Learn How To: Create a Website with WordPress

For anyone who is looking to make money from any form of Internet marketing, be that affiliated sales, network marketing, e-book/information product sales or direct selling the basic requirements are the same.

• Provide informative website content, that builds rapport with your website visitors.
• Produce Internet content (web pages) that are accessible to the website search engines so that visitors can find your content.
• Create an email list of visitors to your website, so that you send further information anf offers. This is THE most important aspect to your marketing activity. If you can build an email list from your website visitors, ie. from people to whom you’ve already provided valuable information, then you have a potential gold mine for future marketing activity.
• Produce content for your website based on known search statistics, i.e. know what searches people are already making, provide content that meats this demand and you will be guaranteed free visitors direct from the search engines.

OK, so what tools do you need to use to provide this website content, and start building your list of interested visitors.

• Website Authoring Tool – e.g. WordPress
• Website Host Account – e.g Bluehost or HostGator
• Keyword Search tool – e.g. Wordtracker
• Squeeze Page Generator – e.g. Squeezetheme for WordPress

First and foremost you need a website authoring tool. The one I recommend, if you hadn’t already guessed is WordPress.  Why WordPress? Primarily because it’s free (open source) and has lots free tools you can bolt on to help you market your website. There is loads of online help (including this blog) for advice hints and tips on using WordPress to build your income generating website.

Secondly, you need somewhere for your website to live, i.e. you need a host for your sites.  Here I recommend a Bluehost account.  This is not free, but is definitely good value for money. It will cost you around $100 per year, but his account can be used to host many websites, so you can have your main website/blog hosted here plus several others for additional marketing and sqeeze page activity. The beauty of a Bluehost account is the almost instand WordPress installation scripts that are provided, at the click of a few buttons you can have a new blog installed and available for editing/viewing.

Thirdly, to help build content that will attract visitors you will need to know exactly what people are already searchng for. If you can provide content that matches the search words and phrases that people are entering into the search engines, then provided you’ve also done some research on the competition, you’re going to get some hits to your site. One of the best tools available for keyword research is:  wordtracker – Learn Wordtracker Here.

Finally, to help pull all things together and to create a great looking site for your content, and where you can quicly and simply build “squeeze pages”  so you can start building you contact list of potential buyers… then you can’t go wrong with sqeezetheme.com (for WordPress of course!)

Bluehost adds a new WordPress Install Script

The install wordpress task using Bluehost just got even easier. Bluehost have intalled a new script that simplifies the process even further. You can have a new blog up and running in less than 5 minutes. Here’s a demo I just created to show me setting up a “Newblog” on my server using the new wordpress install script.

WordPress Intall Demo using Bluehost Script

How to set-up Domain Name Redirects to “forward slash” addresses.

For example:   www.yourdomain.com/newredirect

Firstly why would you want to do set this up?

If you have a multiple page website, then there is no need to set-up redirects, assuming your website is structured correctly, then you will already have additional pages that already have a specific address, for example Product specific page, or Contact Us, or Location pages.

However perhaps you are using your domain with a network or affiliate marketing campaign, in which case you may want a short punchy domain name to use on your advertising material that will direct people to your affiliate pages.

Here’s an example of this in practice.  I use domain

www.utilities-dc.com  to direct protential residential customers to my affilaited Utility Sales site: http://www.uwdcvideos.co.uk/index.taf?exref=627824&v=1

but I also use www.utilities-dc.com/business to direct business customers to business specific sales pages: http://www.utilitywarehouse.co.uk/business/index.taf?exref=627824

Another reason is perhaps for Team support. You can purchase one domain name and use it for each team member to redirect to their own affiliated pages. For example the team building side to our network business has it’s own affiliated link. So I use domain www.join-our-team.co.uk and then use /intials for each team member to use if they so wish and this saves them to cost of an additional domain name purchase.

www.join-our-team.co.uk/dvd

Notice in this example the top level domain www.join-our-team.co.uk has a single web-page explaining to the reader that the “website name is missing an identifier”.  This is so that his domain is safe for team members to use without fear of their contacts, just dropping the “forward slash” bit and losing the prospect to an upline distributor.

So enough example of why you may want to use a domain redirect, and onto the:

How to set-up domain redirect (using Bluehost)

1. Either Purchase the domain name to be used for redirection directly with Bluehost, or alternatively use your regular domain provider and then set the “Nameserver” records to direct the domain to Bluehost (ns1.bluehost.com  &  ns2.bluehost.com)
2. Login to your Bluehost account cPanel
3. Select “Addon Domain” from the Domain Section
4. Type the Domain name (excluding www.) in the box for Step1. Domain:

   Bluehost will
   then automatically verify the domain is available to Bluehost and if
   you so will get the following message in the step 2 response section:

   “Ownership verified. The nameservers for the domain “your-domain-name” are currently set to NS1.BLUEHOST.COM, NS2.BLUEHOST.COM.”

   In the Step 3 section, select ADDON DOMAIN

   In the Step 4 section, either accept the filename for the subfolder
   of this domain on your account, or change this to a different name if
   you prefer. (personally I keep them the same as the domain name so that
   I can easily see which folder relates to which website)

   Now just Click the ADD DOMAIN button, and wait for Bluehost to finish the set-up (this can take a minute or two)

5. Back to cPanel Domain section, and now click on “Redirect Domain”
6. Select the Domain to use from the Dropdown selection (the domain will only be vailable here if you have followed the above steps to create the Addon Domain.
7. Enter the “/name” to use.
8. Enter the redirection address.
9. Click the Add Button.
10. JOB DONE

How to set-up additional domains (i.e. extra “Free Standing” blogs) on your Bluehost Account.

I use Bluehost for my chosen host provider for a number of reasons:

1. Competitively priced
2. Cpanel for easy online adminsitration (Filemanager, Domain Handling, ftp account set-up etc.)
3. Fantastico for easy WordPress Install
4. Easy to create additional domains under the one account.

This post is regarding point 4… how to set-up an additional domain on your host account ready to install a new wordpress blog.

Step 1.

Purchase the domain of your choice. You can do this from the domain manager of your bluehost account, or if you prefer use one of the many domain providers that are out there. Personally I use either the Bluehost account because the .com names are cheap at $10/year each, or if I’m setting up a UK based website and need a .co.uk domain, then I I’ll use 123reg.

Step 2.

If you have purchased the domain from anywhere other than Bluehost, then you need to change the domain nameserver records to direct to Bluehost.

1. Login to the control panel for your domain and select “Change Nameserver” setting for your domain.
2. Set the name servers to: NS1.BLUEHOST.COM & NS2.BLUEHOST.COM
3. You may need to “Unlock” the domain before you can change the nameserver record, if this is the case then just look for the “Unlock Domain” setting, and remember to re-set the domain lock after changing the nameserver settings.

Step 4.

Login to your Bluehost Cpanel and select the “Addon Domain” icon

Type the Domain name (excluding www.) in the box for Step1. Domain:

Bluehost will then automatically verify the domain is available to Bluehost and if you so will get the following message in the step 2 response section:

“Ownership verified. The nameservers for the domain “your-domain-name” are currently set to NS1.BLUEHOST.COM, NS2.BLUEHOST.COM.”

In the Step 3 section, select ADDON DOMAIN

In the Step 4 section, either accept the filename for the subfolder of this domain on your account, or change this to a different name if you prefer. (personally I keep them the same as the domain name so that I can easily see which folder relates to which website)

Now just Click the ADD DOMAIN button, and wait for Bluehost to finish the set-up (this can take a minute or two)

… Job Done, you now have a new “Free standing” domain setup on your Bluehost account ready to install wordpress on that domain.

Help with Getting Listed on Google Quickly

Check out this site from Aaron @ Fultiltblogging.com, he has a new video course about to launch on Friday (14th November) that will demonstrate how he got a niche website listed #1 on Google in less than 24hrs.

http://www.fulltiltblogging.com/fastniche/

Aaron uses a for the demo Fun Home Theater as the niche.

To add Google Analytics to your WordPress Blog, follow these steps:

1. If you haven’t already done so… Register an account with Google. Go to Google.com or Google.co.uk and click on “sign in” at the top right hand corner of the screen. If you don’t have a Google account then click on the “Create Account Now” link.

2. Go to the Google Analytics Page: www.google.com/analytics site and click on “Access Analytics“, then enter your Google account login details.

3. Click on “Add Website Profile”

4. Enter your website URL and your Timezone and click “Finish”

5. Copy the Tracking Code Script, ie. the bit that looks like this:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-*********-25″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

6. Goto your WordPress Back office Administration area (www.yourdomain/WP-ADMIN) and click on:

• Design
• Theme Editor
• Footer – Paste the Google Script into the Template Footer, just above the </body> tag. Save the Template change.

7. On the Google Analytics Page, click on “FINISH“. If you click on “Check Status” link alongside your domain, it should now state “Waiting for Data -Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now.”

Congratulations You have successfully installed Google Analytics on your WordPress blog.

See my separate post on Viewing Statistics with Google Analytics for some hints and tips on how the statistics information that I find useful from Google Analytics.

Some hints and tips for using Google Analytics

When you first login to your Google Analytics page, the default “Dashboard” view will contain data for the past month. You can change the date range for the statistics (eg. to view perhaps the past week or maybe for a specific day where you see a peak of visitors).

To change the date range for the Stats:

• Click on the Date Range at the top right hand side of the screen.
• Click on the first day for the selection on the calendar that opens up.
• Click on the last day for the selection, or omit this step for a one day only search.
• Click on “Apply”

You will now see the hits section with only your date range highlighted, all the information in the sub-sections now relate to this date range only.

The information I find most useful from Google Analytics:

Visitor Overview: Click on the “View Report” link below the Visitor Overview section. This report shows you the number of visitors to your site, whether these visitors clicked away immediately (bounced) or whether they stuck around for a while. If they did stick around the report tells you how many pages they read on average.

Traffic Sources Overview: Click on the “View Report” link below the Visitor Overview section. This is a very useful report to show you where your visitors are coming from:
eg:

• Direct hits – they typed in your address, eg from business card or flier or other advert
• Google (organic) / Yayoo (organic) – from the main pages of search engines (ie, the free hits!!). If you get these visitors look across to the Keywords section, this now shows you what keywords were used in the search engines that resulted in a visit to your website. (Use this information to build new content based on these hits).

Click back to the dashboard and take a look at where your visitors are based from the Map Overlay and see also which pages have been visited from the Content Overview.

Here’s a neat Tell-A-Friend Plugin that I use.

www.freetellafriend.com

or from the WordPress.org plugin search pages:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tell-a-friend/

What does the “Tell A Friend” Plugin Do?

Read the rest of this entry »

This article attempts to show how the components of WordPress fit together to help you build your “living blog”.

1. The WordPress Base Code:

When you first decide that you want to produce a website or blog, and you select WordPress as your choice of authoring tool, then imagine this as the conception and the “birth” of your Blog. When you first install WordPress, then your baby blog is now born… it has everything you need to start your blog growing, but you need to nurture it, feed it and love it to help it grow and build it’s character.

2. The WordPress Theme:

Selecting a WordPress theme gives your blog two thing’s.

• Firstly the templates for Pages and Posts that provide the Structure of your blog, the living blog’s skeleton.
• Secondly the theme will have a stylesheet, this is the look and feel of your site, it’s Clothes, style and part of it’s character.

3. The Content. Pages and posts.

As you start to add pages of content and posts to your blog, this is where you add the muscles, the living tissue, the brain, nerves, organs, veins and arteries. The content you add gives your blog it’s life blood and it’s spirit. Without your content, your blog is lifeless. As you build the content, your blog will develop it’s character.

4. The Plugins:

Plugins are snippets of code written by smart people that help to add specific functionality to your blog. They give your blog special skills to do new tasks and tricks. Adding Plugins are like sending your blog to school and university, or sending it on a specialist training course. Some Plugins can help to make your blog more productive, help it to connect with other blogs. They can help your blog to earn money. They are the working tools for your blog to use.

5. The Theme Stylesheet (or CSS)

Previously mentioned in the Theme section, the Stylesheet defines how pages and posts are displayed, which fonts and font sizes are used for each section. It defines color and any background images to use and everything related to how your blog looks. The Stylesheet is your blogs fashion sense… It’s spirit, soul and character will be defined by the content written in posts and pages, but the way it appears is defined by the Stylesheet.

I hope this light hearted article can help you picture the bulding blocks for your WordPress Blog.

Please see the Comments below for testimonies from people who I have assisted with either a WordPress Blog installation, or other website that I have built and provide support for.

If I’ve helped you out, please leave a comment with a brief description of how I’ve helped, and please provide a link to your website. (Don’t worry about a screen shot image and link, I can add those later)

Note: This page is moderated, any links to inappropriate websites will be immediately removed. Please only reply If you feel I have been of assistance to you.