• Customize Your Blog

    Comments: 4

    By this stage your blog is actually live and you can start blogging immediately. But, most bloggers first take some time to customize their blog with different looks and features to give their blog a unique feel, and make it serve their blogging topic better. Because Wordpress is open source, the Wordpress community has created literally thousands of different themes (pre-set way the blog looks) and addons.

    Make Your Blog Look the Way You Want
    To customize the appearance of your blog, your first stop is the Wordpress Themes.

    This page will list hundreds of completely free themes that you can choose between to change the way your blog looks. Once you’ve chosen one you like, all you have to do is download it, unzip it, and then upload it to your website (more on how to do that in a moment).

    Wordpress Plugins
    I also recommend you spend some time browsing the Wordpress Plugins page.

    Plugins are addons to the Wordpress code that change its functionality — things like dynamic flash photo galleries, polls, allowing people to vote on your posts, and just about anything else you can imagine. Like the themes and Wordpress itself, these are all free.

    One plugin that I consider pretty much essential is WP-SpamFree. This plugin does a phenomenal job of completely blocking automated spam programs from posting advertisements in the comments of your blog. Trust me when I say this is a very real problem with popular blogs, and with WP-Spamfree you can just install it and never worry about the spam again.

    How to Install Plugins and Themes
    In order to upload the themes and plugins to your website you will need a FTP program. Much like the plugins themselves, you can get a FTP program for free — Filezilla has both PC and Mac compatible versions.

    Once you have your FTP program, just send it to your website with the login info that you got from Hostmonster (you will need to know your website URL, username, and password). You will want to navigate to public_html folder>wp-content. Upload your theme to the Themes folder, and your plugins to the Plugins folder – pretty straightforward!

    When you log into your Wordpress blog you’ll be able to activate your new content from the Themes or Plugins section.

    Congratulations!
    You now have your own robust, flexible, customizable blog. And setting it up probably took far less time than you spent choosing a domain name and a theme!

  • One Click Blog Installation

    Comments: 4
    1. Once Hostmonster has confirmed that you’re a real person, you’re ready to install your blog. This process will take you just a few minutes. First, go to Hostmonster.com and log in from the upper right of the screen with your email address and the password that was sent to you via automatic email. instal1
    2. When you log in, you will be at the admin control panel, called cpanel. From here you can control everything about your website. For example, you could create your own custom email addresses from here.However for the purposes of installing your blog, we’re concerned with something down toward the bottom. In the Software/Services section you will find Simple Scripts. Click on that. instal2
    3. You will be redirected to the Simple Scripts page, which gives you a huge list of free scripts that you can install with the click of a button. On the left near the top under Blogs you will find Wordpress. Click on that. instal3
    4. This is the Wordpress info screen. Just click the green Intstall button on the lower left. instal4
    5. On the installation preferences screen you can just leave everything on the default settings. Check the legal info boxes and click complete — and you’re done! instal5
    6. Now your blog is installed and you will be automatically emailed the login information for the Wordpress admin section. You can access it by going to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You’ll be asked for your username and password, which were automatically sent to you via email.Once you’re logged in you can literally start blogging right away. Take a moment to look over the settings (found on the bottom of the left panel). Everything about the Wordpress interface is very intuitive and you should have no problems publishing blogs. Your site is already live — as soon as you write your first post it will be online for the world to read!

  • Setting Up Your Hosting

    Comments: 0
    1. Once you’re ready to get your hosting and make your blog happen, go back to the Hostmonster Domain Check page. Enter thedomain name that you’ve chosen and verified and click Next. domaincheck 
    2. Fill out your information in all the blanks – you know how this is done.The Domain Privacy option means that if people look up to find out who owns the website they’ll be given Hostmonster’s contact information instead of yours. This keeps random people from contacting you, and could in theory prevent some spam from spiders that harvest email addresses from the whois database. Frankly, I don’t think this is a big deal. Of the dozens of websites I’ve run, I never actually got more than a handful of contacts from the Whois database.

      If the Domain Privacy is free then there’s no reason not to sign up for it; however, it’s not something that I’d ever pay anything for. 
       

    3. Once you’ve registered for your hosting, Hostmonster will email you your login info for the admin section of your website.Be aware that they will also require you to call them up and verify that you are, in fact, a real person. The reason they do this is to prevent automated programs from creating a bunch of accounts to take advantage of their very inexpensive hosting. Frankly I consider this verification of your sentence another nice feature of Hostmonster.

    And we’re almost done!

    You now have a website and you have a domain name. Of course, there’s nothing on your site but a construction message, but with the click of a couple buttons we’ll have your blog up and running in minutes.

  • Host Your Blog

    Comments: 5

    When you get down to the nuts and bolts of how a blog works, your blog is essentially just a website with some software running on it that makes publishing blog entries easy. That means that the software and the files that are your blog posts have to exist on a server out on the internet somewhere.

    There are now hundreds of web hosts where you can put your website. While it’s true that many of them are expensive or even scame, the nice thing about all that competition is that it has driven prices of web hosting down to almost nothing!

    Free Web Hosting – The Very Real Dangers
    I have never, ever seen a free web hosting company that turned out to be a good idea – in point of fact many of them are scams. I don’t recommend using free web hosting – I’ve never seen it work out well. Ever.

    The best of the free hosts may actually stay around for a couple of years and you’ll only have to tolerate them putting random ads on the top or side of your site so that they can make advertising revenue off of you. In the worst cases they are actually scams that use malicious software to steal information from your site’s visitors.

    In my experience it is just not worth risking the free hosting companies — remember, they’re not altruistic: they have to make their money somehow.

    Best Hosting Solution I’ve Found
    I heartily recommend a company called Hostmonster. This website you are reading is actually hosted on Hostmonster, as well as many other sites that I run, including a blog that gets over 5,000 visitors a day. I’ve used and worked with a heck of a lot of hosting companies in my time, both for companies I’ve worked for and for my personal use, and Hostmonster beats them hands down, for three main reasons:

    1. Low Cost
      Hostmonster is on the low end of pricing — so low in fact that when I first tested them out a couple years ago I was a bit suspiscious (I’d been burned by hosting companies before). A website with Hostmonster will cost you around $6 – $7 per month. And when you sign up they’ll give you your domain name for free. Hostmonster also gives you unlimited storage space for your site, and unlimited bandwidth — so you aren’t paying extra for getting high traffic (which is common on many hosting providers).
    2. Customer Service
      If you have a technical problem or question, they have 24/7 tech support. And best of all they’re based in the US, so you aren’t talking to someone across the world for whom English is a second language. This is also pretty rare to find in a hosting provider.
    3. Simple Scripts
      This is a huge deal – really. Hostmonster uses cpanel, which is a fantastic backend admin setup. Most of it you’ll probably never need to use for your blog, but they also have something called Simple Scripts is a life saver. It’s a piece of software that will install various free scripts on your site at literally the click of a button.And that includes Wordpress! So you don’t have to have any special technical skills or know about setting up databases or php settings. You just click on a button and it installs everything for you. Let your host worry about the technical stuff – you worry about blogging.

  • Choose Your Domain Name

    Comments: 4

    Now we’re at one of the most exciting steps of making your blog – choosing your blog domain name!

    A domain name is the web address, or URL, of your new blog – just like the domain name of this site is www.20minuteblog.com. Unless you are a nonprofit, I recommend that you get a domain name that ends in .com or .net. You probably do not want to use one of the new .biz, .us, etc. Of course .org is a perfectly valid choice if you are a nonprofit.

    The domain name that you want may not be available. Not only are there a lot of websites out there these days, but there are also companies that buy up tons of domain names in hopes that they can get a legitimate business to offer them an outrageous amount of money for them. Fortunately they can’t buy them all, and by going through some variants of your domain name it shouldn’t be too hard to find one that’s available.

    How to Check Domain Availability
    Hostmonster offers an excellent free service to verify whether a domain name is available or not. Just go Here and type your domain name in the field to automatically check if it’s available or if it’s already registered. If the domain name you want is already registered it will automatically tell you if a different extension, such as .net, is available instead.

     domaincheck

     

    In a perfect world you want your domain name to be three words or less – this makes it easy for people to remember. However be aware that very few single word domain names are still available these days. If your ideal domain is already registered by someone else, trying putting “the” in front of it, or slight variations on the wording, or changing the word order. For example this site could just as easily have been The20MinuteBlog.com or BlogIn20Minutes.com and would be just as easy to remember. With a little experimentation you can usually get a domain name very close to what you want.

  • Choosing Your Blog Software

    Comments: 18

    Before we do anything else to get your blog started, you need to decide which blog software you want to use. There are several different blog software options out there, and happily all of them are free. I want to stress that choosing the software for your blog is something you really, really want to do right the first time. Having to switch your entire blog over to a different software is a huge pain to go through – and you don’t want to risk choosing a software without support that crashes and loses your entire site!

    The things you want to look for in your blog software are: supported (with regular updates), reliable, stable, easy an intuitive to use, and flexible enough to cover anything that you’ll want to do with your blog.

    In the blogging world on the internet, there is one very clear leading blog software that is the most flexible, and most used: Wordpress. Wordpress both heavily supported and completely free.

    Wordpress

     

    wordpressimg

     
    Wordpress (www.wordpress.org) is the leading blog software on the web today. It is both free and heavily supported, with updates released regularly. Wordpress is tremendously flexible and expandable, and because it is open source there’s a huge community of people who create (free) addons that you can use to easily expand the capabilities of your blog.

    I’ve used many different kinds of blog software, and I unhesitantly recommend Wordpress as the best blog software by far available out there. This site that you’re reading now is a Wordpress blog, and I have several others. Don’t start with something else and then have to go through the hassle of having to move your whole blog to a different software down the line.

    Ultimately there’s a reason that Wordpress is the most popular blogging software on the web. And for the low price of free, there’s no reason not to use it.

    Why Not Blogger?

    Blogger (www.blogger.com) is a free software owned by Google, and is also pretty popular right now. The main advantage of Blogger is that they will host your blog for you. Blogger is popular among first time bloggers and people who just have a personal blog (as opposed to a business, writing column, etc.) Blogger does have several disadvantages, cheifly:

    • You do not have your own domain name. Instead your blog will be at http://yourname.blogspot.com. In addition to being harder to remember, it looks unprofessional.
    • Blogger is just not as flexible or powerful as Wordpress. The majority of people who use Blogger eventually move on to Wordpress, and transferring your entire blog to a new software is a huge pain.

     Next – 2: Choose Your Domain Name

  • How to Make a Blog in Under 20 Minutes

    Comments: 0

    If you’re reading this then you’re clearly thinking about how to start your own blog, either to blog for fun, blog for your business, or you want to start a blog to make money. Whatever reason you chose to create a blog, the process to make your blog is easy, fast, inexpensive, and doesn’t require any kind of special computer skills.

    Take a few minutes to review our instructions on how to create your blog, and we once you see how easy it is to make a blog you’ll quit thinking about it, and start doing it!

    This site will quickly and easily explain how to make your blog with step by step instructions, complete with graphics. We’ll walk you through everything from how to choose your blog software, how to find a domain name, how to get blog hosting, and how to install your blog software. With the right information, the entire process of making a blog will take you far less than 25 minutes. In fact, you’ll probably spend more time reading this site and picking your name than you’ll actually spend to make the blog!

    The Five Steps to Make a Blog

    For convenience this site is divided into the five basic steps you need to make your blog. These are:

    1. How to Choose Your (free) Blog Software
      The best blog software out there today is actually free to use!
    2. How to Choose Your Blog Domain Name
      And how to find out if the name you want is available.
    3. How to Get Your Blog Hosting
      Simple and straight answers and recommendation for your blog hosting.
    4. How to Install Your Blog Software
      As easy as clicking a few buttons – really!
    5. How to Customize Your Blog
      Now that your blog is up and running, why not make it look exactly the way you want it to!

    Different Reasons to Make a Blog

    Blogging has risen from a diary-like pastime to become a new way to spread news and a serious factor is companies’ business strategy. Some of the reasons to start a blog are:

    • Share Stories with Friends
      The origial reason to make a blog, to communicate with friends and family. Post updates about your life, pictures of your travels, writing, poetry. The blog makes a perfect format for sharing since your friends and family can subscribe to your blog feed to receive email notices whenever your blog is updated.
    • Blog as a News Source
      In recent years bloggers have become competitive in the news industry by breaking stories early. However, you don’t have to be in journalism to use a blog as a news site – many companies use blog to communicate information to their customers and fans. Which of course brings us to…
    • Blogging for Business
      More and more companies have chosen to make a blog on their coporate website. It’s more than a way to communicate with customers and vendors, it allows them to put a more personal face on the company. Creating a blog also helps companies strengthen their web presence, since search engines reward the frequent updates that a blog provides with more frequent spidering of the site, and even higher rankings in search results.
    • Blogging as Your Business
      Of course as the popularity and business importance of blogging grows, some people make a blog as their business. If you start a blog and develop a large readership blogging definitely provides money-making opportunities through ads and affiliate marketing.

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