How To: My First Website & Blog

Since this is my first website and as you will later see this post will serve as a means to an end, I will outline for you some basic steps to getting your own website up and running.

1. Register a Domain

2. Find a web hosting company

3. Install WordPress

4. Begin Blogging

5. Post your page to your facebook, twitter, myspace – whatever social networking services you use.

6. Submit the URL to various search engines

7. Post relevant comments on better known websites that link back to yours

8. Start to think about SEO

9. When you have some decent traffic running through your site, start to think about advertisements

10. This is a continuing process – stay on top of new trends and ideas in the blogging community

To get started you first need to register a domain name. Easier said than done – almost everything has been thought of and registered already Your domain name should be concise, somewhat catchy, and somewhat relevant to what your blog is going to be about. According to certain statistics, 97% of all permutations of 4 letter domains have already been registered. Register early! Registration fees run from $5-$20/year. I pay $15/year for this domain.

After you have a domain name(s) in mind, you can use services such as GoDaddy, HostGator and LunarPages, etc… to check availability and register your domain. For this site, I chose HostGator. HostGator offers both domain registration and web hosting services. When you register a doman, you only have the rights to a potential website at www.WHATEVERYOUREGISTERED.com, but you still have to have that domain name hosted by a service, or yourself, and create content for the site.

In an effort to keep things simple stupid, I went with HostGator for both my domain name and webhosting. Like many other companies, HostGator is a one stop shop. I would reccomend HostGator to anyone new to building a website as I find their control panel is easy to navigate and their fees are reasonable. With HostGator my site was online in just about 24 hours.

Once your site goes live, the fun begins. I chose to run a blog-based website on the WordPress platform. WordPress is commonly used and easy to operate. To install WordPress on your website (in the root folder), go to the control panel in HostGator (which is accessed by going to www.yourwebsitehere.com/cpanel). On the homescreen, towards the bottom, there is an option under “Software/Services” called Fantastico De Luxe. Fantastico automates the installation of Wordpress, as well as various other programs you may want for your site. Boom… that was easy.

Now that you have WordPress installed, you can begin creating your site. WordPress offers many free themes for your website, which vary in functionality, design, and features. The theme you chose will depend on the type of site you are creating. I find that it is easiest to search and install a theme while inside the WordPress interface for your site (www.youresitehere.com/wp-admin). To change the theme, you simply go to Appearance – Add New Themes. After finding a theme that suits your needs, click install. You can switch between various themes by activating whichever one you like from the Appearance – Themes page.

Now that you have a template/theme for your website (you should now be able to go to www.yoursitehere.com and see a blank template of your blog), you need to begin blogging. Hopefully along the way you have been keeping in mind what the subject of your blog is going to be. Cooking, Investing, Politics, Technology, whatever you want. It is probably better for the long term success of your site to select one subject and expand it into infinity, but for my purposes this blog is a general interest blog. You can always refine your post topics as you better get the hang of blogging.

Great, now you should have a few solid posts up and going. If your creative juices are flowing on high one night (lots of posts), WordPress allows you to schedule when certain posts will go online – so your followers don’t become overwhelmed and your site looks more regular. With your site theme selected, and good content online, you should begin to promote your site on existing social networking pages you control. I posted my website under the website option in Facebook, sent out a tweet to my followers, and am currently exploring additional ways to promote my site. Social networking is the first and often the easiest way you can begin to generate traffic before a search engine or other, larger site picks you up.

When you start to get your friends and family interested in your site with good reception to your material, you can begin submitting your blog to search engines. The following hyperlinks will bring you to the various search engines submit pages. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and many more. The more time you have, the more search engines you can submit to. You can also use bulk submission services, such as this one to submit your site to multiple search engines at the same time. I don’t know how well I trust these sites, so I also submit to the bigger search engines manually.

You can also get picked up by search engines if they find your site while ‘crawling’ through a larger site. Now that I have a good beginners overview of starting a webpage, I can begin to comment with a link back to this post on the discussion boards of more recognized sites. This will help generate overall traffic to my site, and hopefully get me picked up by Google or Yahoo faster. I also think this is a good idea for other people to employ if they don’t know of a good way to start posting on other comment boards. This type of post will be relevant for most beginner blogs.

WordPress makes it really easy to integrate some basic SEO into your website. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a process in which you categorize your website by keywords, html architecture, etc.. to bring your website higher up the list (page rank) when relevant search phrases are queried in, let’s say, Google.

You can install SEO plugins by clicking the “Plugins” tab on the left panel of the WordPress Dashboard, and searching for an SEO install. As these are regularly updated, I will leave it to you to decide which plugin suits you best, though I use Platinum SEO.

SEO is a topic that can be expanded indefinitely and is the core of competency for many businesses and consultancy companies, but for now SEO is something you should be aware of and keep on the radar for your website’s future.

There are many avenues to go when it comes to advertising (generating revenue) on your website. There are two basic kinds of payment structures associated with web advertising: pay per click, and pay per thousand views. Depending on the traffic and the nature of traffic your website attratcs, you will chose whichever structure works best. View based ad’s, while they pay less, can generate a steady revenue stream for high traffic websites. Pay per click ads, most notably Google’s AdSense – but there are many others, pay you every time an ad is clicked on your website. The payout is typically higher for click based ads, but you are relying on your viewer’s clicks. You can also become involved with affiliate programs and other types of revenue generation, which will be discussed as I learn about them

A website is a living organism. To thrive, it must be continually updated and adapted. The internet is constantly changing and you want to be sure you change with it. Also, new content will keep viewers coming back and allow you to generate a steady “customer” base for your site. Those customers can be subscribers, or if you sell things they are indeed actual customers. Be sure to stay educated on new trends and techniques involved with maintaining a successful website. While I am not expert, I will do my best to keep you updated of the advances I learn about In Retentis.

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Tags: Blogging

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.