Jamdo Marketing Blog

Now that you have a .com and some hosting, it is time to get started on the good stuff. Here are the basics on setting up a blog using Wordpress.

After you receive an email from ResellerZoom to confirm your hosting account has been set up, log into your control panel (for your site) - the URL will be http://YourSite.com/cpanel (you should have the username and password in the email from your host).

Cpanel is a great control panel program that allows you to do heaps of things with your site.

Look for a little icon with a smiley face called “Fantastico” - click on it.

On the next page in the left hand collumn click on “Wordpress” - now in the right hand collum click on “New Installation”

You want your blog in the top level directory so leave the “directory” option blank.

Follow the prompts to install your Wordpress blog.

Congratulations - you now have a Wordpress blog - in my opinion, this is the best type of blog as it has hundreds of different templates that you can use to make it look funky and there is a very large supporter community to ask silly questions if you get into trouble.

Now go to yourSite.com and click on the “login” link (use the username and password that you input during the installation process).

If this is the first time you have looked at the back-end of a Wordpress blog then you should spend AT LEAST an hour in the blog control panel looking around at the options and pressing all the buttons.

Write a post or two for a test (don’t worry, you can delete them later).

Now you are up and running!

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So you have done your keyword research and decided that your idea for a blog is viable. Next step is to do something about it. Time to get a site set up! This tutorial will concentrate on the basics of getting a place for your site to live on the internet. You will need a web host and a URL address - here’s how to get them:

Hosting - First thing you will need is someone to host your site. If you plan on having several sites (anybody who makes money in this game has several sites) then you should get a reseller account for hosting. You won’t be reselling anything (unless you really want to do that), but it will allow you to set up many websites from within one control panel. Go to http://www.resellerzoom.com/ and order the 4.95/month reseller plan. It is cheap and their plan has all of the tools and software you need to set up your blog or site very easily.

I have one of these accounts myself and it is fine for what you will need to get started with blogging and setting up multiple sites.

Domain Name - During the sign up process with ResellerZoom you can register a new domain with them for $9.95 - do it because that is the easiest thing to do at this stage. When you move onto your second site, we will be able to find another cheaper place to get domain names, but this will do for starters (because it is far easier).

What should you call your site? There are two schools or thought on this. Some people think that you should include your keywords in the domain name to have something like http://credit-card-information.com. This may get you some benefit in the search engines for your keywords, but it is probably minimal. If you plan to keep the site and brand it then you want something like yahoo.com or google.com (or jamdo.com!!)

I have both types of domain names and to be honest, I don’t see any difference in performace in the search engines. So it is really up to you what you call it.

NOTE: After you order your reseller account with ResellerZoom, you will have TWO control panels (one for your reseller account and one for your actual site).

You don’t need any of the addons that ResellerZoom offers (such as your own domain name servers). So don’t tick any of those boxes during the signup process.

After you have filled everything and given them your credit card details, they will send you an email confirmation with all of the information you need to get started!

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The very first thing you will need to build a site or a blog is an idea. Ideally your idea will be a niche (or you can at least alter your idea slightly to fit a niche). It will be very difficult to beat all of the established sites and blogs on the topic of “health” (for example) because it is too general and the guys at the top of that niche have multi-million dollar budgets to promote their sites. Off the top of my head, a health niche which might be worth investigating would be “children’s nutrition.”

But exactly how easy will it be? Let’s find out.

Go over to http://overture.com

Click on “Visit the Resource Center”

Click on “Keyword Selector Tool”

Type in “Child Nutrition” without the “”

This tool tells me that there were 7605 searches last month that contained the term “child nutrition.” Not great, but not bad either. (I usually aim for keywords with around 20,000 searches per month or more) Let’s take a look at the competition.

Go to http://google.com

Type in “Child Nutrition” without the “”

Click on the first result. Now look at the Google Page Rank (PR) of this page which is displayed in the Google toolbar.

Whoah – PR 6 – they will be tough to beat.

Site 2 – PR7 – almost impossible to beat

Site 3 – PR 5 – difficult but not impossible to beat

Site 4 – PR 6 – very tough to beat

Site 5 – PR5

Ok – this isn’t going to be as easy as I thought. Let’s skip down to number 10 and see if we think we can beat him to get into the top 10.

Site 10 - www.schoolnutrition.org - PR6 – Nope, I think there will be much easier niches to attack, so I forget about “Child Nutrition”

Just to make sure, I do a quick link analysis of the site to see who is linking to them (back-links) (this is where the real power of ranking well lies, but we will cover it in a future lesson). Now, Google is terrible at reporting back-links (possibly on purpose), so let’s use Yahoo!

Go over to http://yahoo.com

Type in “link:http://www.schoolnutrition.org” without the “” (There are much better tools for doing this analysis, but we will talk about that in a later lesson).

984 back-links! That is going to be really tough to beat in the short term. (Less than 100 back-links we can beat pretty easily) We can find a much better niche.

Now I have to go back and choose another niche within health that I think might have a lot of people searching for, but not much competition. Possibilities could be “women strength training” or “elderly fitness” – you really need to brainstorm about 50 ideas to snag a good one that is achievable.

Now I can spend a few days using overture and Google for all of this, but this is very time consuming and I am not a patient guy.

Almost every professional keyword researcher I have ever heard of uses Wordtracker – they have a database of search terms that you can compare against how many websites are competing to be ranked on that search term as well as how often people actually use the search term to find something. There are free tools that claim to do similar things, but to be honest every free tool I have tried sucks and I will not recommend any of them.

Now, Wordtracker isn’t free. It costs about $10 per day, but usually they extend your membership out to 48 hours to give you a better taste of their product. 24 hours is PLENTY of time to sit down and get as many good keywords as you can find. You will find keywords that you never even thought of. Make a record of all of the keywords you find that look promising.

Then we can talk about building a blog or a site around those keywords.

Now go do some research on your niche at WordTracker.

You can find them at http://wordtracker.com or if you enjoyed this lesson and want to do me a favour you can use my affiliate link to get to their site here.

When you think you have found a niche keyword then go back to Google and follow the steps above to analyse the competition for that keyword. Be sure to do a backlink analysis at http://yahoo.com to see if you can beat them (if they have PR4 and less than 100 back-links then you should be able to beat them pretty easily). Wordtracker is not always accurate so it is important to do this to double check.

Next we can talk about using those keywords to set up your new site or blog.

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