Now that you have your niche, keywords, domain name and hosting, it is time to setup your website. You can create a website in many ways, such as editing and uploading a template, using web design software to create a new page, or using an online site builder provided by the web host.
There is another option that also requires some patience in the beginning, but once it is setup, it makes content management, SEO, and page creation a breeze. This option is the Wordpress blog software. It comes with your hosting and can be found by logging into your hosting cpanel and selecting the fantastico icon near the bottom. Fantastico is a program that contains a list of scripts representing anything from forums, calendars, blogs, templates, and much more. Fantastico will automatically install one of these scripts or programs that you select from their menu. For this niche strategy, we are interested in auto installing the latest version of Wordpress. Just choose it from the list and then click on “new installation”. Follow the instructions and Wordpress will be installed on your domain or subdomain and the database and tables will also be automatically created for you.
Once Wordpress is installed, you will be shown your admin panel login. It will look something like yourdomain.com/wp_login.php . It is from your admin panel that you will select themes, activate plugins, set options, write and manage posts/ pages/comments. If you are new to Wordpress, here are a couple of definitions:
- wordpress theme - this is a template that controls how your site looks. It is similar to a web site template. There are hundreds of wordpress themes available for free online. They come with differing graphics and layouts. Some have 2 columns, some 3 columns. Some are more optimized for the search engines than others.
- wordpress plugins - a plugin gives your wordpress website a special ability. For example, the all-in-one-seo plugin allows you to tailor your meta tags. The phpbaylite plugin allows the user to display keyword based ebay auctions in their posts, like what is on the home page of this site. The static front page plugin allows a user to identify a post that stays at the top of the home page instead of the latest post. There are hundreds of plugins available for almost every conceivable purpose.
Any Wordpress theme or plugin that you download to your computer will come in a zip file. You will need to first unzip them to a folder on your computer, then they can be uploaded to your hosting site. All site files go into the public_html folder. Once inside that folder, you can access subfolders.
Wordpress themes are uploaded to the /public_html/wp_content/themes folder.
Wordpress plugins are uploaded to the /public_html/wp_content/plugins folder.
It is highly recommended that you download the Free Blogging With Wordpress Video Tutorial. Being able to see these steps in action will be much more enabling than following a written procedure. Not only do you get the video tutorials, but the file comes with 15 themes and 7 plugins that are crucial to proper Search Engine Optimization and site monetization. The first part of the tutorial can be skipped since it involves manually installing Wordpress. You have used the auto-install feature that is part of the hosting cpanel fantastico program. These videos will also show you how to setup and use the themes and plugins. Once you know how to do these things, setting up new sites will be a snap.
One of the wordpress plugins is for inserting an Amazon product with your affiliate link. The above graphic is just one example of using Wordpress as the keyword to bring up a list of books on that topic. This particular book is a visual guide. Anyway, the plugin, which comes with the free tutorial mentioned above, was not compatible with the latest version of Wordpress, but if you go into the plugin file called wp-amazon.php and change line 32 from
require_once (ABSPATH . ‘/wp-includes/wp-l10n.php’);
to
require_once (ABSPATH . ‘/wp-includes/l10n.php’);
then it will work with the latest Wordpress version 2.2, or you can download the modified plugin here. There are 2 files, so just unzip and upload to your plugin folder. You can also check the main plugin site for the latest updates.
One of the options you will want to set up inside your Wordpress admin panel is the custom permalink. Just click on Options–>Permalinks. Then select custom and in the field enter %postname%. Click on update and what this does is whenever you make a post to your blog, the post title will become part of the URL, ie - yourdomain.com/your-article instead of yourdomain.com/#1 . That way your indexed pages will be more search engine friendly and easier for people to see what the URL leads to.
If you have never uploaded files to a web host before, you can do so from your hosting cpanel file manager. A more efficient method is to use FTP software (FTP - File Transfer Protocol). This type of software connects your computer to your host computer in an easy Windows type interface that allows you to move files and folders from your computer to your web host and vice versa. Here are some links to free FTP programs:
- Sofotex - list of different FTP programs with links
- FTP Commander - free version has enough features for most people.
- The Free Site - more FTP programs to choose from.
You are one step closer to your first niche site, but it is a big step.
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