WordPress Blogging

Even if you’re worried about doing something “technical” on the internet, it’s surprisingly easy to create a WordPress blog for your personal use or to promote something for a profit.

Far and away the best way to create a blog is to get some webspace yourself (if you’ve already got a web hosting account, you’ve already done this part) and use your host’s one-click install option to install a WordPress blog.

Why create a WordPress blog?

Because it’s free and it’s pretty much the industry standard for blogs.

There are lots of add-ons that you can use and there are lots of free blog templates (which WordPress calls themes) that you can use to differentiate your blog from the thousands of other blogs out there.

The first thing you should do when you’ve created your brand new blog is to personalize it.

Start with the blog theme.

The standard WordPress theme works OK but it’s a bit boring.

You can get “under the hood” and customize the look and feel of your blog from your WordPress control panel but it is a lot quicker, easier, and more reliable to simply choose a new blog template from the huge number available.

Then you just upload it to your webspace (use the file upload option in your web hosting control panel or, if you’re feeling brave, an FTP program).

Once it’s uploaded, WordPress will recognize this and will offer you the option to change your theme to the new one you’ve just installed.

See also How Do YOU Protect and Secure Your WordPress Site?

Take the time to go through the various menu options on WordPress.

If this is the first time you’ve created a blog this way it may take you 20 or 30 minutes.

Once you start to become a blog veteran, you’ll get this process down to a couple of minutes.

Unless you have a pressing need to keep them, delete the Blogroll links that come with every installation of WordPress.

Put your own blogroll there instead – this is a great place to discretely put some affiliate links and start earning your blog some cash.

Change the default “Permalinks” to something the search engines prefer. If you’re not sure what to do, just select the /%postname%/ option.

Activate Akismet anti-spam.

Start creating the first post on your brand new blog.

Congratulations! You’ve just created a blog!