A lot of people are under the misconception that you can easily set up a blog and start making money from it overnight, and I want to dispel that myth.

It is possible to make a healthy side income stream from blogging, and there are the exceptions to the rule that do it quite successfully, but I would say that only 1 in 1000 people stand a chance at making a living for themselves solely from writing a blog. People ask me how I make my living from my blog, and the fact is, while I make a small stream of income from recommending useful products to you guys, and from a few generous donations for my theme, the fact is, for the last five years, I’ve always made the majority of my income through my client web development projects and marketing consulting gigs.

A blog isn’t a business. But, it is a stellar supplement to your business.

Think of a blog simply as a platform for you to broadcast whatever it is you have to share. Whether that’s simply your thoughts, or whether you use it to promote the projects you work on, the business(es) you create, or the services you provide, etc.

A blog is your online business card.

Every time I receive an email from someone new, asking for feedback, or a favor, or for a partnership of some sort, the first thing I always look for is 1) what email address is this coming from? OR 2) is there a website in their signature? Is this person serious enough to invest in their own domain name, into building their own headquarters on the web?

A blog or website of your own is a place you can share your ideas, expertise, and build credibility. For me, since I started Thrilling Heroics nearly five years ago, it has opened the door to many opportunities for me. I’ve made friends with readers and other bloggers from around the globe, I’ve met entrepreneurs in a handful of countries, I’ve been asked to write for various publications, I’ve found cofounders and partnered on a number of fun projects, and I’ve expanded my visibility online to the point that clients frequently come to me, and I’ve worked with organizations on five continents.

Whether you’re a freelancer, aiming to create and sell a product, or working as a virtual assistant, you won’t find opportunity if nobody is paying any attention to you. Because blogs are such a powerful platform for building an audience, even building a small following is invaluable for anyone seeking to earn an online income.

Establishing your own online headquarters is imperative to your success.

Before we get started, what I want you to do first is click here and read these 9 things you should think about before you get started blogging.

That said, let’s dig into the easiest content management software that will allow you to start a blog, upload your own media, and manage your new website with very little technical knowledge.

WordPress

wordpress siteWordPress is a free, open source publishing platform. Open source means you’re free to add and change the software, and for that reason, there is a massive community of software developers constantly improving the WordPress software, which is good for us if we want to build our own business site, and it means there’s a lot of support available out there, plus tons of free themes and plugins to increase the functionality and aesthetic of your new site.

You’ll need to purchase your own domain name and web hosting, and install the self-hosted WordPress software available at WordPress.org.

Once you install your own WordPress software on your domain (explained below), the WordPress admin panel is web-based, which means you can access and update your site from anywhere. And the biggest benefit of content management systems like WordPress is that they separate the layout and the design of your page from the content. In other words, once you have a suitable design for your new website, anyone can easily update the content of your site! Unlike programs like DreamWeaver or Microsoft FrontPage, even the most non-technical person can create, edit, or update as much content as they want, and never have to worry about corrupting the structure of the webpage!

Purchasing Your Domain Name & Web Hosting

There are literally thousands of web hosting companies to choose from, and combing through them can be an intimidating task if you’re fairly new to this stuff.

If you’re planning on running a WordPress-powered site, make damned sure you find a WordPress-friendly host! Avoid GoDaddy and 1&1, for example, which have awkward backends and aren’t particularly well-suited for Linux hosting (which is what WordPress plays nicely with).

There are many options out there (for much more information about comparing hosts, see here), but through my experience with my own sites and working on behalf of many clients, BlueHost offers the ideal low-cost hosting for WordPress-powered websites. They run fast, reliable servers that are configured precisely how they should be for an optimized blog, and they’ve got free, attentive and helpful 24-hour, 365 days-a-year phone support in case anything ever goes wrong. They’ve provided the most helpful customer service of any host I’ve ever worked with, with the quickest turnaround.

  1. Open your web browser and click HERE to visit the BlueHost website.
  2. From the BlueHost homepage, click on the big green “Sign Up Now” button in the center of the page.
  3. You get one free domain name for life with your BlueHost package. If you haven’t already registered your own domain name (i.e., your own .com), enter it in the “I Need a Domain Name” section.  OR  If you do already own your own domain name, enter it in the “I Have a Domain Name” section. Click “Next”.
  4. Double-check that your domain name is correct and complete the Account Information section.
  5. Choose your desired hosting package and enter your Billing Information.
  6. Read the “Service Agreement” carefully, then check the box and click “Next”.
  7. Once your purchase is completed, you will receive an email from BlueHost with your new log-in details.

With your BlueHost package, you’ll get one free domain name for life, unlimited disk storage space, tons of email addresses, unlimited transfer bandwidth, you can host unlimited domains on 1 account, and you can have up to 50 MySQL databases (which you’ll need for each installation of the WordPress software).

NOTE: If you want more than one dot com, or if you’re the kind of person who likes to purchase domain names in bulk, I’ve found that NameCheap tends to be the best domain registrar around, with the best prices. You can then easily transfer your domains to BlueHost by following this video tutorial and using the instructions for your particular domain registrar here.

Installing the WordPress Software

With BlueHost, you get an easy, one-click WordPress auto-install! It’s ridiculously simple:

  1. Click HERE to visit the BlueHost page.
  2. Login to the BlueHost “Control Panel” at the top-right corner of the page using your chosen domain name and the password you chose when you just set up your new hosting account.
  3. Once you’re inside the control panel, follow this easy video tutorial.

Configuring WordPress

Your WordPress dashboard will usually be somewhere like http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ so once you’re logged in here after installing your blog, the first thing I’d do is bookmark that link so you can always easily come back to your dashboard.

  1. Next, click on “Settings” in the sidebar on the left of your dashboard.
  2. To change the title or tagline of your site (as set up during the installation process), click on “General”.
  3. Enter your desired title for your site in the “Blog Title” field and your tagline in the “Tagline” field. Click Save.
  4. Next, to control the ability for readers to comment on your site, click on “Discussion”.
  5. To be sure that your site appears in the search engines, click on “Privacy” and make sure that “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” is selected.
  6. Next, click on “Permalinks”. This is the URL that will be used for your posts and sub pages all across your site. The default permalink is set to like like http://yourdomain.com/?p=123. To help with search engine optimization and the ability for search engines to index your website easier, I recommend selecting the “custom” option and pasting in /%postname%

If you’d rather display a static homepage like your “About me” page or a services page rather than your most recent blog posts, click here for instructions. And see here for more details about the settings tabs in your WordPress dashboard.

Installing Plugins for Added Functionality

  1. To find and install a new plugin, click on the dropdown next to “Plugins”, then click on “Add new”.
  2. To install a new plugin within your WordPress dashboard, find the plugin you want using the Search box. (See below for a list of plugins I recommend).
  3. Scroll down to find your desired plugin and click on the orange “Install” button next to it.
  4. In the popup window, click “Install now”.
  5. Once the plugin software is installed, you will need to activate the plugin you’ve just downloaded by clicking on the “Activate Plugin” link next to it.

8 Best WordPress Plugins for 2011

  • Contact Form 7 – a powerful contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.
  • Defensio Anti-Spam – an advanced spam filtering web service that learns and adapts to your behaviors as well to those of your readers and commenters. To use this plugin, you need to obtain a free API Key.
  • Digg Digg – adds social bookmarking buttons to your blog posts.
  • Hyper Cache – the best damn cacheing system I’ve found for WordPress, to improve it’s performance and save your server resources.
  • Jetpack – Bring the power of the WordPress.com cloud to your self-hosted WordPress blog. Jetpack enables you to connect your blog to a free WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users
  • SEO Smart Links – provides automatic SEO benefits for your site by automatically linking certain keywords across your site to your desired target pages.
  • WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. This is really important in case something happens, to always maintain an automated backup of your blog history.
  • WordPress SEO – this one blows the old standard All-In-One SEO out of the water! WordPress is very search engine friendly by default, but this plugin from Joost de Valk covers pretty much everything you need for strong SEO, including XML sitemaps.

Simply do a search for these by title under the “Plugins” > “Add New” tab.

Changing Your Blog Design

WordPress makes it very easy to change the design, look and feel of your blog using themes. There are hundreds of free blog themes as well as many incredible paid premium themes which you need to purchase to use. Try the following places to find a great blog theme:

To install a new theme, follow these instructions:

  1. When you’ve found a theme you like, download the zip file to your computer.
  2. In the main WordPress control panel, click on the “Appearance” tab.
  3. Click “Install a Theme”.
  4. Click “Browse” and find your theme zip file. Click “Install”.
  5. Once you’ve successfully uploaded this file, click on the “Appearance” > “Themes” section.
  6. You should now be able to see the new theme you’ve uploaded. To apply this design to your site, simply click on the picture of the theme.
  7. If you’re happy with how the theme looks on your blog, click “Activate [theme name]” in the right hand corner.
  8. The theme should now have been applied to your site!

Adding the First Content to Your WordPress Blog

Customizing Your Sidebar

If the theme you have chosen is “widgetized”, you’ll be able to easily add content to your sidebar:

  1. Navigate to “Appearance” > “Widgets”.
  2. From the options available, select which widgets you’d like to add to your sidebar by dragging and dropping them to the available sidebar columns on the right.
  3. To add your own custom widget, select a “Text widget”, add a title (if necessary), and either add your custom code to the widget or write whatever text content you want to display, and click “Save”.
  4. To remove any widgets you no longer want, click on the widget title you want to remove and then click “Remove”.
  5. To re-order the widgets and change the order you want them to be displayed on your site, simply drag & drop the widgets in the order you’d like them to be.

Setting Up Blog Categories

WordPress allows you to create different categories for your posts which help organize your blog content. It’s best to use your target keywords and key phrases as category titles if possible. To set your categories up, follow the steps below:

  1. Click on the dropdown next to “Posts”.
  2. Click on the “Categories” link.
  3. Enter the Category Name and click on “Add Category”.

Categories will only show up publicly on the front end of your blog once a post in that category has been published.

Editing Your “About” Page

  1. Click on “Pages” to see a list of the default pages automatically included by default with your fresh WordPress install.
  2. Click on the “About” page title (or underneath it, if you hover over you will see an “Edit” link).
  3. Make your changes to the content of the page, and click on “Update”.

Adding a New Blog Post

  1. Click on the dropdown next to “Posts”, then click “Add New”.
  2. Add the title and text of your post.
  3. Select the category for your post.
  4. When your new blog post is ready, you can either publish it immediately by clicking “Publish”, or click “Edit” to post-date it to be published on a later date and then click “Schedule”.

Go Further with WordPress

Once you make it this far, check out the following:

Congratulations!