Following on from our article on making an income from blogging, we take the post one step further and teach you how to give yourself arguably the most powerful blogging platform from which to build your blogging empire!
WordPress is arguably one of the most popular online content management systems, and is a great tool with which to build your first online web journal or Blog. It is free to use, easy to set up thanks to the online wizard and so user friendly and simple, that even a novice user will find it a simple matter to get their blog up and running in a matter of minutes.
There are two main methods of starting the process of building a WordPress blog. You can choose to have the blog hosted on one of the WordPress servers, which is completely free of charge, or alternatively, you can buy your own hosting and domain name, and install the WordPress system on it, and then have a dedicated presence online.
The main advantage of investing in your own domain name is that it looks a lot more professional, and if you are planning to make money from blogging, having your own easy to remember domain will allow users to find you much more easily. Advanced users will find that they can configure the look and feel of a WordPress blog much more easily if it is hosted on their own server, and include advertising and affiliate links much more simply.
The advantage of using the free WordPress hosting service is that it is completely free, is very reliable thanks to the resources of the company providing it, and is much more simple to set up and administer. Blogs hosted on the WordPress server are automatically updated to the latest version of the software, and many of the processes of publicizing a blog are automatic thanks to the way that it is configured.
Once you have set up your account, and chosen a name for your blog, you can use the selection of templates in order to choose a distinctive look and feel that suits your taste, and then you can start writing. It is as simple as that!
WordPress has a simple interface for bloggers that means that you do not even need to know how to create html in order to publish your blog on the internet. You can simply type what you want to write into the editor, and then it will all be formatted for you, leaving you to concentrate on the actual writing and creativity that marks out your blog as individual and worthwhile.
Including links to other web sites and adding pictures to your blog is also a breeze, and is as simple as clicking on a button on the screen. WordPress also offers a range of tools to help you to promote your blog to interested parties, and is flexible enough and powerful enough to allow you to adapt and evolve your blog to your audience. You can tag articles into categories, and organize your writing to make it easy for users to find a particular post that they are interested in, and there is a large and helpful community of other users on hand to give you hints and tips about any problems that you might get stuck with, all of which makes building a WordPress blog a pleasure and a very rewarding experience.