How To Set Up Your Wordpress Blog

Installing a blog on your domain is probably the quickest and easiest way to set up your website and get it to start earning you money.

If you web hosting company is one of the many that give you the option of a "one click" installation of Wordpress then this is far and away the easiest way to get a basic Wordpress installation on your website. It will take care of the database that your Wordpress blog will use and will unzip all the files into the right place.

The only downside to using this method is that Wordpress regularly introduces updates, which means you may have a version that isn't quite the latest one. It's up to you whether you're worried about this, although I would advise that you do keep your version of Wordpress as up to date as possible as the updates often cover security bugs.

The next thing to do once you've got the newest version of Wordpress installed on your website is to make some small changes that will have a big influence on making it as attractive as possible to the search engines.

This involves changing a few of the default settings in Wordpress and adding in what are termed "plugins" to improve the functionality.

I recommend that you install the following plugins:

• Akismet, a useful plugin that helps cut down comment spam on your blog
• All in one SEO pack, which will help you optimize your blog for the best search engine results
• Sociable, to allow your blog readers to easily add your blog to various social bookmarking sites
• Wordpress stats, which make your stats just a click away from your main Wordpress dashboard

One other important thing to change is the "permalink" structure. You can select this from the Settings menu in Wordpress. Once you've chosen Permalinks, go down to the box called custom structure and type in:

/%postname%/

then save your changes.

This will alter the way your blog posts are named and makes them friendlier for the search engines to index.

Check out my series of free videos that show you how to earn money with blogs. It's easy to follow this information on earning money from your blog.