Make Money Online Affiliate Marketing Blog

You Gotta Blog Dog!

So you got your domain…or you couldn’t afford one…either way I got your next step. You have to get your blog up and running. This is really an easy step, but I can tell you from personal experience that getting the blog up is not the problem - keeping it up is. You need to provide your own blog Viagra which comes in the form of tenacity. I have had problems with the blogging aspect myself and had instead just focused on the affiliate side of marketing. Blogging can and should be a part of your overall success strategy.

So I am going to break this down into two parts. The first is putting up your blog - like I said, easy. The second part (another post) will be about what you need to do to keep up your blogging and how you will start promoting it. This second post will be just a touch on the subject as I will cover this more in-depth over and over in the future as it involves the ever-evolving social media marketing aspect of blogging.

First things first - you have to choose your blogging platform - choose Wordpress. Wasn’t that easy? I took all of the thinking out of it for you. Don’t get me wrong, Blogger blogs and the others are good, and I do use them, but Wordpress is the one I would choose if I could only choose one. For the uninitiated, let me give you a brief reason behind this. Wordpress is an open source project - basically, there is a huge community of techno-geeks (all the love in the world intended on that one) who work on making Wordpress better and more usable. Because of this, you will find an unparalleled amount of support, applications, and themes (the background of your blog) available all for free. There certainly are things that you can pay for, but before you sink anymore money than in necessary into your online venture, let me tell you, free is good!

Wordpress comes in two flavors - self hosted, and well, Wordpress hosted.  If you purchased or are going to purchase hosting, you will use Wordpress.org, and if you want to go the free route, you will use Wordpress.com.

So why would anyone use the self-hosted Wordpress when the other is free?  Well, you have much more flexibility with your own hosting as your choice of themes (backgrounds) and plugins (cool little tools) are not limited like they are on the Wordpress.com site.  However, once again, free is good, so if money is really tight, use that option.  As a matter of fact, if you are planning on doing the self hosted route, go ahead and get a free blog if you have never blogged before.  It will be very quick and painless, and once you decide to get your self hosted blog, everything will be familiar.

Another difference is in your web address.  For instance, this self hosted Wordpress blog address is mmoneyonline.com - this sort of layout is something that most people are familiar with and is relatively easy to type in the browser bar.  I opened up a free Wordpress blog for mmoneyonline (took me 5 minutes to do - including typing the post and changing the header image) and the web address is mmoneyonline.wordpress.com  go there to check it out just so you can get the visual.  So the bottom line is if you go with the free account, you will not be able to fully brand yourself as you will always have “wordpress” attached to your name - but you can certainly start out this way as many people have already done.  Not bad for free and 5 minutes of my time huh?  Of course it is fairly sparse (as of this writing) - I will utilize it - but I will cover the use of additional free blogs in a future post. 

So, how do you put up a free Wordpress blog?  Just click wordpress.com/signup/ and fill in the Wordpress.com form and you will be up and running in just a minute or two - it really is super simple.  You will have options as to your background and as to widgets you can use.  I could go in-depth on these things, but again, I am more of a big picture kind of a guy.  Even if I explained it, you would still have to tinker around with it to understand it…but trust me, it is all very easy.  

Now, for self hosted.  You want to have familiarized yourself with the back office of your host provider first - that way you have some sense of what they are talking about in the installation guide.  Second, you want to go to http://wordpress.org/download/ and click download to put the wordpress folder full wordpress stuff on your desktop (that is a technical term - stuff).  You then click the link on that page that says handy guide, and you follow all the instructions from there.  Once again, I am not going to even attempt to put down all the particulars as I am not a technical writer - just follow the directions.  If you get stuck, there is a Wordpress installation forum at http://wordpress.org/support/forum/2 and there are even people who volunteer to install Wordpress for you on those forums.  But I suggest you slog through it and do it yourself, by all means, ask questions, but there is no better way to learn than to do it yourself.  

As a first timer, it may take you an hour, once you do it a few times, it takes only a couple of minutes - maybe take me 5 minutes, and I am not a techie at all!

Once you are in, tinker around - it is relatively intuitive.

Okie dokie?  That is enough for now - have fun!

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