Small Business Internet Marketing – Setting Up WordPress

Small Business Internet Marketing – If you are a small business looking for a blog that will provide ease of use and great SEO capabilities, I only recommend a WordPress Self Hosted Blog! When I was checking into what to use to build my sites (www.marketingartfully.com I looked at TypePad, Blogger and WordPress Self Hosted Blogs. After much research, I decided to set up my small business marketing blogs on WordPress.

This is a journal of my trials and tribulations. All mistakes were my own!

Hosting – I use www.godaddy.com for all of my hosting needs. They are pretty user friendly and their customer service people are WONDERFUL and patient. The first thing you need to do is register your domain name and set up a hosting account. The basic account with database capabilities is fine for this excercise. You then need to setup your account incuding your database. If you have a choice pick PHP 5. Log into your hosting account go to Content > Go Daddy Hosting Connection. On the left nav bar select Blogs, click on WordPress and install (http://help.godaddy.com/article/834). Then wait. Don’t get all fired up to get started right away, they have to set up your database and everything. (I am doing this part after the fact, if you know of any items out of order please leave a comment and I will fix it!).

While you are in here you might as well also set up your email addresses for your new blog. I tend to forward everything to my gmail account so I am not checking 5000 different accounts each day! At this point you may want to make it a “catchall” account meaning that anything at yoursite.com will come to you.

WordPress Login – Once you have your hosting and database set up, sign up for wordpress at www.wordpress.org. This is professional (and I use that term loosely here) site for self hosted accounts. If you would like to have the easy to use version and are not super concerned with SEO and visability you can use www.wordpress.com and stop reading this instant! I have read NUMEROUS articles about how hard it is to get WordPress set up and how you have to change files and add database connections. I did not have to do that. If at any point in the setup you get stuck, stop immediately and call go daddy customer support. You can only make matters worse. I made one 5 minute call during the whole setup process. Here are some really good articles I came upon while stressing about the setup.

• Moving your wordpress blog to a godaddy account

• Making your blog webfriendly

Templates – I looked around and found a free neat wordpress template named Neoclassical. I like it because it has three columns and allows me to make rotating headers. For a true small business blog I recommend Thesis WordPress Theme – it costs a little bit of money but is SO worth it for the ease of use.

After you pick a theme, you will need to download it to your computer and unzip it (do not upload the .zip file as it won’t work). ALSO when I unzipped it I made a file named wp_themename and extracted the files into there. That made a file in a file and did not show up under my themes. Make sure you only have one level of files.

You will then need to FTP the unzipped folder to your wp-content > themes folder on your server. If you have never FTP’d before this is the best description I have seen of how to use Internet Explorer to transfer files http://faq.1and1.com/web_space__access/ftp_account/8.html. This is not NOT a hard thing. Basically you are sending the files you have downloaded on your computer up to the server so that they are accessable to people on the internet.

Once you have your theme in your folder, login to your wordpress account. Go to presentation > themes and pick your new theme! If you are going to use neoclassical or Thesis you will want to change your banners to other pretty pictures of your own choosing. Here is the explaination from the horses mouth (Chris Pearson, author of these fabulous templates!).

Working with your files – Go to Manage > Files. This is what was the MOST confusing to me at the start. All your files DO NOT show up in the recent and common listings on the right. To find them for editing purposes copy the entire string at the top (mine says wp-content/themes/neoclassical/FILENAME.php) and then scroll down to the bottom of the page and do a search. I tried a number of times to search just for the page file name and got NOWHERE!

Adding pages to your navigation – (If you have Thesis you can use the interface in WordPress Appearance>Thesis Options). If you have almost anything else Go to Manage > Files. Search for wp-content/themes/neoclassical/nav_menu.php. Copy the SECOND line and paste it on the next line down. Change about to the name of your page and the .php file name to the name of your page. The easiest way to find this out is to click on View under Manage > Pages. The file name will be after your URL in the address bar.

Naming your permalinks – This is a great tubetorial on how to make your blog more SEO friendly – thanks sean!

Upgrading WordPress – If you have WordPress 2.7 or higher, all you have to do to update your blog is to click update now. If you have WordPress 2.6 or older, use the following directions!

I waited until I had A BUNCH of posts, plugins and pages before I tried to update to the most current wordpress edition. I figured adding a little more stress to my life was a good thing? Anyways, here is a great tutorial on upgrading WordPress on GoDaddy - I had a pretty old version of wordpress on this blog and wanted to upgrade BUT knew from past upgrades that it is not always easy, so I did a search to see if anyone had an easy method. Along came Keith Jameslock with the answer! I will be using this method from now on! http://keithjameslock.com/make-money-online/quick-wp-26-upgrade-instructions-for-godaddy-users/

Plugins – Here are the plugins I am using. All are easy for a novice to add! If you are using WordPress 2.7 or higher, most plugins can be installed right from WordPress Plugins.

1. Feedburner Feedsmith – Make your RSS feed direct to your feedburner

2. Subscribe to Comments – Adding an email link to your comments so people can see the responses – I love this one so that I can see if a blog author or anyone else comments after me. The description in the readme file is super and I just put the code after all the other code on the page and it worked!

3. All In One SEO Pack – Puts the description, title tags and keywords in your blog, it is a beautiful thing! If you use Thesis, it has a great internal SEO and you won’t need All In One SEO.

4. Sociable – Put the little icons so people can share your posts. Once you have uploaded it and activated it just go to your options tab and it is right there. ABSOLUTELY the easiest thing I have done to date! One Note – It will make your blog a little bit slower.

5. Commentluv – Lets your readers show their last posting as a link under their name. This is REALLY neat! Commentluv Download

6. Akismet – this is already in the plugins when you start your blog. It is supposed to keep spam out of your comments. Figured it couldn’t hurt to use. You need an API key to make it work (this comes from your wordpress.com login).

7. WP DB Manager – Great backup software! Let’s you email yourself a backup copy of your database (vital if you are going to update to the most recent version of WordPress) http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/

8. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Automatically adds specified number of related posts without ANY changes needed to the template! http://mitcho.com/code/yarpp/

9. Embedit – Let’s you put HTML into your posts without blowing up! Vital for my forms from www.1shoppingcart.com

10. WordPress Dropdown Menu Plugin – I have not tried this plugin but my thesis forum friends recommend it!
11. AB Testing for WordPress – Not exactly a plugin but VERY interesting
12. WordPress eStore – This is a good e-commerce plugin that I use for clients when they want to sell digital products from their blog.

Customizing your feedburner form – there is a great post over at the internet digest!