I see that many people encounter problems in setting up a WordPress blog in their own domain (also known as a self-hosted WordPress blog). With that, what I’ll be sharing with you in this article is a step-by-step guide that you can follow through to set up your very own WordPress blog.

You may be asking me about the difference between a self-hosted WordPress blog and a free blog from WordPress.com – The main difference is that if you are using a free blog from WordPress.com, you are not allowed to use it for marketing purposes. However, if it’s a self-hosted WordPress blog, then you can promote other peoples’ products and services (or selling your own).

Before you can set up your own self-hosted WordPress blog, you will first need to have your own domain name (you can get one in Namecheap – which costs less than US$10/year) and your own hosting service (you can get one in Hostgator – which costs less than US$10/month for a Hatchling plan).

Step #01 – Accessing Your Domain’s Cpanel

The first thing you need to do is to log into your domain’s Cpanel.

You’ll be prompted to enter your user name and password before you can gain access into it.

Step #02 – Locate “Fantastico De Luxe”

After you’ve accessed your domain’s Cpanel, you need to locate and click on this icon called “Fantastico De Luxe”. – It’s in “Fantastico De Luxe” that you need to go to in order to install your WordPress blog.

Step #03 – Select “WordPress ” Under Blogs

What you need to do once you have accessed Fantastico De Luxe is to locate and click on the link called “WordPress” under the category “Blogs” (it is located on the left of your screen, where all the menu items are).

Step #04 – Select “New Installation”

After you’ve selected to setup a WordPress blog, you’ll see a menu on your right – You need to click on the link “New Installation” to start a new installation.

Step #05 – WordPress Setup Information

Next, you will see the following page – Where you need to enter some information about the blog you are going to set up:

Install In Directory – If you do not specify anything here, your WordPress blog will be installed in the root directory If you like your blog to be installed under the directory “blog”, then you need to specify “blog” (without inverted commas) here.

Administrator User Name & Password – You need to set up an account to access your blog.

Admin Nickname – What you want to be known as when you post blog entries in your blog (this is what your “Author’s Name” will be.

Admin Email – Specify your email address here.

Site Name – Name of your blog.

Description – A simple, 1 line description on what your blog is about.

Once you’re done filling up the details, simply click on the “Install WordPress” button below to proceed.

Step #06 – Setup Confirmation

Before your blog is being set up, you are required to confirm whether the information you’ve entered is correct.

If the information is correct, simply click on the “Finish Installation” button to install your WordPress blog.

Step #07 – You’re Done!

You’re done! Now, you can following the instructions to access the admin area of your WordPress blog.

I hope you find this step-by-step tutorial useful and hope that you manage to follow it and get your WordPress blog up.

Watch How Popup Domination Plugin Increased Email Opt-in’s From 17 to 109+

This is insane, these two guys increased their mailing list opt-in rate by over 304% over night with one simple WordPress plugin and now their letting you and I get our hands on it.
You probably heard this before, The Money Is In The List!

And it’s so true… The more people you get on your list, the more money you will make because you can promote more things and send more readers back to your site.

Check It Out Now. http://john-regis.com/popup domination

This guy earns 6 figures a year from one of his blogs and the majority of his income comes from his list, because of that he has included a BONUS presentation you can watch on exactly how he makes money with is mailing list.

To Your Online Success,

John Regis – Popup Domination – View Original Post Here

In my blog post I’ve written on Enhance your blogging skills with WordPress Plug-ins. Today I’m going to explain about advance hacks & wordpress plug-in for powering your blogging.We all know that WordPress is best CMS for blogging, if you have bit technical skills to tweaked with coding & R& D for trying new plug-ins, then blog post is must read for you. Let’s start with WordPress Plug-in & Hacks:

Wordbook – WordBook is provides you to facility of posting your blog posts in to your Face Book Wall. These blog posts will be showing on Boxes tab of your recent blog post.

Broken Link Checker – This plug-in let you know broking links of your blog. You can monitor links in your blog post, pages and other custom fields. It also notifies redirected links.

Link to This Page – Link to This Page allows you to handy way to obtain a link to your page or blog post from their web site.

WP Wall – This plug-in appears in your blog’s side bar. Readers can add quick comment about your blog and it will appear in side bar immediately, with out reloading the page.

PixoPoint Menu Plugin – Pix Point Menu Plug-in enhance your navigation control with regular or dropdown menu. It’s easy to modifying design & animated drop down menus and you can use it Up to two menus.

Highlight Search Terms – This plug-in Highlights search terms using  jQuery within WordPress generated search results. This is compatible up to wordpress 2.7.1

Platinum SEO Pack – Platinum SEO Pack is pretty much similar as All in One SEO. It has also some additional functionality like you can add other Meta tags such as robots, index, follow or no follow. It also helps you to avoid duplicate content issues.

SEO Slugs – SEO Slugs WordPress plug-in eliminates stop words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.

Extended Options – This plug-in can manage some certain Meta data like Relationship Meta links, Favicon Meta links, OpenID Meta links MicroID Meta links and Protocol discovery Meta links.

After the Deadline – This plug-in helps you to write better and spend less time on editing. You can use this plug-in for checking spelling, style, and grammar.

Automatically insert content after each post – This blog post helps you to minimize your efforts on content which you’re mentioning after each post. This hack will help you to insert automatically content after blog post.

Automatically insert author bio on each post – With the help of this WordPress hack you can add author bio of your blog on each blog post.

Compress WordPress output and speed your blog’s load speed – This blog post helps you to compress your WordPress blog and speed up your blog load post. Now a day faster loading website is having more chances to rank well as per Google’s latest algorithm update.

Hope this WordPress Plug-in & Hacks will helps you to take your wordpress blog at advance level as you want. If you have some other plug-in & Hacks of WordPress then you can share here.

There is no doubt that the blogging has changed the internet as we know it today. The days of boring, stale, static content websites are over. Bloggers have become a source of fresh and interesting content for internet users across the world. The blogosphere is constantly evolving and changing thanks to this seemingly unending stream of interesting information published by regular people like you.

The great thing about the blogosphere is that anyone can contribute to it. You can start blogging and get your word out there today with a great open source blogging platform known as WordPress. Install this software on your website and you can have a blog up and running in no time. Never heard of WordPress? Well these top companies and publications have:

The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/topnews/blog-index.html
Yahoo’s Corporate Blog: http://ycorpblog.com/
CNN’s Political Ticker: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/

The list goes on and on…

You’re probably thinking: if all these huge companies use this software called WordPress, it’s probably too complicated for a beginning blogger like me. That is just absolutely wrong. WordPress is very simple to use and anyone can start blogging with it. The reason why such large companies and small-time bloggers alike use WordPress is the simplicity, flexibility, and easy of use. Let’s not forget WordPress is absolutely free and open source. After you install WordPress, here are some of the benefits of using it as your blogging platform of choice:

An easy to use blogging platform. Write in a WYSIWYG editor, save drafts, and publish when you’re ready.
A huge community full of support, a wide selection of free templates, WordPress plugins, and additional addons and modifications for your blog
A dynamic theming system, change the look of your entire blog with one click.
Generate “SEO-friendly” permalinks with the click of a button.
Built-in RSS feed functionality.
Categorize and tag your blog posts.
Create static pages.
Integrated search box.
Automatic pinging to the top blog ping services.

The possibilities are literally endless…

With the thousands upon thousands of other blogs running WordPress, it’s popularity is undeniable. Give it a test drive yourself by signing up for a free hosted blog at WordPress.com or take the plunge and host it yourself. Take advantage of the variety of free tools and resources associated with this popular open source blogging software. Happy blogging!

The WordPress framework is one of the best solutions for designing, developing and launching websites in as short a time frame as possible. The modular nature of WordPress allows quick and easy customization and configuration, which is especially important to Affiliate Marketers. The vast WordPress plugin library allows website owners to make the most of their affiliate marketing websites. Here are a few essential plugins to help Affiliate Marketers fully optimize their campaigns.

1. WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam :The infiltration of spam into the comments section of blog posts and other areas can derail the legitimacy and hurt the page rankings of your various sites. WP-SpamFree features intelligent filters for weeding out blog content spam, trackback spam and pingback spam. This plugin manages to eliminate virtually all spam through the new Enhanced Comment Blacklist feature, and without pestering visitors with CAPTCHAs and other annoying safety precautions.
2. All-In-One SEO Pack:An absolute must for any site, this extension is the Swiss Army Knife of plugins. In a nutshell, it optimizes your WordPress blog or website to rank highly in the Search Engine Results Pages based on the content specific to your page. The All-In-One SEO Pack automatically generates the meta tags that Search Engine crawlers look at when they index websites to determine where they will be ranked for important keywords, and it even tweaks internal links for optimal ease of navigation.
3. Google Analyticator:As any seasoned Affiliate Marketer knows, the profitability of a site hinges largely on understanding your visitors, identifying their needs and delivering solutions tailored to their unique problems. Tracking and analytics play a large role in making that happen. Google Analyticator automates the addition of Javascript tracking codes to individual blogs and web pages and organizes the collected data in an easy to read format for clear traffic analysis.
4. Affiliate Link:Cleaning up unsightly, never-ending affiliate links and redirects goes a long way in making your site more presentable and professional looking. The Affiliate Link extension allows you to shrink, cloak and track any URL and analyze traffic through a unique and simplified Admin Panel that gives you incredibly detailed and accurate reports. It’s one of the best all purpose link cloaking tools available through the official WordPress plugin repositories.
5. Sociable:The surge in the popularity of social networking sites has in many ways been a great boon to Affiliate Marketers. Facebook, Digg and Twitter are all great ways to drive immense amounts of traffic to your site, so it’s a good idea to make it easy for visitors to upvote and link to your posts. Sociable adds link widgets to your posts and RSS feeds from over 99 different social bookmarking sites to make sure that your fans can let other people know about you and increase your exposure on the web.
6. Google XML Sitemaps:This plugin creates specialized XML sitemaps that allow major Search Engines to more efficiently and thoroughly index your site. It’s an important component in proper SEO, and Google XML Sitemaps also lets Search Engines like Google and Bing know when you publish new posts so that your most recent content shows up in the results as soon as possible.
7. WordPress-Banner:Headline banners and other Affiliate Advertising Graphics have been shown to substantially increase conversions for affiliate sites. Managing them all can be a pain, which is why the WordPress-Banner plugin is such a godsend. This handy add-on can randomly select different banners from the same affiliate program or from various different programs depending on how you want to set it up. For high traffic sites, it’s a great way to test out the effectiveness of each banner and see how well they convert.

Making money in the world of online Affiliate Marketing is difficult enough without having to worry about all the minutia and fine details of Search Engine Optimization, Keyword Optimization, tracking and analytics. These helpful and effective plugins take care of many of the back-end operations of running a successful affiliate site. Ultimately, they’ll give you more time to plan your marketing strategy, promote your web real estate, and maximize the profits of your online marketing efforts.

WordPress is one among the popular weblog publishing platforms available on the web. There are millions of blogs based on WordPress.

Search engines are the best way to promote, publicize and help people discover your content. Thus, it is very important to optimize your blog or web site so that search engines can discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

WordPress, in addition to providing you with the state-of-the-art publishing platform, also provides plethora of plugins for Search Engine Optimization(SEO). Some plugins are really effective whereas some are not. To help you find the right plugin for your web site, we have composed some of the best SEO plugins.

1. All in one SEO Pack

One among the most popular and widely discussed plugins for WordPress. This plugin is easy to use and is compatible with most WordPress plugins. It works as an overall SEO plugin – automatically generating META tags and optimizes your titles for search engines and helps you in avoiding duplicate content. This plugin also enables you to manually include META tags (title, description and keywords) for each page and post in your web site.

2. HeadSpace2

A powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. It allows you to tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions, thereby improves your page ranking and relevance on search engines. You can also change the theme or load plugins on specific pages and much more. This plugin is available in multiple languages.

3. Platinum SEO plugin

An all-in-one SEO plugin with a host of features like automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto generation of META tags, avoid duplicate content, SEO optimized post and page titles and a whole lot of other features.

4. TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin

This plugin is a fairly modified version of the all-in-one SEO Pack. The unique feature of this plugin is that, it’s directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS. It can auto generate titles, descriptions and keywords when overrides are not present and also avoids duplicate content.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Generates an XML sitemap supported by Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask. Sitemaps make it much easier for crawlers to see the complete structure of your web site and retrieve more efficiently. It also notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post. You can either choose to write a normal XML file or a zipped file. In case of any errors, you can rebuild the sitemap manually. As a remark, Pingomatic can be used to ping your blog to multiple search engines and other specialized services.

6. Sitemap Generator

Creates a highly customizable sitemap for your WordPress powered web site. It enables you to choose what to show and what not to including – what order to list the items in. It supports multi-level categories, pages and permalinks.

7. SEO Slugs

Slugs are long filenames assigned to your posts. Ex: http://yourblog.com/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings. This plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’,’in’,’what’,’you’ etc. from the automatically assigned post slug to make it more Search Engine friendly.

8. SEO Post Links

This plugin works similar to SEO slugs. It shortens the post slug and retains only the necessary keywords making it Search Engine friendly. It allows you to choose the longest number of characters in your post slug and also remove unnecessary words.

9. Automatic SEO links

Just choose a word or a phrase for automatic linking and this plugin will replace all matches in the posts of your weblog. It allows you to set the title, target and rel. for each link. You can also set the anchor text and choose if it should be no-follow or not. If there are repeated words, only the first matched word in the post will be replaced.

10. SEO Smart links

Automatically links keywords and phrases on your blog with corresponding posts, pages, categories or tags on your blog. It allows you to set up your own keywords and a list of matching URLs and also set the no-follow attribute. You can customize it according to your needs through the Administration Settings Panel.

11. WP Backlinks

This plugin helps in making the task of link exchange very simple. Once installed, it puts a small form on the sidebar of your blog that allows webmasters and other bloggers to quickly submit a link for link exchange. The plugin will spider the webmasters site for a reciprocal link and if everything is successful you will have made a successful link exchange. It also has the option of displaying different links on different pages.

12. SEO Title Tag

SEO Title Tag makes it easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress powered blog. It allows you to override a page’s title tag with a custom one, mass editing of title tags, title tags for 404 error pages and much more.

13. 404 SEO plugin

Gives you a smart, customized ‘Page Not Found(404)’ error message and automatically displays links to relevant pages on your site, based on the words in the URL that was not found.

14. Redirection

This plugin helps you to manage 301 redirections, to keep track of 404 errors and also correct them. It also allows you to monitor your redirects by giving you full logs of all redirected URLs and also RSS feed for 404 errors. Automatically adds a redirection when a posts URL changes.

15. Simple Submit SEO/Social Bookmarking Plugin

This plugin adds submission links for Digg, Delicious, Buzz, and Stumble to pages and posts. It allows you to choose whether to display it on home page, post page, all pages etc.

16. AntiSocial

Adding this plugin on your blog allows readers to submit your posts to Digg, Reddit, Del.Icio.Us, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites. It adds a row of buttons with links to the sites and also adds a nofollow to the links. It is actually a hacked version of the famous plugin Socialable.

17. AddToAny

Helps your readers share,save,email and also bookmark your posts and pages. It supports over hundred social bookmarking and sharing sites. It comes with a smart menu that places the services that visitors use a lot at the top of the menu based on their browsing and usage history.

18. SEO Friendly Images

This plugin helps in making your images SEO friendly. It automatically updates all images with a proper ALT and TITLE. ALT acts as a description for your image and TITLE is the tooltip text displayed when the mouse is over the image. These attributes are one of the important part of SEO.

19. Robots Meta

A very easy solution to add robot tags to your WordPress pages. It allows you to add meta tags to individual posts and pages, prevent indexing of your comments, login and admin pages.

20. Nofollow Case by Case

Allows you to selectively apply or remove nofollow attributes to comment links, comment author links, pingbacks and trackbacks and also open the comment links in a new window. If not configured it automatically strips nofollow attributes from all your comment links and comment author links.

Here are, in my opinion are the three main reasons why most bloggers can’t make money blogging!

Firstly no matter how much money you’ve spent in premium wordpress themes or custom widgets to make your site look pretty and operate the way you want it to, if you don’t have enough targeted traffic coming to your blog you simply won’t make money blogging.

By targeted traffic I mean quality leads or qualified people bought to your site, via pay per click, paid advertisements, referrals etc.

I find it so disappointing that people have been lead to believe that by simply putting up a website or blog they will instantly get loads of visitors to the site and make loads of cash. There are millions of blogs and websites accessible via the internet with hundreds of thousands, to millions of sites competing for the same customers.

No matter what you have been lead to believe, you need to take real actionable steps to increase the traffic to your site / blog and it’s only when you have a real mass of visitors to your blog that you will start to make money blogging.

However you will still need to monetize your blog correctly to see your visitors turn into cold hard cash, you can actually pay your bills with. Which brings me in to the second reason, blog monetization.

To monetize your blog is actually quite easy, most bloggers start out adding Googe Adsense ads to display on their blogs making them a small commission each time one is clicked. This however isn’t the most powerful way to make money blogging, it’s simply a method that’s easy to get started with hence why many bloggers start out using it.

Monetizing your blog is a massive subject in itself, covering areas such as Adsense, text link ads, paid advertising space, paid reviews, affiliate marketing for physical or digital products, just to start.

However the main thing that you need to be aware of is that with out some form of monetization you’re just not going to be able to make money blogging.

If your hoping that every visitor that comes to your website or blog is going to pick up the phone and call you or complete your contact us form, with an order request your going to be dreadfully disappointed. So make sure you monetize your blog using a few different strategies to maximise your income.

The last reason why most blog owners fail to make money blogging is down to the fact that 99% of visitors who visit your blog end up leaving without taking any form of action, such as clicking a paid link or followng a link to a product you recommend.

This can be for a number of reasons such as the visitor not being able to quickly find what they’re searching for, or the content of the site is poor or they simple are put off by your graphics. What ever it is, the point of the matter is that your visitors leave without you even knowing they visited your blog.

So you need to combat that only 1 in 100 people will do business with you, and the best way to do this is to get really good at gaining your visitors attention and keeping their concentration on your products and services.

If you can develop a strategy on your blog that ensures your customer does at least one thing when visiting your site, you stand a much better chance of retaining the visitors attention. This allows you to start proving your credibility and building the visitors trust.

Then you can start to build a relationship with your customers, which will eventually make you a trusted source of information and make sales of your recommended products or services a whole lot easier.

So there it is, to make money blogging simply generate traffic to your blog, gain your visitors trust by giving them great content, then monetize your blog using a couple of different strategies.

Last Thursday, the WordPress core development team got together to discuss the upcoming version of WordPress. In this meeting, it was announced that WordPress 2.9 is now feature frozen meaning additional features would be postponed to the next branch. The first proposed release date of WordPress 2.9 was October 31st but that goal is not attainable. Instead, expect to see Beta 1 around October 31st with release candidates released during the month of November. Depending on what happens during the testing phase, we may see WordPress 2.9 stable released during the second half of November or early December.

Expect to see details regarding how to participate in the testing process show up on the WordPress development blog within the next week or so.

Confronted with a recent question about How To Change The Squeeze page Header Image in The Flexsqueeze wordpress theme, once again realised the technical challenges some of you my have with Premium or any word press theme for that matter.

This easy yet challenging task (if you dont know where to go) can send even the most experienced of wordpress user up and down the walls.

gh

So here to show you just how you can change your Squeeze Page Header Image, is another great tutorial from YourInternetMarketingExpert.

Enjoy

Please Pass on your comments!

photo credit: mattbuck4950

WordPress is one of the most popular publishing platforms currently out on the market. It’s free, highly-customizable, and very easy to install and use. Because of its popularity, you’ll find a wide array of resources that discuss WordPress development, administration, as well as plenty of user guides to help you get started quickly.

In this article, we take advantage of the merits of learning by way of watching video tutorials and screencasts. Video tutorials allow you to learn by following along with the instructor……………………….. in real-time – a format that’s very effective for many people.

You can use these video tutorials a couple of ways: to learn about WordPress yourself or to send to your not-so-technology-inclined clients as a reference to help them get started. You’ll find the tutorials organized into several topics that include theme development and customization, site administration, beginner’s tutorials, and using some WordPress tools.

WordPress theme development

Hodgepodge of WordPress Tricks

You’ll see a variety of useful WordPress theme customization tips and tricks through this video tutorial.

WordPress as a CMS

Learn how to create a WordPress site that’s more of a fully-featured content management system (like Drupal or Joomla) rather than a blogging platform using a few tools at your disposal such as the SimplePie WordPress plugin.

How to Modify WordPress Theme

In this tutorial, you’ll learn about some Theme Template tags in WordPress.

Add a Twitter Field to Your Form

Learn how to install and set up the WP Twitip ID plugin to integrate Twitter into your WordPress site.

How to put a Custom Header in your WordPress Blog

Replace the default WordPress header to a custom-made header so that you can quickly get started with your WordPress blog.

Create your first widget

This video tutorial shows you how to create a theme widget for WordPress.

How to make a WordPress plugin

Learn how to create a WordPress plugin that follows the WordPress plugin development guidelines.

Administration

How to setup PrettyURLs on WordPress

Learn everything about permalinks (including how to set it up on your WordPress site) in this video tutorial.

Setting up a member/user directory in WordPress

This video tutorial shows you how to create a member/user directory listing page to display member information.

Lost Password, Update User Info

This helpful tutorial teaches site administrators what to do in case a user loses his or her password.

Enable HTTPS

Learn about HTTPS as it pertains to the security of your WordPress site in this insightful video tutorial.

Best Practices for Upgrading WordPress

Upgrading WordPress is a simple task but there are some steps you should consider before proceeding with a major upgrade (such as backing up your WordPress database). In this tutorial, you’ll learn about a good way of safely upgrading your WordPress installation.

Moving your Blog, changing your domain name

If you need to move your WordPress installation to another location on your server or web host you should check out this general tutorial on the steps involved in relocating your existing WordPress site.

Import and Export WordPress Data

Learn everything about exporting and importing your WordPress data by viewing this excellent screencast.

WordPress blog admin settings

Get a run-down of useful WordPress admin settings to help you properly administer your site.

WordPress User Roles Explained

There are several user roles that you can assign to members of your WordPress site – this thorough video tutorial teaches you the difference of each.

Getting started with WordPress

Creating the Database for your WordPress Installation

One of the first steps involved in the installation of WordPress is the creation of a database. This tutorial shows beginners how to create a database for WordPress using phpMyAdmin, a freely available web application that most shared hosting plans have.

Creating a Sitemap using the Google Sitemap Generator Plugin

Improve search engine results using the Google Sitemap plugin – this tutorial shows you how to install and set up the plugin.

Getting Started

Geared for beginners, this tutorial is a great general introduction to blogging and WordPress.

WordPress installation and theme tutorial

Get up and running with a WordPress installation, as well as learn the basics behind WordPress themes, by following along this video tutorial.

How to Upload PDFs

WordPress users that want to learn how to upload PDFs to share to their audience might find this short video tutorial useful.

Photo Captions

Captions describe the photos displayed on a post and in this tutorial you’ll see a method for adding them to photos of a blog post.

Simple Page Edit in WordPress

This screencast shows beginning users how to edit a page in the WordPress admin section.

How do I create a picture gallery in my blog post?

This tutorial shows you how to put together a picture gallery post in WordPress.

HTML & QuickTags vs. Visual Editor

Learn the difference between editing content through the Visual Editor (the built-in WYSIWYG editor in WordPress) and good old-fashioned HTML.

WordPress tools

Using Windows Live Writer

Set up Windows Live Writer for WordPress so that you can let authors write blog posts offline.

How do I write WordPress blog posts with the ScribeFire Firefox add-on?

Make blogging hassle-free with ScribeFire, a Mozilla Firefox browser add-on that let’s you update posts on-the-fly.

Further reading

• View the WordPress showcase on the official WordPress site.
• Find useful tools (over 300 of them) on from this Mashable article.
• Check out Smashing Magazine’s roundup of 100 free WordPress themes.