Author: Tom McCarrickYou may be trying to get started with an online business in web marketing, getting a web presence for your existing business, or maybe just setting up a personal website or blog. As for the choice of what kind of website to go for, the choices available are many and varied, but it's a good idea to go for a blog format because it's very flexible and can be easily customized. You can add content each day, as you would keep a diary, and you can change the appearance, like you might re-decorate your house.
One thing I like about blogs is all the "plugins" that are available for them, which make life easier. There's a great variety of them and you literally just need to "plug them in" and away you go. Some of my favourites are the Event Calendar, Picture Gallery and the Alexa traffic counter, which is a good way of monitoring how high my site is ranking.
It's quite easy to get a blog up and running, even if you have never been through the process before. I will outline the main steps involved, from a beginner's point of view. I will go into more detail later on with each stage, and I would welcome comments, questions etc. But for now, here are the main stages, with a brief description of each:
1. Get a domain name: For this I would recommend Namecheap - they will register a domain name for less than $10 per year, which is hard to beat. And they have good customer service.
2. Get a web hosting account: I would heartily recommend Hostgator for hosting, both for value and customer service. This will cost $4.95 per month for the basic version. This will be fine for a single website,,but if you have plans on having more than one, you will need the $7.95 per month multiple-domain package.
3. Install Wordpress: Wordpress is the "blogging platform" of choice for most users who have an online business, or personal website. The good news is that it's free to download, and it's not insanely big (about 6MB). And installing it is not rocket science.
4. Start Posting: When you're up and running with Wordpress installed on your domain, you can go ahead and add life to your blog, by posting your thoughts, write on something you are passionate about or advertise your products or services.
5. Advertise your site: There are many millions of websites in existence, and if you want to advertise your products or services, you will need to notify the search engines so they will start to rank your site, and also to make use of web marketing through free or paid advertising, and by linking to other sites.
So these are the 5 main stages in getting started with your blog, and I will be expanding each one in future posts on this site. Once again, comments and questions are welcome and they will only help to enhance these tutorials. I hope to make a series of instructional videos also when I am finished with this series.
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