New Affiliate Discoveries

Getting Word Press installed is easy, and many hosts have a service called “Fantastico” which is a single button automated installatin of many open source website scripts.

My host, Lunar Pages, uses Fantastico, and I am able to set up a new domain name, set up a blog and start posting online content within less than 30 minutes. But before you get too carried away posting your brains out and creating the next hot blog, there are a few essential plugins and settings you should take care of before your first post.

Don’t worry, these won’t take long. I’m sitting here at a coffee shop and have already done this entire checklist for a brand new blog.

Step 1:

Download the following plugins to a folder on your desktop and unzip them. If you are going to be creating several blogs, then these plugins will be sitting on your desktop ready for you to install.

1) All-in-one SEO Pack

2) Google site map Generator

3) WP Stats

Step 2:

Set up an FTP program (cute FTP, Direct FTP by Coffee Cup, many others) pointing to the root directory of your new blog domain. If you want to set up Wordpress in a subdirectory (yourdomain/blog/) for example, you’ll have to create this directory first. I like to install in the root directory because most of my domains are primarily blogs.

Step 3:

Navigate to your wp-plugins folder on your host side, and the download folder you created on your desktop side and drop each folder into place. Note thta sometimes you will just have a single file to install, but usually it will be a folder of files. You want to transfer the entire (unzipped) folder of contents into the wp-plugin directory

Step 4:

Go to your WP-Administration (yourblogname/wp-admin/) and select “plugins” from the menu. Activate all the plugins by selecting the word “activate”.

Step 5:

If you have not registered on WordPress.com with an account, you will need to do so in order to get an “API Key”, a code that is used to uniquely identify your blog’s hits with the stats program. The same API key is used for the built in Comment Spam blocker which I recommend using as well.

All in One SEO Pack will have some fields for you to fill out based on the general theme of your blog.  The google site map will get up dated everytime your page is refreshed and the stats…well everyone is addicted to stats.

There are of course many other plugins, but the above three are essential for getting your blog off to a good start for search engine optimization and tracking your visitors, progress and keywords.

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Filed under: Affiliate Marketing by adventurebear