Today’s post is all about the mysterious business of SEO.  If you’re new to blogging then you’ve probably seen the term floating around the Internet and wondered what the heck the fuss is all about and whether or not you need it in order to survive online as a blogger.

Let me start by saying that the term SEO stands for search engine optimization.  What this means is every time you search for something for example “red tennis shoes” on Google, any webmasters who run sites that match your search words “red tennis shoes” want to be as close to the top of the first page of results that Google or any other search engine comes back with.

Have you ever had a look when you’re searching in Google at just how many sites are returned for your keywords? It can be an enormous amount of websites that often number in the millions. Since the Internet has been around since the early 90’s, there are literally millions of websites out there that span all kinds of topics and interests but they can’t all be the number one search result right at the top of Google’s results page.

So how do webmasters get to the top of Google?  That’s where the optimization part of SEO comes in.  Webmasters who run sites or blogs that match the keywords you type in to search engines will optimize their sites to ensure that they are right there at number one.  Why do webmasters use SEO techniques?  The bottom line: money and sales.  If you’re a webmaster with a product to sell, then you will be extremely motivated to optimize your website or blog to fit somewhere on the first page of search engine results.  But what if you’re a blogger who just writes for yourself or your friends?  Or even just a hobby blogger not interested in money?  Then learning search engine optimization techniques is probably not a huge concern for you as the financial aspect of blogging most likely doesn’t concern you. However, if you are looking to supplement your income through your website, then you should really know the basics of search engine optimization even before you put up your first site or blog.

The topic of SEO is a very broad one and encompasses more than just a few tips and tricks.  There are even folks who have written whole books on the subject of search engine optimization and courses available online.  If you’re serious about getting to the top of Google, it’s worth investing in a good seo book or online course to help your site reach the top of Google and stay there.

Shopperpress is a full featured storefront shopping cart solution for Wordpress that is packed with amazing features that turn a standard wordpress blog into a feature rich shopping cart website in just a few easy steps. The ease of installation of Shopperpress will have your online store up in running in 5 minutes or less. You have the ability to use the built-in Amazon product importer, CSV product import, and datafeed imports as well. It’s a snap to quickly and easily import thousands of targeted products and merchandise to your blog without headaches or frustration working with complicated software. Your products will practically sell themselves as Shopperpress includes lots of extra product data like product photos, product descriptions, and customer reviews.

Payment processing can be a real fear and concern for new bloggers as the thought of integrating their own Wordpress shopping cart solution can be quite complicated and advanced. The good news is that Shopperpress integrates all of the major payment gateways right there in your Wordpress admin so you don’t have to get your hands dirty messing with code or uploading tricky software solutions that require lots of technical assistance. Once you’ve uploaded the plugin files to your blog, it’s a simple matter of activating it and then selecting your personal preference for payment with a click of a button.

Are you concerned about what your blog might look like if you want to feature products on it? Don’t worry, there are lots of beautiful shopping cart themes to choose from within the plugin that are simply amazing to look at and best of all no coding experience is needed to implement them. It’s a simple click to remake your blog into a product showcase that will have make your products, services, and digital downloads more attractive to your intended audience: your customers.

If you’re worried about operating system or browser conflicts, this Wordpress shopping cart has been fully tested and works with Windows, Linux and Mac OSX operating systems as well as all major browsers like Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Safari.

Anyone new to blogging eventually ponders whether or not to monetize their blog with products and services closely related to their chosen topic. While I can’t tell you whether or not you should or shouldn’t make some money from your blogging, I will say that there is no shortage of products out there for you to try your hand at selling. The products and services you could sell on your blog are usually referred to as affiliate products, this means that you are selling something on behalf of another company and you share in the commission revenue. But how do you find products to sell on your website? Here’s a list of the top ways to find and promote products and services to sell on your blog.

Google It – Do a search in Google for specific keyword terms that are related to your blog’s topic. For instance, if you have a blog about parakeet care you could try googling “parakeet care affiliate” and see what sort of results are returned. If you find that parakeets are too specific then you could try something like “pet care affiliate” which would have more options as it has a much broader reach with customers than just parakeets.

Affiliate Networks – Another way to find affiliate products to sell on your blog is to go through an affiliate network and there are some big players out there with huge amounts of products in their network. Here’s a quick list of the biggest players out there right now:

Commission Junction – Easy to apply and be approved. Individual product advertisers approve readily if your site is functional and relevant to the products.

LinkShare – Easy to apply and be approved. Individual product advertisers are picky about sites that do not have loads of traffic,expect to be turned down by most advertisers if you’re just starting out.

ShareASale – Easy to apply and be approved. Individual product advertisers approve readily if your site is functional and relevant to the products.

Sign Up for Pepperjam Network and Get a $10 Sign On Bonus – Easy to apply and be approved. Individual product advertisers approve readily if your site is functional and relevant to the products.

Affiliate Product Marketplaces (Non-Network) -The benefits of using a product marketplace over an affiliate network are that once your affiliate account is approved you can start building your products links from thousands of product advertisers right away. Affiliate networks can be a little snobbish to new websites who don’t quite have traffic numbers a product advertiser expects. Often, an affiliate networks product advertiser will turn down your application based solely on your traffic numbers , but if you go through an affiliate marketplace you will more than likely be able to find that company’s products to sell on your blog anyways. An example of this is selling Disney products online. Disney is huge and has an agreement with the Linkshare network that pretty much denies new bloggers with low traffic from being accepted into their program. Alternatively, you can find tons of Disney products to promote and sell on your blog if you go set up an Amazon Associates account instead. The commissions may be smaller but if you can’t get in through the front door, affiliate marketplaces are your next best bet. Here are a few affiliate marketplaces you can try:

Clickbank – The biggest and best marketplace online to sell digital downloads like ebooks and online courses. The beauty of Clickbank is that you can get started right away once you’re a Clickbank affiliate as you’re already pre-approved to promote and sell any of the thousands of products they have available.

Amazon Associates – Scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the link marked “Join Associates” once you’re approved as a publisher, you’ll be able to start making links to promote literally hundreds of thousands of products on your blog.

Online Auctions – If you have a Wordpress blog there is an amazing way to make money online as well as give your blog fresh content automagically! How do you do it? By adding other people’s Ebay auctions to your blogs pages and posts. All you need are two things, an Ebay Partner Network account and the Free Ebay Wordpress Plugin. Once you’re approved with Ebay, you need to install and configure the plugin. Ebay auctions will then be listed wherever you decide to display them, and you will earn commissions on sales as well as always having fresh content for your blog as you can see by my auction list below.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the list and until next time…stay cool people…

[AffomaticEbay]wordpress[/AffomaticEbay]

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In the spirit of helping others get the most out of their Wordpress blogs, I’m divulging the list of plugins I use on my blog in the hopes that it helps someone out there get more functionality out of their blog software. Feel free to try these plugins yourself and recommend any plugins you feel a blog shouldn’t be without. All of the Wordpress plugins that are listed are hyper-linked for your convenience so you can check out the some more information about these Wordpress plugins from their sites. I’m not affiliated with any of these plugins in any way and all of them are freely available on the Internet so enjoy the list.

AddInto – Allows you to make it easier for visitors of your website adding alink, article in several favorite systems, social networks. Instead ofhaving a link to each of them, you have a single link or button to all!

All In One SEO Pack – Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog …

Disqus Comment System – Disqus is a powerful comment system that easily enhances the discussion on websites. In minutes, connect your community with those of over 45,000 other websites.

Google XML Sitemap – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of yourWordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages aswell as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemapis updated and all major search engines that support the sitemapprotocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notifiedabout the update.

Robots Meta – This plugin makes it possible (and very easy) to:

* Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags.
* Prevent indexing of the subpages to your homepage, by adding a noindex,follow.
* Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
* Add noodp an noydir meta robots tags, allowing you to opt out of DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions.
* Prevent Yahoo! and Google from indexing your feeds by adding a meta tag to their head-section.
* Disable author and date-based archives.

Statpress – The first real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statisticsabout blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders,search keywords, feeds, browsers etc.

Tagaroo -Tagaroo is designed to make your WordPress blog better for you,better for your readers and more accessible to search engines. As you’re writing, Tagaroo analyzes the text in your post and suggestsintelligent tags for the things and events you’re writing about. You can use these tags in your post – but even better – you can use these tags to automatically get great images from Flickr to include in your post. The Tagaroo website doesn’t seem to have the latest version of their own plugin but the good news is you can download the latest version of Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file. right here from New Blog Help and it’s fully compatible with Wordpress 2.7

Wordpress Download Monitor – Download Monitor is a plugin for uploading and managing downloads, tracking download hits, and displaying links. I use this plugin because sometimes I give away my own free graphics and they can be quite large to upload inside my posts. This plugin allows me to upload my graphics in archived format into my blog right from inside my post editor. Just think if you gave things away on your blog like ebooks or pdf files this plugin would be really, really handy.

WP-Note – This plugin allows you to create nice notes in your Wordpress posts or pages.You just should add note tags in your post.There are all five tags: note,important,tip,warning and help.

WP-SpamFree – An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin for WordPress that virtuallyeliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam.Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-freecontact form feature as well.

That’s all the plugins I use and maybe they can help solve a Wordpress functionality issue for someone out there who might be new to Wordpress and it’s huge amount of plugins. If you need a larger list of Wordpress plugins then be sure to have a look at the repository which contains over 4,000 free Wordpress plugins. Until next time new bloggers, stay safe online and blog about it all…

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As a new blogger you’ve probably gotten Wordpress all loaded up to your server by now and even though you might not be too familiar with the Wordpress Admin dashboard you can’t wait to get your blog on and write your first post. While you could by all means get straight to blogging your heart out, one thing you should be aware of is that there are a few Wordpress settings that you will need to configure inside the Wordpress dashboard prior to publishing your first post. Let’s go through them together and once we’re through you can get down to the serious business of blogging about it all. So when you’re ready, log into your Wordpress Admin and let’s have a look around.

As of the writing of this post the current version of Wordpress is version 2.7 Coltrane and it is quite different from other versions of the software and requires some getting used to even for seasoned users, so here’s the nitty gritty:

Once you’ve logged into your account you will be in the default dashboard which is like your blog’s command center. You will be able to see lots of valuable information here like your blogs status in regards to number of posts, comments waiting to be moderated, who links to your blog, your recent drafts, latest news from the Wordpress development blog, and many other pieces of useful and interesting information about your blog.

While the dashboard is a helpful information center, the real heart and soul of managing your blog is found in the list of links in the left sidebar of your dashboard and they are labelled Posts, Media, Links, Pages, Comments, Appearance, Plugins, Users, Tools and Settings.
The first thing you should do to set up your blog is to change the password that was generated for you when you first installed Wordpress and that can be done by clicking on the Users link. You should see your profile and an option to edit the settings there. You will be able to change your email address, the color scheme of your dashboard, your user nickname and of course your password so make sure it’s something you can remember and note it down somewhere just in case. If you are setting up a multi-user blog this is also the area where you would add users and set their access levels.

The very next place you should go to is the Settings link and more specifically the General tab. You will need to add your blog title and tagline if you didn’t already do so when you installed Wordpress. Setting your time zone is also crucial to do as your blog posts and comments will always be off otherwise. It will also wreak havoc on your scheduled posts if your time zone is set incorrectly.

The next important area in the Settings link is the Reading tab. This is the area where you will choose if you want your blog to have a static front page such as a Home or Welcome page or if you’d rather have your blog posts running down your page instead. You will be able to set any page you’ve created as the front page of your blog so make sure to set it up before selecting this option. You also have the choice of how many posts to display on your blog’s front page and whether they display the full post or a small expert if you decide not to go with the static front page.

Next in the Settings link you should access the Media tab. This lets you adjust the default sizes for your thumbnails, medium and full-size post images.

The next option in the Settings link is the Privacy tab. You probably already said yes to have your blog visible to search engines when you set it up, but just in case you didn’t just double-check that your settings are set to being visible to everyone including search engines and such.

The last but probably most important setting you should set appropriately in your Wordpress blog is what sort of permalink structure you plan on using for your posts. This step may be last on the list here but it is crucial that you set this correctly so your post urls are defined the way you want them right away before you start posting…once you’ve set up your permalink structure you never have to do it again so take the time to decide your permalink structure now. If you’re having trouble deciding which permalink structure is for you I’ve written a post about choosing the structure that’s right for you as well as instructions to make changes to your permalinks here.

Now you’re all set, go on and write your first post…send me a link to it I’d love to read it.

Until next time new bloggers…have fun on the Internet and get those blogs up and running!

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In the Wordpress Admin there is a Settings tab and within that tab is the Permalinks tab. Setting up this area of your blog administration is crucial to having your blog post urls (or links) be the way you want them. The default setting for your posts is p=”whatever the post id number is” but it’s not such a nice url to have. Here’s an example: You’ve written a post on your dog care blog about how to choose the best breeds. With Wordpress’s default permalink strucutre your post would look like this:

“http://dogcare.com/p=123/” – What the heck does that even mean to anyone? Not much and if anything were to ever happen to your blog and you didn’t have a backup of your post database, would you be able to remember all of your post id numbers? Probably not, and then all those people finding your posts in the search engines would click and receive an error message because the link they followed would be invalid.

Next option is day and name and again this option is not so great either…why? Because time moves on and again if anything ever happened to your blog and you had no backup of your post database, you would have to re-post to your blog and the date from the re-post wouldn’t match the previous date. You would end up having to implement a redirection plugin to have your old post structure match up to your new post structure. Here’s an example of the original post link using this structure:

“http://dogcare.com/january/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/” and if you had to repost it months later your new post would look like “http://dogcare.com/december/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/” and you can see how the new link structure could never match up to the old link structure without a redirection plugin from the old link to the new one.

The same issues would arise with the month and name option so make sure to keep track of which posts were posted in which month.

Same thing goes for the numeric option but again you will have to keep track of which posts go with which number.

The best option by far is the custom permalink option and one of the best custom permalink structures to use is to have your post url structured by category and post name. The value you would need to enter for this field looks like:

%category%/%postname%

This will have your posts looking like this example: “http://dogcare.com/breeds/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/”and if anything ever happens to your post database it would be easy to remember your categories and post names and they wouldn’t be dependent on variables that change like the date or post id numbers.

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Now that you’ve gotten your blog up and running you’re probably already writing posts but some unusual anomalies have crept into your work. You’ve perhaps wondered why your text is not wrapping around your images? Or perhaps you find that you have oodles of whitespace to the right of your posts because your post text is not justified? Maybe you’re wondering why no-one is coming to your posts? Perhaps it’s due to the irrelevant title? Here’s a short list of ways you can style your Wordpress posts to address the most basic issues every blogger runs across when just starting out.

• Blog Posts Need Relevant Titles – Make sure your title is relevant to the post you’ve written or no-one will ever find it. So let’s say you wrote a fantastic article about “home stereo systems” then you should try to pull a relevant title from what you’ve written. For example, you’ve written a comparison guide for “home stereo systems” that includes features and prices, then a great title for your post could be “Features and Price Guide For Home Stereo System Buffs”. You might be saying to yourself, “Well isn’t it obvious that my post is about features and prices for home stereo systems?” and “What kind of moron would incorrectly title their blog post anyways?” Well, some posts you write will have a very clear and concise direction while others will be more like unfocused rants or just thoughts you’ve had about a certain subject and the title may not be so easy to come up with then. If the latter is the case, then trying to find the focus of an unfocused post can be somewhat challenging and it happens to us all. Take a moment and consider the subject matter of your post before coming up an irrelevant title and check out Copyblogger for some great tips on writing your best post titles.

• Post Images Need Relevant Titles – The way to title an image is there in the display window that comes up after you’ve uploaded the image. The default photo title will be the what the camera gave it or the name of the file you downloaded from the Internet. You will need to change it to something relevant to the photo if you want folks to find it. As an example, if you took a photo of a beautiful sunrise your camera has probably titled your photo something like “img1101.jpg”. You need to change the title in the image title field to read something like “beautiful sunrise”. After all, which do you think folks will search for on the Internet? Photos named “img1101″ or photos of “beautfiul sunrises”…it’s up to you…

• Wrap Text Around Wordpress Images – To make sure your text wraps nicely around your post photos…always set the photo alignment to left, right or center. You can do this from the display window that pops open after you’ve uploaded your image. If you find that even after setting the alignment your text is still now wrapping around the image, that’s because Wordpress changed the default image classes not too long ago and probably the template you’re using still uses the old image classes in the stylesheet. Add these codes to the style.css of the theme you are using:

img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}
img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}
img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}

• Always Use The HTML Editor Tab When Inserting Any Sort of HTML Codes Into Your Posts. – Why? Because the visual editor tab inside Wordpress will not convert your html codes to what you wanted it to do. Instead, your html codes will appear in your post exactly the way you inserted them using the visual editor. Switch to the html editor tab, insert your code, then switch back to the visual editor. Your post html should look like what you had intended and not the raw codes.

• Set The Alignment Of Your Post Text – You can align your post text left, right, or justified. Justified gives you the same amount of whitespace in between each left and right margin. You can do this two ways…the first way is to wrap your post writing in this source code < p style=”text-align: justify;” > or align it left or right, from inside the Wordpress post editor each and every time you write a post. Or you can fix this globally by adding:

text-align: left;
text-align: right;
text-align: justify;

to your style.css file at to automatically align text such as on page paragraphs and post paragraphs.

• Clear The Float Of Images You Add To Your Posts – If it ever happens (and it will) that you have an image that is longer than the text you want to put next to it, when you want to start a new paragraph the image will hang down over your next block of text. Your next paragraph or image will by default try to line up underneath the last block of text even if it throws off your entire post layout. Here’s how to fix this:

Enter this source code <div style=”clear:both;”></div> after your last paragraph (with the image) in the Wordpress editor and before the next text paragraph or image. This code will force your next paragraph to start below the last image length instead of the length of the short text you wrote beside it.

This is not an exhaustive list of how to style a Wordpress post, but it is an outline of the basic quirks that you will be sure to run into pretty much as soon as you write your first post…so keep this list handy as a reference and happy blogging.

Congratulations on getting your Wordpress blog installed! Now you can start blogging…what’s that? You despise the default Kubrick theme that comes with all Wordpress installations? I for one find that very hard to believe, I mean look at that theme…it’s simple, it’s rounded at the corners….it’s a sea of blue…

Okay, okay so there’s probably only 2% of the population that actually likes the Kubrick default Wordpress theme…and the only other theme that comes with Wordpress by default is the Classic theme and it’s not so hot either. So what’s a blogger to do? You could find some pre-made Wordpress themes and install them to your blog as is, you could modify a pre-made Wordpress theme with your own graphics and artistic style, and then install it to your blog, or you could get wild and create your own theme…okay, okay we’ll save the wildness for another post…

So today’s post is about where to find Wordpress themes. Back in the old days of Wordpress there were some pretty hokey-looking themes available for bloggers and they were pretty basic in their functionality. Nowadays Wordpress themes or templates, are nothing short of a marvel of superb design with breath-taking appeal. This new breed of Wordpress themes is not only stylish and good-looking, but they have an amazing level of functionality that will allow you to do things with your blog that you may not have known was even possible to do before.

If you’re just starting out with Wordpress and you’re looking for some excellent Wordpress template resources then here is a list of where you can get some free or not-so-free themes from:

WP Start – This site offers literally TONS of free Wordpress themes and the best part is that most of them are free premium themes. They also offer a great selection of priced themes but the costs are very reasonable.

Brian Gardner offers the Revolution based series of high quality, professionally designed WordPress themes with included support packages. His premium Wordpress themes can take your blog to a higher level or give your website that professional edge with a not so blog-like look. Click here to visit Brian Gardner Media LLC website

Wordpress not only gives you the most awesome blogging software on the planet, but they also provide a huge assortment of themes and templates for your blog as well. The Wordpress themes repository has the largest selection of themes anywhere on the Internet and they’re all free so if your on a budget, you won’t break the bank.

freewpthemes has around 150 free WP templates to choose from so be sure to have a browse over there.

Also have a look at The Wordpress Themes Archive where you can download a whole shwack of themes in one go or pick and choose between the more than 2000 themes freely available.

Happy Wordpress theme hunting bloggers!

When I upgraded my Wordpress version to 2.7, the ability to schedule posts in Wordpress 2.7 no longer worked. I could still schedule a post but the scheduled time would come and go with no future post being published. All that I could see in the Wordpress dashboard was “Missed Schedule” no matter what I tried to fix this problem.

The Missed Scheduled Wordpress Posts Problem

After searching for a solution to Wordpress missed schedule problems it was clear that no-one seemed to know exactly why it was happening and how to fix it. The problem of future posts not working in Wordpress happened to some folks who upgraded from version 2.6.5 and not to others, and it happened to some folks who changed web hosts and again not to others. The Wordpress missed schedule error has also been known to happen to folks on one or two of their blogs and not on their other blogs. So clearly this issue needs to be resolved in future versions of Wordpress but for now there are a few suggestions that have been offered on the Internet.

Some fixes that were suggested for the scheduled Wordpress posts not working problem:

You can see details of what some other fixes others have suggested as well as my fix in the Wordpress support forum in regards to this issue here

Here’s My Wordpress Missed Scheduled Posts Fix:

I’m a simple kind of chick and as such I downloaded Wordpress version 2.6.5 and had a look at the wp-cron.php file in the root directory as well as the cron.php file that resides inside the “wp-includes” folder. The code inside both files is quite different from the the Wordpress 2.7 file versions. In Wordpress 2.7 wp-cron.php there are references to “local-time” and the doing_cron option is set to zero. This is not present in the 2.6.5 versions of these files. So I decided that it might be possible that if your web server time is off by even a few seconds from the Wordpress official time the scheduled post may not go through. This is because the doin_cron argument is set to zero making it absolutely necessary that your web server and your Wordpress time match up pretty much exactly. Now I could have changed something in the code of these files but since I didn’t want to mess with variables I am unfamiliar with, so here’s what I did:

While this fix may not be for everyone and “Frankensteining” (yes I just made that word up) your Wordpress installation is not the best solution, it is a temporary fix until the next version of Wordpress is released and the issue is hopefully resolved.

I have included for download the two Wordpress files needed to fix the missed scheduled post issue in this post. Click on the download button, unzip the files and follow the directions in this post or the readme file that is included with the two files. Please note that these two files were obtained directly from the official Wordpress repository and are guaranteed virus-free.

Setting your blog using Fantastico scripts is pretty quick and easy but what if you don’t have Fantastico scripts or cPanel hosting? Well then you will need to learn how to install Wordpress manually using FTP or File Transfer Protocol. In a previous post I outlined how FireFTP is by far the best and easiest FTP to use to get the job done and the best part is that it works right inside your Firefox or Flock browser. So before you get started installing Wordpress make sure you’ve downloaded, installed, and set up FireFTP and you can find complete instructions and a download link to FireFTP here.

To install Wordpress manually you will need the following:

- Firefox or Flock
- FireFTP all set up and ready to go
- The latest version of Wordpress (2.7 at time of writing)
- A text editor like Notepad or Notepad++

Step One – Unzip Wordpress once you’ve downloaded it to your computer
Step Two – Open the unzipped Wordpress folder and locate a file named wp-config.sample
Step Three – Open the file wp-config.sample in Notepad or Notepad++
Step Four – Look for these lines inside the wp-config.sample file:

Step Five – You will need to change the values listed here but first you need to create a database for your Wordpress installation inside your hosting account in order to obtain these values. So go ahead and log into your hosting account and let’s set up your database using MyPhp if you have cPanel hosting otherwise look for “Databases” in your hosting account.

- The first field you should see in MyPhp is your database name and here is where you can enter any name you want but you should make it relevant to your site name so you can remember it later on. Now click “Create Database”.

- Once your database has been created you will see a field marked “Database User” and you will need to enter a username of your choosing as well as a secure password (please note your username and password somewhere as we will need them for your Wordpress installation later). Now once you’ve filled out your database username and password click “Create User”.

- Now you will have to scroll down to the section that shows how many databases you currently have and it should be the one we just created, there should be a field next to it that allows you to choose a user to add to your database. Choose the username we just made together and click on “Add User To Database”.

- You should now see a screen asking what sort of privileges you would like the user to have and you should select “All Privileges” and save your changes.

Congratulations! Your Wordpress database is now set up!

Step 6 – Now we just need to go back to the wp-config.sample file we opened earlier and enter your database name, username, and password in the approriate fields. Where you see:

‘putyourdbnamehere‘ replace everything between the single quotation marks with the database name we just made
‘usernamehere‘ replace everything between the single quotation marks with the username we just made
‘yourpasswordhere‘ replace everything between the single quotation marks with the password we just made

Step 7 – Once you’ve made the changes to wp-config.sample you will need to save the file but use “Save As” and change the file extension from .sample to .php

Step 8 – Now you’re almost done, it’s time to load everything up to your web server using an FTP program. So go ahead and open the FTP program of your choice and log into your web server

Step 9 – You need to make sure that you are in the public_html directory before uploading any files and if you use Thinkhost it will be the docs directory

Step 10 – Locate your Wordpress folder and open it inside your FTP program…then upload all the folders and files inside the Wordpress folder into your web space (this should take a few minutes as there are quite a few Wordpress files to load)

* Once you are finished uploading your Wordpress files to your web space you will need to run the install script so Wordpress can set itself up inside your web space. Here’s what it should look like:

http://yournewdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php (of course you need to replace yournewdomain with your actual domain name) and if everything went well the install script will run. All you need to do is follow the onscreen prompts regarding your blog’s name, and email address.

You will be given a username (admin) and a password PLEASE WRITE IT DOWN as this will be your Wordpress Admin login until you change it.

If you have any trouble you can check out the Wordpress Installation guide here.

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