The absolute fastest way to get traffic has to be pay per click. It’s also one of the financially riskiest. You can learn a lot about your website’s ability to convert customers from using pay per click.

At least, if you do it right.

Mistakes Are Easy to Make

Just going through Google’s pay per click ads you will often seen mistakes being made. Some people worry too little about relevance. Google’s Quality Score does help to limit that these days. Others don’t know how to use negative keywords to their advantage.

But one of the worst mistakes you can make is to have a product, bid on the relevant terms, with a well-written ad, and not send visitors straight to that page. Sure your home page may be relevant enough, but when someone is searching for a particular item on a search engine, they don’t want to have to search all over again on your site.

Google’s blog can be very helpful when it comes to determining why a page gets a low quality score. While some of what Google wants can make it harder to design your landing pages, doing your best to adhere to their guidelines helps you to pay less for the traffic they do send.

But the absolute worst mistake you can make is to fail to test.

You should be testing your landing page. Your ads. The keywords and phrases you’re bidding on. Everything.

Sometimes a very small change makes a big difference. Even singular vs. plural in your ad text can make a difference.

Once you get your ads optimized, you still can’t relax. You should still test things regularly. Ads can suffer from lower conversions completely out of the blue.

What About My Site?

Your site should be tested for ease of use and good copywriting. An easy to use shopping cart won’t get you much of anywhere if your copy doesn’t encourage people to buy. But a difficult shopping cart means people will abandon their carts out of sheer frustration, despite otherwise being sold on the product.

A lot of sites make the mistake of requiring visitors to make an account in order to place an order. This is a big mistake. You’ll annoy people who don’t want to make an account right away, especially if you require it to even put something in the cart. When an order is placed you”ll be getting enough information that an account can be set up just in the process of ordering, not as a separate step. That’s the right time for it.

Some sites even make it hard to figure out how to order. Add to carts or buy now links can be hard to see sometimes. This is really poor planning on the webmaster’s part.

If you want to read some great tips on testing your site for conversions, including things like the placement of the add to cart button, head over to Grokdotcom. Some of it will be very difficult for beginning webmasters, but it’s great food for thought.

Who to Use and What to Pay?

There are plenty of pay per click options out there. Google’s AdWords is of course the best known, and Yahoo! Sponsored Search is also well known, but there are less known companies too.

It’s best to start simple. You don’t want to be managing several different accounts until you know what you’re doing and have an idea as to what works. However, sometimes slightly different landing pages work better for different pay per click engines, and you may have to take that into consideration.

AdWords has the advantage of being well known, but that also means it can get more expensive more quickly. But the traffic is excellent. I would strongly recommend opting out of the content network at the start, however. Some people do very well with it, but until you know how well you’re converting, the content network is best left alone. It can get expensive fast.

There can be good and bad about the less known engines, such as Enhance Interactive or MIVA. The cost per click is generally lower, but some feel that the quality of traffic is much less. These are things you need to test carefully, no matter which pay per click engine you use.

How much to pay will depend on two factors: what it takes to get your ad seen, and what you can afford to pay.

Some areas are very competitive, and if you aren’t bidding on obscure keywords (a good practice in just about any case!), you may have to pay a lot for traffic. If you aren’t making enough money from the traffic you’re buying from pay per click, you need to cut your price or improve the sales you’re getting from the ad.

If you’re earning $10 per sale, for example, you need to do better than 1 sale per 100 clicks if you’re paying a mere $0.10 per click. That’s not a lot for many keywords.

The beauty of pay per click is that if you’re good at it you can get an exceptional return on your investment. Only trouble is that you can just as easily wipe out your budget.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Niche
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
Can Article Marketing Work for You?
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work - Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click? (current page)
Article Marketing Statistics
Putting the Pieces Together

Social media marketing has become one of my favorite ways to market a website. Most specifically I like StumbleUpon. It’s fun from both a user and a marketer perspective.

It’s best to first get to know StumbleUpon, Digg and other social media by using them as a user, not as a marketer. You need to get a feel for what people are after, and maybe to build a solid profile.

You absolutely do not want to be the marketer who bookmarks, diggs or stumbles his or her own posts only. People catch on fast, and your efforts will soon be dismissed, even if the quality of what you are offering is good.

Worse is if you’re doing that with no care for what people want to see. Promoting your quick work rather than your best is a rotten idea.

Getting Visitors to Socially Bookmark Your Site

It’s tough getting anyone to bookmark your site, whether it be in their bookmarks on their internet browser or in social media. But one of the delightful things about social media is that it’s easy to put up links to encourage people to think about it.

There are a few different ways to go about this. On this blog right now I’m using the AddThis plugin. It places a link for bookmarking that gives users a tremendous range of social media sites they can bookmark this site at.

Honestly, I’m often thinking that it’s overkill and really isn’t doing the job. While AddThis means that my posts can easily be bookmarked through any service, sometimes offering lots of options means you’re offering too many. But the stats are a nice feature.

You can do this service by service. A very good option to consider is to figure out which social media sites are your priority, and put up chicklets or links only to them. You do not want to have a bunch of them at the bottom of your site. Too many definitely gets confusing.

Digg also offers a nice way to integrate it into your posts. They provide a couple of options using Javascript that allow you to show how many times a given post has been dugg. The advantage is that if you’re getting dugg regularly, a high number shows how popular the post is. But if you aren’t getting many diggs, the constant 0 diggs showing on your posts can be a kind of drag. No one wants to know how unpopular you are! (grin!) Some of the other sites offer similar integration options.

But is the Traffic Any Good?

There’s the biggest question! Does social media marketing do you any good at all, aside from driving up your traffic stats?

Maybe…

Social media can be enough to take down your server. It rarely pays off in terms of immediate revenue.

What you do get varies by site. People like getting on the front page of Digg because it gets you in front of a lot of big bloggers, and they might link to you, as will smaller bloggers. The attention can overall do your site good.

In my experience, StumbleUpon can bring a lot of visitors who just bounce right back out of your site, but it also brings some who explore a little. You can get the host crashing peaks of traffic, but Stumble traffic also tends to endure longer. I can get bits of traffic for weeks for a given page that Stumbled well. It can also peak more than once.

Do Friends and Fans Matter?

Social media generally includes the ability to mark other users as friends or to be a fan of a member. Advantages can be both real and theoretical.

If you’re on Digg, for example, you can see what your friends have been digging, and they can see what you’ve dugg. You can send out shouts to friends to try to get more attention to things you want to do well.

You can do similarly with StumbleUpon, but people have theories about what else having friends and fans on there might do. Many think that if you have a lot of friends and fans, the power of your Stumbles goes up and you can send more traffic. It’s pure theory, but the idea is that you’ll only get a lot of fans if you stumble well, so a lot of them is a sign of trust.

Being a Good User

Bookmarking quality resources is part one of being a good social media user. Another part is writing quality reviews and comments about what you bookmark.

Posting good reviews and comments about the sites you bookmark helps to build your reputation. If you’re the first to bookmark a site, so much the better in many cases. Most will note who discovered a given page. This puts your profile right at the top and may even help you to come to the attention of the site owner.

I Want to Bookmark My Own Stuff! I Need the Traffic!

Go right on ahead. Just choose wisely.

On most services you should not bookmark every page of your site. It’s not too bad on del.icio.us, but on other sites that is a sure way to annoy other users.

If it’s traffic you’re after, don’t oversubmit your own work. If you already have some traffic, your best stuff may be submitted by users anyhow. It’s really nice when you don’t have to do your own submissions. Looks a lot better too.

It’s hard to resist, however, when you don’t have enough traffic to generate natural submissions. You’ll need to be highly critical of your own work, so that you can select that which is worth submitting, versus the ones that might not do the job.

On Digg you can send your friends a shout about things you would like to see dugg. That doesn’t mean do it every time you digg something. That’s a great way to shorten your friends list. You can also send pages to your StumbleUpon friends through the toolbar. Same principle, of course. Don’t do it much.

Overall, I have seen some good benefits from using social media. But the key word there is using. It won’t be nearly as useful to you if you see it only as a marketing tool.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Niche
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
Can Article Marketing Work for You?
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work - Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List
Getting Social with Your Blog (current page)
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click?
Article Marketing Statistics
Putting the Pieces Together

How would you like to hear from Armand Morin about Internet Marketing… free? He held a call earlier today, and you can also listen to it tonight, starting at 9 pm Eastern. It’s the last one in his Internet Marketing Explained series, and I really wish I had heard of this sooner.

Yes, it’s about his Internet Marketing Explained course, but you get some really great tips just from these calls. They’re very much so worth the time. I missed the call earlier and I’m really looking forward to listening to it later.

He’s promising a huge announcement during the call and I can hardly wait to see what it is.

You’ll hear it said many times that the money is in the list. And in most online businesses, that’s absolutely true.

Where Do You Build a List?

The first thing you want to do is to sign up with a good autoresponder service. It doesn’t matter if your main focus will be on sending out a weekly newsletter or having a series of emails sent out to subscribers, you need to have a good autoresponder service.

I suggest AWeber or GetResponse.

Both offer excellent service and work hard to keep their emails delivered. AWeber has perhaps the best reputation, but I’ve found GetResponse to work well too.

The important thing is to start with a service that you can stick with. You might be surprised at how very, very painful it is to change autoresponder services. As a rule you will have to have your subscribers confirm that they want to remain on your list. It’s not uncommon to lose about 90% of your list at that point, although a more responsive list can do much better than that.

The advantage to using a paid service rather than a free script that runs on your own server is that they handle blacklisting issues and keeping track of how users subscribed for you, which is useful in case of spam complaints. Free services may have the price right, but you generally lose out in other ways in the long run.

How Do You Build a List?

Building a list is not easy. Especially if you are using a reputable service such as AWeber or GetResponse, you cannot just buy leads from anywhere. That’s a good way to flat out lose your account. But that helps with your deliverability and cuts way back on spam complaints.

The simplest of the legitimate ways is to use the form your autoresponder company generates for your website. You should do at least some light customization. You should have a subscription form on every page of your site to maximize the chances of getting subscribers.
If you offer something free in return for subscribing, you can increase the rate at which people subscribe. It can be an ecourse that you offer alongside your regular newsletter, an ebook, just something easy to offer electronically that is relevant to your subscribers’ needs.

I like the results I’ve been getting using the forms through Optin Design. It’s a bit more work if you want to customize the images, but they are attention getting and did increase the number of subscribers I’ve been getting. It’s pretty nice.

Running ads on other sites can be helpful too. This is one of those places where having a freebie helps, as well as a dedicated subscription page. This gives you the best chance to sell people on subscribing to your site.

There are several ways to do this. You can do pay per click advertising on Google. You can buy ads on other sites. You can buy ads in other people’s newsletters. You can even trade ads with other sites.

What Do You Do with Your List?

Sell to it, of course! But not to excess!

How much you sell to your list depends on what you teach your subscribers to expect. Your mailings need to provide good value to them; otherwise they’ll be quick to unsubscribe.

If your list is all about products going on sale, people will expect you to be telling them about a lot of products. But if you’re mostly informational, they won’t want to be hearing every week about the latest product. You have to think about how much you push products at them.

You’ll find some subscribers are very touchy about you discussing products with them. If they say they’ll unsubscribe if you don’t ease up on the advertising, think about what you’re doing. If you haven’t been overdoing and haven’t been getting a lot of other unsubscriptions (note: most won’t say a word, they’ll just unsubscribe), you may be just fine and only be dealing with a complainer. It’s your list and you do get to decide how much you advertise.

Basic ad links don’t seem to bother subscribers that much. After all, look at how many ads are in your typical print newspaper or magazine. Many are far worse than even a fairly cluttered website. People aren’t as accepting of ads online in many cases.

But it’s the constant product recommendations that tend to get the reactions I described above. I’ve had people threaten to leave my list after a single product promotion. It was on a list where I very rarely do direct product promotions, so my subscribers weren’t used to it. But I did explain that my opinion was that it was an excellent product, and if I chose to run a promotion I would, but I had no plans to take it to excess. So far as I’m concerned, if that makes a subscriber want to leave, they can go.

The thing to remember here is that it’s not the freebie seekers who make your list valuable. It’s the buyers. Anyone who wants only your free advice that doesn’t concern buying things isn’t going to help you bring in much money, if any at all.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Product
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
Can Article Marketing Work for You?
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work - Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List (current page)
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click?
Article Marketing Statistics
Putting the Pieces Together

All of the things I’ve talked about so far can sound like a lot of work. And it can be. But does it have to be?

Depends on who you ask.

Armand Morin say it’s not that hard. If you have any doubts about that, check out his report, An Obvious Truth. You’re downloading it free, here. No need to share your email address with me… unless you really want to. If you really, really need to give me your email address, you can subscribe to my newsletter. But that’s not necessary for getting this report.

An Obvious Truth is a good read. It gave me some points to think about, things I hadn’t really considered doing and really ought to try. It can’t hurt that much, after all.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Product
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
Can Article Marketing Work for You?
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work - Is It Really That Hard? (current page)
Building Your List
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click?
Article Marketing Statistics
Putting the Pieces Together

I’m a big fan of article marketing myself. I have regular goals for how many articles I write each and every month for publication on other websites. It has really helped me to build traffic.

But it doesn’t work for everyone. Why is that?

A lot of people try to skip steps when they write articles. They dash off a quick piece, possibly full of links to their own site and submit it to tons of article websites. The part they don’t understand is that in order for article marketing to work, someone has to want to post your article.

And the good article directories are picky. They don’t post just any old piece of junk.

A good article should be at least 400 words of relevant information. Some say 750 words is ideal, others don’t really worry about it. But it is much harder to really impress people with fewer than 400 words.

There are tons of article directories out there, but just a few important ones, such as Ezine Articles. Many of the rest will probably never do much more than provide a highly obscure backlink, if the search engines notice it at all. The better article directories give you a chance that webmasters will decide to use your article.

You should also be submitting to selected webmasters who are willing to receive articles from you. If you can develop a relationship with a webmaster you are more likely to get them to publish your article to their site or newsletter. If they have a good readership, that can mean a nice amount of traffic to your website.

A lot of people recommend using automated solutions to article submission. There are some good services out there, as well as software solutions. My own personal favorite is Article Marketer. I’m a Lifetime Member there.

What I love about their service is that I can queue up my articles in advance, telling them when I want an article sent out to their publication list. Article Marketer is also picky. They review my articles and tell me if, in their view, there’s a problem. It’s just a bit of prescreening that helps to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

They absolutely require a minimum of 400 words, they make sure you haven’t overdone your use of keywords (their opinion, of course), they make sure your resource box HTML works, and they make sure your article is correctly categorized. These things can be a help.

Right now Article Marketer has a deal going on, and I don’t know the end date. They’re offering discounts on their quarterly, annual and lifetime memberships. And if you sign up, they’re also offering 1, 2 or 3 articles written for you, free with the purchase.

I love using them because it simplifies my overall article submission process. If I want to target a particular webmaster, I can still do that myself, but I don’t have to take the time to submit to the various websites. I’ve used article submission software, and using Article Marketer is just a better use of my time in my opinion.

What Else Should You Know?

A lot of people worry about duplicate content when they submit articles. The quickest way around that is to not post the identical articles on your site. The other part is to remember that it’s not quite as bad as people say it is, so far as I can tell.

I often have what I post on my site be different from what I submit to directories using Article Marketer. The information on my site generally has the most detailed information. The submitted articles are good, go into some reasonable depth, but there’s just a bit more to them on my sites than elsewhere.

It also takes a LOT of article submissions to really make a difference. Two or three articles won’t do a lot for your site. You have to be persistent in your efforts.

I would also suggest that you read my recent article from the newsletter on what I find keeps an article from being marketable. It’s from my own experiences running one of those really minor article directories.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Product
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
Can Article Marketing Work for You? (current page)
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work - Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click?
Article Marketing Statistics
Putting the Pieces Together

Hunting for the right theme for a blog takes a lot of time. It’s not all that easy to find something that will do exactly what you want it to do and look how you want it to. These are some of the things you want to consider:

Columns

Most themes have at least two columns. I generally go for 3 columns, occasionally even 4 if it’s well made.

You also need to think on how the columns are set up. My current theme has sidebars to the right and to the left. But having all sidebars to the right has become rather popular in blogging. You’ll see quite a bit of that.

Colors

While I do strongly recommend that you customize your header image when present, the overall color of a theme matters. If you find one that has more or less the color scheme you want, it’s a lot less work to adapt it than having to find in all the CSS where you need to switch the colors.

Width

Some people like fixed width, while others want it to adapt to the size of their visitors’ monitors. It’s a matter of personal preference, but do consider your user base. If you find by looking at your stats over time that most of your visitors have a lower resolution to their monitor, a wider theme probably isn’t for you. Similarly, too many users with really high resolution monitors can be trouble if you have variable width.

Required Links

Just about all free Wordpress themes will require that you keep a link to the designer in the footer or elsewhere. It’s good form to comply with this request, and if such is stated in the terms, the designer can insist that you take the theme off your site if you don’t comply.

Make sure the links are ones you can stand. Some free theme designer sell their footer links to others, and you can end up linking to all kinds of spammy sites.
You will also want to know if there’s anything more being added to your site than is immediately obvious. Check the footer file for anything odd. Search for hidden links. There’s nothing good to come of the search engines blaming you for links to bad neighborhoods.

Overall Function

I’ve seen some Wordpress themes look great on the index page, and have problems on other pages. I’ve seen some that don’t bother including navigation on individual post pages.

Check everything as soon as you try a theme on your blog. Check it on as many browsers as you can on your own. BrowserShots.org is a great help for this. It gives you screenshots of how your page looks in a wide range of browsers and operating systems. It may take from minutes to hours to generate your results, but it’s far simpler than finding a way to check out your site in so many browsers on your own.

But I still recommend doing it live as much as you can.

Search Engine Optimization

Not all themes do anything with this, so it’s a nice bonus when you can find it. If not, there are a variety of plugins that can help you to do the important things yourself, such as displaying appropriate page titles.

Themes That Have Recently Caught My Eye

While I don’t change themes too often, I’m not 100% satisfied with all the themes I’m using on other sites. So I took this time to find some new favorites.

Gridline Light
Very clean and probably easy to adapt to a wide range of website styles, which is always a big help.

Smashing Theme
If I chose this one for a project, I’d no doubt change or remove the overall background image. Just not quite my style, really. But I do like the rest of it quite well.

xPlosive Reloaded
You may quickly be noting my preference for 3 columns. I like the flexibility of having several things clearly visible in the sidebars. On this one I particularly like the emphasized subscription area. I would probably move and shrink the search box, and make it into an email subscription form.

WP Premium
It looks good to me. Easy to add 125×125 ads if you like, for either selling advertising or affiliate marketing.

Ayumi
Not 100% wild about the particular shade of green, but it looks easy to adapt. Another one where I’d be using some of the wider sidebar space to really emphasize the RSS and email subscription options.

If none of these suit you, there are plenty more available for free download at the Wordpress site. And remember that one of the great things about Wordpress is that it is incredibly easy to test and discard themes. I have a folder dedicated to the ones I’ve downloaded onto my computer, yet I use very few of them.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Product
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes (current page)
Can Article Marketing Work for You?
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work - Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click?
Article Marketing Statistics
Putting the Pieces Together

On most hosts, setting up a Wordpress blog is incredibly easy. But just for those who want it step by step, here we go. I’ll be demonstrating through the control panel of my Site5 account. Through their control panel I go to SiteAdmin and select my site. This may vary somewhat by hosting company.

Under CGI & PHP scripts I see Fantastico. This is the tool that makes Wordpress’s already easy installation even easier. I click on Fantastico, then under their blog category choose Wordpress.

And of course I choose New Installation. This takes me to a screen that asks for the basic required information: domain to install on (Site5 allows you to host more than one), directory to install to (left empty if you want the blog to be the main page of the site), your preferred admin name and password, admin nickname, admin email address, blog name and description.

If you want to use the Blog by eMail feature, you can fill in the section for that as well, otherwise just lie to it. Fantastico does want it filled in. If you use it, this allows you to email your posts to your blog. Obviously you need the email account set up just for that, and you have to watch for any signs of spam to the account. Personally, I never do it since if I can access email I can log into my blog. But if you feel it works for you, go right ahead. We all have our preferences.

Click ‘Install Wordpress’. You’re done and Fantastico will provide you with a link to your login screen.

It’s only slightly trickier if you don’t have Fantastico through your host or some other installation system.

Go to Wordpress.org. Download the latest version of Wordpress.

Create a MySQL database through your host. This should be very easy to do - just find the MySQL Administration section. There should be an obvious way to make a new database. Follow the directions, and note the database name, user name, password, and host name if relevant. Most often host name is just ‘localhost’ but some do it differently.

Unzip the version of Wordpress you downloaded onto your computer. Use an FTP program to upload it to the appropriate directory on your site. Read through the Read Me file and make the appropriate edits to the wp-config-sample.php file, saving it as wp-config.php when you’re done. Do not use Microsoft Word or similar for this. Notepad is better. Upload this file as well.

Go to the directory where you’ve put your blog and add wp-admin/install.php to the end of that address. Wordpress will handle the installation. If you gave it the right information about your database in the wp-config.php file, all should be well. Wordpress will create a login for you.

Customizing Your Blog

This is the big part. You really don’t want to rely on that plain, functional theme that Wordpress uses by default, do you? And there’s so much more functionality you can add with plugins, even if you don’t understand HTML or PHP.

Two easy places to seek free themes are at Alex King’s site and on the Wordpress site. I like the Wordpress site’s version pretty well. It allows you to search by selected criteria, such as number of columns or color. Go ahead and download more than one, and try each out. I’ve often found that one I liked on the theme viewer wasn’t quite what I wanted when I put it live on my site.

Themes are very easy to install. Download to a folder on your computer and unzip. Upload the theme using FTP to the themes folder of your Wordpress installation. This will be under the wp-content folder.

Go to the Presentation tab. Click on the them you want to activate, then view your blog. Repeat as necessary if you don’t like the first theme you pick.

You can customize your free themes if you like. If you understand how to use an image editor such as Fireworks or Photoshop, you can take the current header image (for example), and make it your own. It’s an easy way to keep from looking like everyone else using that theme. If you don’t know anything about it, consider hiring someone to do it.

You can also edit the CSS file or any other files as you see fit, just be sure you know what you’re doing, and back up your theme in case you break it.

The other alternative is to pay someone to create a theme for you. This may not fit into your early budget, but it’s a thought for when you have more money coming in.

Plugins are similarly easy to add. If you read Wordpress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin she recommends 10 great Wordpress plugins. You can download free plugins from the Wordpress site.

Some of her recommendations I’ve been using for a while, such as Subscribe to Comments. It’s a great plugin for making it easier for people to follow conversations on your blog. Related Entries is also great, and I really need to add it to more of my blogs. Others I haven’t tried yet, but they’re pretty much on the to-do list. I just have to reach a point where I’m willing to do the installation across multiple blogs.

Once again, download to a folder on your computer, unzip and upload to the plugins folder of your Wordpress installation.

Plugins are easy to activate, but some require an additional step.

Go to the Plugins tabe and just hit Activate for any plugins you want to use on your blog.

Some will require that you insert a piece of code into your Wordpress theme. If they do, there will be a Readme file telling you how to do this. And then there’s Akismet, which requires you to get a key from the Wordpress.com site. But that’s very easy to do.

What Else Should You Do?

There are a few more things you’ll want to do. Every new Wordpress installation comes with links to the blogs of some of the developers in your blogroll. You can take these out if you like. Odds are they won’t be relevant to your topic.

Make several posts before you start trying for traffic. No matter how great the post, no one will be interested in a blog that has only one post available.

If you want blogging stats, sign up with Feedburner. Their tools are free, they make it possible for you to track your subscribers and allow people to subscribe to your blog by email. Many people are more comfortable with this.

You will want to add at least the basic RSS chicklet linked to your Feedburner account. Replace any existing chicklets (the orange square with white curves you see on so many blogs) with the Feedburner one.

With Feedburner and several good posts over several days in place, you can start some promotion of your blog. It’s going to take time to look serious and really bring in the readers in most cases.

Read related blogs and comment. Use a name rather than keywords for your name when you post comments in most cases. Some people do use their blog name, but many webmasters don’t like that, so think carefully first. Don’t just post for the link to your site. Contribute. Useless comments don’t generate visitors.

Overall, the setup can take a day or so, especially if you’re picky about your theme and plugins, but the installation itself is really easy. The creation of quality content should take far more time, even to just get to the point where you can start generating visitors.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Product
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog (current page)
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
Can Article Marketing Work for You?
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work - Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click?
Article Marketing Statistics
Putting the Pieces Together