I was a newbie to WordPress when I decided to start a blog to make money.
At that time, I really didn’t know what to do after installing WordPress into my web hosting.
I don’t even know where to start.
At that time, I really wonder how to really setup a completely awesome looking site that has all these features such as Contact Page with forms, checkbox to prevent spammers, RSS subscription and etc.
Of course I know how to do all these now and because of that, I know that it is not easy to do all these things as a beginner.
In this entry, I will guide you step by step to setup your blog the right way with all the free plugins available.
So, let’s keep thing short and get straight to the point.
P.S.: Remember to check out my 100 blogging tips post after this.
15 tasks for you
I had split the tasks into 15 different post. Be sure that you visit my post on how to install WordPress into your web hosting before proceeding to do the setup below.
Note: These guides are purely for blog setup and not some in-depth tutorials.
- Install Google Analytics. The Google Analytics is used to track your blog traffic and performance. You will learn the steps on how to create a Google Analytics account and how to insert the messy code into your WordPress blog easily.
- SEO your URL. By default, the URL of your blog post is not SEO friendly. It display the post ID instead of post title. In this guide, you will learn on how to insert your post title into the URL of your blog post to make your URL SEO friendly.
- Getting your blog indexed. I have some easy and quick tips in getting your new blog indexed by Google quickly. Once you have your main site indexed, it is not difficult to get the remaining indexed as well. Find out how to do it here.
- SEO Optimized your blog posts. There is a simple way for you to optimize your blog post which is by inserting the META tags. This is not a complete On-Page SEO, but it is rather a necessity to get yourself started with SEO by learning how to display your post on search engine.
- Secure your blog. Whether your blog is a new or old one, you need to start protecting it from day one. Protecting a blog means everything from setting less permission to access your files and folders up to making brute-force password crack harder. There is a non-technical way to do it which you can find out more from here.
- Chase spammers away. You do prefer a genuine commentator over a spam commentator, don’t you? So, don’t let spammers to spoil your blog. Follow my anti-spam guide and keep spammers away with minimum moderation effort.
- Check for broken links. Don’t give false hope by leading your readers to a broken-linked resourceful page. I have a short guide on how to detect broken links within your blog where the process is completely automated.
- Speed does matters. Blog loading speed is always an issue especially when you have lots of plugins and scripts to load at your readers side. In this guide, you will find some easy steps for you to do that you can speed up your blog by caching certain items. On top of that, you will also save some bandwidth.
- Privacy policy page. Writing the privacy policy content can be a headache but generating one is like a piece of cake. Find out how I generate one for my blog in less than 5 minutes.
- About your blog. You need to let your readers know why your blog existed on the internet. A simple way of doing it is to write an About page and tell whatever you think your readers need to know.
- Contacting you. Putting up your email address on your blog might seems to be a good idea but it is more professional if you have a proper form for your readers to fill in and submit their inquires. You don’t need to know any HTML coding to do that. All you need is to refer to this guide.
- Making your blog worth interacting. Some blogs generates lots of comments while some don’t. The difference could be the content and traffic, but mainly, it is the blog is not setup in the way that captures the attention of the reader to put in a comment. Learn how you do it here.
- Increase your readership. One way to keep your readers with you in a long run is to enable subscription. In this guide, I will tell you how you why some blogs fail to gain readership and what you can do to overcome it.
- Going viral on social media. Social media is extremely powerful especially when your blog is new where it is still too early to get a good search engine ranking. As a result, you will need to make use of the social media power to drive early traffic to your blog.
- Keep your readers keep reading. Don’t let them stop reading after a post. Keep feeding them more of your contents so that they will fall in love with your blog.
Once you are done setting up your WordPress blog, it is time to start producing quality contents.
Right Alan, now every blogger should start their business with wordpress and transform the blogspot platform. Blog with wordpress is a real online investment for future beside the social media marketing maintain like Twitter follower and facebook fans. thanks
Chris Jhon recently posted..Twitter jobs to gain 500k real followers with profile picture
Right, Chris. I’m all in to support WordPress 😉
Ah, now that is a concise list of “must do’s” that any blogger should follow after setting up their blog. I think the points you mentioned are all extremely needed to be followed without skipping for one to get success with their blogs. Skip one of the points and it will be quite harder for you down the lane.
Shiva recently posted..Best Ecommerce Plugins For WordPress
Thanks for dropping by and clarify my to-do list. I hope this guide will be able to help out new bloggers out there.
Hi Alan,
WordPress is a great platform for bloggers as it provides different themes for every niche one want to blog.The varieties are much more to start with.
For every new blogger it is the best place to be in.
Aditya recently posted..ERP Software Companies
Absolutely agree with you. WordPress is always the best place for starters.
Brilliant step by step direction of things that are needed to set up that wordpress blog. I all in favour for setting up a contact address for the blog just in case someone wants to get in touch. Also the about page is equally important.
Shalu Sharma recently posted..Visiting places in Hyderabad
Thanks for that Shalu.
Hope you find the rest useful as well apart from the two 😉
Amazing post Alan. Really SEO is a major part while starting a new blog specially with the platform like WordPress.
Rudraksh Pathak recently posted..Concept of Canonicalization in blogging
Thanks Rudraksh. Indeed SEO is something we really need for a long run.
Great post Alan, If I were a beginner and wanted to start a wordpress blog, I would definitively use this article.
It’s full of easy and helpful information, thanks for sharing.
Thanks for dropping by, JamesW.
I hope this will not only helpful to beginner, but also to the ones that are partly familiar with WordPress 😉
I’m definitely a wordpress fan, but I see a few items on your list that I’ve neglected. Thanks for the good advice!
Alex recently posted..Happiness Experiment 30: 30k Calories in 30 Days – Day 29
Glad it helps.
Thanks for dropping by there, Alex.
Brilliant Article!
A complete step by step guide for newbie! I’d recommend my friends to see this!
Keep it up! 😉
Ammar Ali recently posted..Customized and Stylized Subscription Widget
Thanks for dropping by there, Anmar. I also saw your tweets on this post as well. Appreciate that.
I didn’t see any guest post guideline on your blog. Not taking anymore guest blogger?
Doing bit changes to it! Will publish new guidelines soon! 😀
Ammar Ali recently posted..Get Huge Discount on CommentLuv Premium Developer License
That’s great 😉
Love to hear from you about that.
Great compile of articles. I am a blogger user and have always found WP rather complicated, too technical if you will. This set of posts was helpful in overcoming that barrier. God bless.
subhorup recently posted..Million Magi
Thanks for the comment, Subhorup. Hope you will find them useful.
Wow, how can I miss this post. By the way, can you also write another post regarding how to configure to accept guest post steps and guides or even recommended plugins?
Tan recently posted..Customer Service Skills: How to Deal with a Difficult Customer – 6 best remedies explained!
The recommended plugins are there although I don’t state them clearly, but I will take your idea into consideration, Tan 😉
Thanks for your comment.
Great post. Making sure you don’t get blog spammed is really important. I probably get 50+ spam comments submitted a day to my blog, I can just imagine what linking out to that many spam sites would do to my rankings.
Trevor recently posted..Percentage of Traffic based On Your Google Rankings
Thanks, Trevor!
Recently, I had been getting spams that were not caught by Akismet and GASP. It is a little pain to moderate them manually although most of the spams had already been filtered >.< Alan Tay recently posted..Cultivating your Email List: An Effective Online Marketing Strategy