Setting Up Your Blog
Now that you have your niche, we can now actually set up the blog. There are 3 main steps to this process:
1) Getting your Domain Name and Hosting and setting them up
2) Installing Wordpress and setting your blog up
3) Optimizing your Wordpress blog
Remote Hosted vs. Self Hosted Blogs
The 2 most popular ways to set up a blog is through Blogger.com or by using Wordpress. Blogger.com offers you a free option for creating a blog and it is really simple and easy to set up, however even thought this may sound great, there are some serious drawbacks to using the free Blogger.com option:
Google owns Blogger.com so essentially that means Google also owns your content. This also means that at any given moment, Google has the right to shut your blog down or just delete it for any reason. Imagine if that was a year’s worth of work!
It is difficult to brand yourself and your business e.g. you can’t put your logo in the blog header.
Blogger doesn’t have very many options and features so it can be difficult to create some things because of the limitations. You can’t create categories and it’s difficult to format.
If you are serious about building an online business that is profitable and sustainable you will have a hard time doing with a free Blogger blog. Because of the above reasons I always recommend using a self-hosted Wordpress blog.
The reason a people are put off setting up a Wordpress is because they think it is difficult and complicated to install. However this is not the case! It is so easy and you don’t need much in the way of technical skills and it can be done in literally minutes!
Getting a Domain Name and Hosting
For choosing a domain name, I suggest looking at your list of keywords you collected earlier and finding one with high search volume and seeing if it’s available as a domain name.
Go to http://www.godaddy.com or any other domain registrar and start typing in domains using your keywords you found earlier until you find something that’s available. Try to get a .com domain.
If most of the good domains are already taken, try adding other words to the end such as ‘tips’, ‘guide’, ‘solutions’ etc. Having your keywords in your domain name really helps in terms of SEO and ranking later on, which in turn helps determine the amount of traffic you will get through search engines.
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