If you’re thinking of starting a blog, then there’s obviously some things that you would need to do in order to get started. While starting a blog may look easy, if you’re going to make some money from it, then there are a few things that you need to think about before you get going. Here are some things that you need to do in order to start a profitable blog:

• Decide on a Domain Name

Avoid using free hosting services that don’t give you your own domain name. It’s now possible to get a domain for about $8 and the most basic hosting service for less than $5 a month, even without paying in advance or taking a commitment with a web host.

• Install Blogging Software

There are a few blogging platforms that are now popular, however WordPress remains a favorite. Other content management systems that you can use for your blog are Joomla and Drupal. It’s recommended to go with WordPress if you don’t have too much experience as a webmaster, due to the fact that it allows easy customization and is also relatively simple and straightforward to use.

• Customize the Look and Feel of Your Blog

Actually changing the design is quite easy, since WordPress has a library of hundreds of free blogging templates. There are also many more commercial templates that you can buy and use together with your WordPress blog. The main issue is that these templates will determine just how your blog looks, so it’s important to pay close attention to them. What you can always do, is to install some templates, make some test posts and look at them one by one to see which of them would be the best suited for the type of blog that you’re going to be putting up. You can also ask others for advice about which blog theme would work best for you.

• Think of Your Content

Create a strategy to add content to your blog before you even launch it. This is because content is the most important element of your blog and what draws readers to it. The more interesting content you post on a regular basis, the more others are likely to find your blog informative, come back to it and also link to it from their own blogs.

Will it be something informative, something related to recent news, or will it be more of an opinion blog where you share your views on a variety of topics with your readers? Will you add other kinds of content besides text, such as graphics, diagrams and videos? How often will you post? Will you be doing all the content writing yourself, or will you hire a freelancer to do all or part of your blog posts? Before you launch the blog, these are the most important questions that you will need to ask yourself.

Tomorrow, we will see some more ideas on how you can get more traffic to your blog and optimize it to get the maximum amount of visitors possible.

If you would like to change or add a new featured article to post to the featured gallery on your home page this is what you need to do:

1) login to your blog and you will see the default wordpress dashboard.  Down the left side are different options and at the bottom you will see “Gazette Edition Options“.  Click on this and under the “Front Page Layout” section change the number of “Featured Entries” to display how many articles you would like displayed in your featured gallery as shown in the pic below:

Then go to “Posts / Add New” and start writing out your article.  Make sure to place the article in the “Featured” category as this is where the main gallery picks up the articles from as shown below:

To add an image to be displayed in the gallery, simply upload a pic and make sure you copy the URL of where the image is and paste this into the following section at the bottom of the articles options as shown below. Also make sure the image dimensions are 595x270px

When your finished hit Publish and it should now be displayed.

As a member to my program I will show you how to set-up a network of successful niche websites built on WordPress.  WordPress is a content management system that is free to the public and is mainly used for Blogging.  A blog can be used as a personal diary to write daily articles about anything you like.  Nearly all online companies use a blog, as blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your website and attract a reader base.  The reason blogs are so successful is because search engines love a website that is updated on a daily basis with unique information especially a WordPress blog because they are optimised for search engines.

The best way to make money online is to start your own blog on any niche you like.  My advice is to set up a blog in a niche that you have a personal interest in.  For example if you’re into gadgets or electronics set-up a blog dedicated to writing reviews and news about electrical items.  If you have an interest in health and beauty set up a blog writing about the latest health and beauty products and so on.  If you have an interest in finance set up a blog about the latest news.

If you’re serious about making money online with your own network of blogs then I highly recommend you to join up to my membership program and watch my video tutorials on how to set-up a successful blog and drive traffic to them and make money from affiliate marketing.

Click Here To Join

To install WordPress first you need to install a Mysql database on your server.  You can do this by logging into your domains Cpanel and following this video tutorial:

Once you have made a note of your database details you now need to download the latest wordpress files from :

http://wordpress.org/latest.zip

Unzip the files to your computer and using your FTP program upload all the files to your server.  As shown in the following pic:

Once you have the wordpress files installed if you now open your website in your browser and following the onscreen installation instructions and putting your Mysql database details when requested on screen.

If you have a wordpress blog and want to make money from your blog then a very good plugin to install is the Google adsense plugin.  The plugin is free to install.  Simply do a search on Google for the “Google Adsense WordPress Plugin”.  Download and unzip the plugin then using your FTP software upload the plugin to the following directory within your hosting account:

Public_html/wp-contents/plugins

Login to your blog and under plugins you should see the Adsense plugin and activate it.

Once you have activated the plugin your ready to customise the plugin under “Settings” on the bottom left of the screen.  Under the Adsense ID this is where you put you Google adsense publisher id also known as your PUB Number.  This number can be found at the top right hand corner in your Google adsense account.

You can also setup Adsense channels if you use adsense for several other websites and want to track which site is generating your clicks.

You can also set what sizes you want the adds to be displayed on your blog under ad formats.  You can also decide if you want your ads to appear on articles, static pages, category pages, on your home page or any of your archive pages.

You can also change the colour of your ads to match the theme of your website and you can also set to show a number of adds per page depending on your preferences.

Social networks are now becoming a vital method to drive traffic to your websites as Twitter in particular is used as a search tool by some users to look for information.

If you have a website that needs more traffic then you should take advantage of the free media that is out there.  One way to get more traffic is to

1) Setup a wordpress blog and link this to your website. 

2) Sign up to Twitter and create an account.

3) Follow as many people as you can that are related to your niche, just run a search for your main keywords

4) Download the wordpress twitter plugin and upload it and active it on your blog.  Fill in your twitter details and set it up so everytime you create a new post, it automatically submits a link on your twitter account

5) Setup a facebook account and become friends with as many people as you can related to your niche.

6) Install the Twitter facebook application and link in your twitter account to your facebook account.  Everytime you create a new tweet via your blog, twitter will also update your facebook status with a link to your article automatically.  So you will get traffic from both Twitter and Facebook automatically when you create new posts in your blog.

To get more followers on Twitter CLICK HERE

To make money from Twitter CLICK HERE

If you have a wordpress blog that you dont pay much attention to then you should install the wp-o-matic wordpress plugin which will turn your blog into an Autoblog.  What this plugin does is automatically adds articles to your blog via an autofeed that pulls feeds from website rss feeds you specify.  You can set it to run at specified times throughout the day adding as many articles as you like.  You will need to setup a cron job via your hosting account in order for it to work.

When you download the plugin simply extract the files locally to your computer and then FTP to your server and upload the plugin folder to the following directory in your hosting account:

Root/wp-content/plugins/

Login to wordpress and active at the plugin

Then under settings click on wp-o-matic and start the installation process.  Follow the onscreen instructions which asks you to setup a cron job.  If your not sure how to setup a cron job follow the following video which shows you how to install and setup the wp-o-matic plugin:

 You can add as many different campaigns as you like

Although if you can i still would recommend your own unique content as your blog will highly benefit from adding unique articles that aren’t duplicated from another blog.

If you would like to add affiliate banners to an article within your blog this is what you need to do:

1) First login to your affiliate merchants accout e.g (cj.com, affiliatefuture.co.uk,etc.)

2) Copy the html banner code the company you are affiliated with has supplied you (preferbly – 468×60 code is ideal for articles)

3) login to your blog and edit or add a new article you would like the banner to appear in and click on the html tab as shown in the following pic and simply paste in the html code. Click publish and your article is live on your blog and you should be able to see the banner. 

To use the WP 0 Matic plugin you will need to login to your website using Mozilla Firefox which you can download from:

http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/

Log into your wordpress blog and within the dashboard down the left hand side click on

Settings / WP – O – Matic

There you will see that i have set up some campaigns for you.

Click on Campaigns

Then click on FETCH

This will now start to pull articles of the news source i have set up for you on your website