If you’re running other CMS’s such as Drupal, there are traffic monitoring programs built in that provide pretty good data.

So, from now on, Statspress will be part of my default Wordpress installation, along with Google Analytics.

I’m pretty much sold on Wordpress as a solid Content Management System. I used to be partial to Drupal. But Wordpress is so much easier to use and it can be adapted to do most of what Drupal does. Though, if I’m building a more robust site, such as Global Citizen Wiki, I’m sticking with Drupal. But for blogs and basic websites, Wordpress works great.

One problem I ran into, though, was adding a link to a static page that wasn’t part of Wordpress in the Wordpress Header. No matter how many settings menus I went though, I just could not find a way to put a static link in the Wordpress Header.

I did some searching around and discovered a simple workaround. This static link header workaround Wordpress requires you to edit your theme manually, which you can do within Wordpress with the Theme Editor.

Go to Theme Editor and find the Wordpress header.php file and open it. All you have to do is find this code (it should look something like this):

Once you’ve found the code, after the ‘php wp_list_pages’ tag tap enter and then code an HTML link, just like you would normally. Make sure it’s before the close of the UL tag. This is an example of what it looked like when I was done.

Keep in mind that, any links you add will always appear after the links generated by Wordpress. Also, you will have to do this again if you decide to switch Wordpress Themes. Your theme code may be different but the principle is the same, find the coded list which is used to generate the header links and manually add an HTML link.

For an example of how this looks when done, check out my blog Anglotopia and look at the header.

Happy Blogging!