Blogging Instructions - Great marketers follow them!

It's a sad fact that a well know provider of free blogs took the decision that too many blogs were put up for the sole purpose of promoting affiliate products and as that was contrary to the terms & conditions...

BANG

...overnight blogs disappeared.

Where would that leave your business? You'd worked hard to build your blog, build your visitors and backlinks to the blog.

Everything was looking great - you opened up your browser one day to see what traffic and sales had been generated by your blog and there it was...

You did make a back up of the site every day didn't you?

So you take the back up (assuming you have one) and you create a new blog.

You know how to do that don't you. But where do you start the new blog?

There are many hosting companies to choose from and I'm sure most of them that offer the essentials I mention above are just fine.

I've used Hostgator for a number of years and have been very pleased wth all aspects of their service.

I started hosting just one domain and upgraded to a "reseller" account that allows me to have unlimited domain names, when I reached 5 sites. At that point it is more cost effective to pay around $25 per month for as many sites as you like rather than around $5 per month each.

One of the hosting essentials mentioned above was cPanel.

The reason you need this is that for your blog you'll want the best platform and that is Wordpress.

With cPanel, Wordpress can be installed on your domain at the click of a few buttons.

If you visit my blogging instructions blog at WizzerSays you can get my Free Video e-book - "Fast Start Online Business" that shows exactly how to do all of this - with my compliments.

Now you have your domain, your hosting account and Wordpress has been installed the fun can begin.

Now you start to turn the blog into exactly what you want.

But wait a second...

Permalinks are basically the way the links to each post you make to your blog are created.

You can set them up so that your categories are always shown in the links and that can be vital to your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy.

Whoops, sorry, we've not talked about SEO yet have we? OK, remind me later.

Now, if you just started posting (writing posts on your blog) and decided to find out about permalinks later and adjust everything then you will have made a huge mistake.

Now, did I talk earlier about needing "blogging instructions"? Perhaps, you're starting to see that there is a bit more to this blogging lark than just throwing up a few random posts to some free blogging service.

Here's the thing about permalinks.

Once you've made a post and it's live the link to that post is, er how can I say this - PERMANENT!

Now I wonder where the term permalinks came from!

The point is that if you change the address (url) of that post later by changing the permalink structure, surprise, surprise the original link will now longer work.

It's a bit like moving house. Any one still using your old address will never find you!

If all of this is starting to sound like hard work or is too complicated you may want to join Randy The Hermit (he's the geeky search engine optimisation guy) and myself at Blogging Beginners where we teach everything that's needed to know about blogging for profit. Oh, yes, it's all video based including our unique - "request a video" service where we answer our members questions on anything to do with blogging by creating a video for them.

If you have you'll remember I mentioned that you may have taken a back up of your old blog - you know the one that got wiped out. But...

...most people don't back up anything.

BIG, BIG MISTAKE

If you are running a business the first thing you absolutely must do is protect that business against unforeseen events.

If you had a shop, unless you were, sorry I have to say this - stupid - you'd insure against theft, fire, public liability etc.

With an online business you simply have to protect your site against...

DISAPPEARING!

Things can and do go wrong. Servers fail, hackers can cause havoc and however unlikely it may be you have to ensure that's not the end of your business.

And this is where you'll be glad you followed these blogging instructions and chose Wordpress.

Rather than having to learn complicated code and technical stuff, with Wordpress you just upload plugins that do so much of the hard work for you.

You'll need to learn to ftp, no that's not a dance young man at the back - can you see anyone laughing?

FTP is a way of uploading information to websites and blogs - it's easy once you know how but it does look complicated to start. You can get free ftp programs like

I talk about plugins and their uses on a regular basis at WizzerSays - Blogging Instructions - where you can find much more detail.