Set up Your Blog
Essential Plugins
Monetize

Building websites used to be way too technical back in 90s, thankfully, when the blogs started to become popular, many services and software emerged that let you create blogs in few minutes. WordPress is one of the awesome platform that makes creating blogs easy.

But building a blog using WordPress is still challenging for non-techies and first timers. When created my first blog in 2007, it took me almost a week to set up the domain name with hosting. It was most than 10 days that I started writing on my blog. Fast forward to 2013, I can create blogs in less than 30 minutes.

Yes, just 30 minutes, from Idea to registering a domain name to setting up hosting to writing my first blog post.

I have written this eBook to help all the first timers there so that they don’t have to struggle and waste 7 days of their life that could be done in an hour or so using a step by step guide.

The Guide was written back in 2009 but the basics remain the same and this guide will still help you in 2013.

What this eBook is about.

As the title of this post, say, it is about creating blogs in Easy Steps. I know, many eBooks has been written about creating blogs, but, as the technology keeps changing, All that information seems to be little outdated to me.

That is why I took my time creating something which will be helpful to people, who want to start their own online venture.

Why should you read it?

This eBook is for people who currently, don’t have any blog or have a .blogspot or .Wordpress blog. This eBook shows how you can make your blog on a domain name, that will give your blog a professional look and you can start your journey to make online income.

Simply click the download button below, that’s it, now email required. Just one thing, please share this page with others who need help in setting up their first blog instead of sending them the copy. I think I am not asking for much in return. Hope to see you visit the blog again as we have tons of valuable information for you once you start your blog.

Download the Free eBook


Sort: All | SEO | Security | Social | Subscription | Others


SEO Plugins

WordPress SEO by Yoast

SEO is an important part and requires a lot of learning and effort to master it, it might overwhelm the people who have just started, we have always advised newbies to keep creating quality content and rest of the things can be learned on the way. Yoast gives easy options to optimize a post with keywords and proper headings.

Google XML Sitemaps

Yoast Plugin also has the feature of creating sitemaps  but Google XML Sitemaps is easier and less complicated which I have been using on all my sites.

Ultimate NoFollow

Ultimate NoFollow plugin does a very simple job and does it well, it adds an option in the WordPress editor to add ‘Nofollow’ tag to any links, which is pretty useful these days.

SEO Friends Images

Images can play an important role in getting targeted traffic. A lot of people do an image search to find something visually, SEO Friendly Images Plugins automatically adds alt and title attribute to all the images on your site making it relevant to the posts so that people can find them and visit on your blog.

Security

Akismet

Spam is something we all bloggers fight every day, this blog alone has got over one hundred thousand spam comments this year, but thanks to Akismet, I didn’t have to worry about it, it works really well in detecting and deleting spam comments on blogs.

Login LockDown

One best thing you can do to save your WordPress blog from hackers is to install this plugin, it records the IP address of every failed login attempt and blocks access to your blog after a certain number of failed trials, pretty useful in securing your blog fro brute force attack.

WP Re-Captcha

This plugin adds a Captcha to registration and login forms preventing bots and hackers from hijacking your account or spamming your email.

Sharing

Mashable Like Share Buttons (Premium)

Big & Flat Buttons are quite popular with blogger these days, you may have seen them on sites like Mashable and Upworthy, this plugin lets you choose a variety of templates that make sharing buttons look good on your site.

Digg Digg (Floating Buttons)

Digg Digg is the set of floating buttons you may have seen on several blogs, the buttons that stay on the left-hand side vertically till the end of the page. They also look good and increase shares of your pages.

Evergreen Post Tweeter

All your blog content gets lost in the archives as the new content in published, this plugin will make sure your evergreen content still gets exposed to your new followers on Twitter. It lets you tweet your blog posts automatically with so many options to select like tweet frequency, selected category, how old a content should be to get tweeted.

Subscription

WP MashSocial Widget

Get the buttons and links of your blog’s account on every social networking channel at one place. Use this nicely done widget in your sidebar. It’s an awesome plugin to increase subscriptions to your media channels.

Popup Domination (Premium)

If you are planning to use email marketing services like Aweber, MailChimp etc to capture emails of your visitors for your newsletter, this plugin can increase the opt-in rate by up to 700%. As you may have read that money is in the list.

Ninja Popups (Premium)

Ninja Popups is a great plugin to showcase your content by popping it out to the visitor. You can use this plugin for various purposes such as popping up Subscription box, Facebook Like box, a video or a special offer. It lets you do it all.

Others

Infinite-Scroll

Recently, the themes with infinite scrolling or endless scrolling have become popular, we are talking about the sites that keep showing posts from other pages when you scroll down and there is literally no end.

WP-Live Edit

Install this plugin and you will be able to edit your posts right from the published lives pages. This is a big time saves if your work requires you to do a lot of edits to the posts.

User Avatar

If you run a Multi-author site, this feature will enable your authors to upload custom avatars that will show their custom pics in the about section. This feature cuts down the step of asking your authors to sign up at gravatar.com to get an avatar.

WP-Optimize

It lets your clean your blog’s database by deleting useless entries, post revisions, spam comments, auto saves etc. An optimized database will help your blog load much faster, so it is much recommended,

W3 Total Cache

This plugin plays the most important role in optimizing a WordPress blog that loads faster. This amazing plugin improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

Making money online is not an easy task. However, it’s not Rocket Science either. I tried to make money online in 2004, I failed, then I tried to make money online in 2005, I failed again, I got failed again and again until I actually made my first dollar in 2007. It’s been almost 7 years I have been doing this and have tried different methods to monetize my blogs. I am listing the methods I have used.


 

Display Advertisements

Display Advertisements is the most oldest form of making money used by print media, like newspapers and magazines, the owners sell space on their newspapers and magazines. Same goes with websites, where advertisers can pay content creators/publishers for displaying ads on their sites.

There are different ways to decide how the money should be paid, these are CPM (Cost Per 1000 Impressions), CPC (Cost Per Click) and CPA (Cost Per Action) and then there would be many other variants that come and go, but the basic funda is to decide how you are going to change the advertisers. CPM: Advertisers pay a fix amount for every 1000 impressions that ad banners make on the site.

So, if you decide to charge $1 CPM and your site gets 100k Pageviews per month, you will get paid $100. CPC: Advertisers pay for every click generated on their ads. If doesn’t matter how many impressions does the ad get. CPA: Advertisers pay for every completed action done by the visitor of the website. Like downloading and installing a software, signing up a form etc. Surely tracking of ads and counting how many impressions or clicks has the ad generated is quite a tough job, there are services that handle all this and take a cut. Listing few of the services below.

Google Adsense

A publisher service by Google, it is the most popular program to make money online. You just need to put their code on your site/blog, and ads will show according to your sites/blog’s content. It’s probably the most effective method to make money online if your site /blog have a great amount of traffic.

Chitika

Chitika is an ad network that can be used if you still have ad spots left after using 3 Google Adsense Ad slots on your site. Chitika has a good number of advertisers plus is also shows ads from Yahoo Publisher Network, which makes sure that you get paid for every pageviews on your blog. Read our review of Chitika.

Bidvertiser

Another great program for bloggers and webmasters. The best thing I like about it is, It has the lowest payout of $10. Unlike Google Adsense, Bidvertiser pays you in PayPal, which means no waiting for checks, (Google still  pays via checks in many countries). This program could be used even If you are using any other ad network.

NeverBlueAds

It’s a very nice CPA program. The Approval system is little tough but you get to make a lot of money if your site/blog has a lot of traffic. Please remember that All the Pay Per Click Programs will go great if your site/blog has a great amount of traffic. So try getting more visitors to your site/blog.

Write Paid Reviews

Writing paid reviews works well for many websites/ blog. If you create interesting content on a particular topic, you might find few products in that niche. The owners of those products would be willing to remunerate you for reviewing their products on your site. As you already have an audience who likes that particular topic, the product will get exposed to more potential customers.

Managing all this is not as hectic as managing the advertising, so, easily create an ‘advertise page’ on your site and talking about your audience reach and benefits to buy a review on your site. There are services that handle all this for big companies and might reach your after looking at your ‘advertise page’.

You can also find different products in your niche and contact the companies directly asking them if they would like to buy a review.

Promote Products as an Affiliate

Promoting affiliates means promoting the same products in your niche, but not for a fixed amount of money and not for a paid review either. You promote these products and take a percentage of every sale generated through your site.

The products could be digital or physical, you will find almost every product has an affiliate program which you can join and promote the product as an affiliate. You can find and go to the website of products and look for affiliate page, which is usually found in the footer area of the website.

The other way to earn commission from product sales is by becoming an affiliate, for the eCommerce sites where the products are being sold. Amazon.com is one such site which sales products in almost every category, ranging from electronics to apparels to diapers to uranium (yes uranium). Amazing commissions usually range between 1% to 4%.

Sell Your Own Products

It’s same life affiliate marketing where you will be promoting products on your blog, the difference is, the products here will be your own. Selling your own products is the most profitable model for a blog.

In selling 1 $100 affiliated product you get just $1 to $4 dollar as your commission, but if the product is your own, you get all of the $100. Building your own product surely cost some money, thousand of dollars in some cases, but you have to decide whether there is a need of a product in your niche that can be created and people will buy it.

The digital products are way easy to create and deliver, with the help of technology, whereas physical products require huge investment in building, storing and delivering it to the customers.

So, if your site is about electronics, you may want to stick to affiliate model, if it’s a crafts blog, you may create your own crafts and give an option to your readers to buy them. If your niche is health or food or anything where people would actually pay for learning something, you can create an eBook and sell it on your blog.

Indirect Methods

Apart from the four methods I have mentioned above, there are many other ways to make money from your blog where you use your blog as a medium to find audience, and promote your other business/ art.

Public Speaking

People really love to listen to people who know what they talk about and are open to share their knowledge with others, you will find public speaking events on any topic, if you think your niche has an audience who would want to you share your knowledge, you can do public speaking and get paid for it.

Just create a page where you offer public speaking and give people an option to contact you for the same, mention your charges whoever contacts you, but make sure you take the effort of reaching out the event organizers to offer public speaking.

Workshops/Conferences

This is same as public speaking, you can create your own workshops or organize conferences and charge a small fee from people who would join it. Though, this requires a lot of credibility in the market, and it would be better if you can find few more people who would be interested in joining you as a speaker so that you can design your conferences in a nice format.

You can also record your workshops or conferences and sell them on your site as a product or give it away for free to make a list of people who would be your potential attendees for the next event.

Offer Services

You can use your blog as a promotional tool to offer your services like one on one consultation, work closely with small businesses to achieve a goal. Offer design, SEO or writing services. Just what kind of service can be offered to your readers.