Setting up and Marketing a New Blog Part 2 – WordPress Nitty Gritty

This post assumes a working knowledge of the installed WordPress software, Feedburner, and Google Analytics.  Please let me know if a more details on any of these services would be helpful.

First – for those following this series, I have had a change of plans.  After setting up the cooking blog described in Part 1, I decided to set up a running blog and then realized I had nowhere to post about the other things I find interesting.  I realized that a strategy of several  focused blogs was not going to work for me so I decided to combine all the personal blogs I set up into just one: http://fun.sherilarsen.com.  I am also combining my personal twitter stream in one account: @sherilarsen. 

Professional Sheri: http://sherilarsen.com and @shlarsen
Personal Sheri: http://fun.sherilarsen.com and @sherilarsen

Setting up WordPress on my self-hosted blogs is quite easy, as is importing and exporting posts.  Yesterday I created a sub-domain for fun.sherilarsen.com and installed WordPress using Fantastico in the administration area of my domain hosting service (AN Hosting).   It took about 5 minutes to set it up and install the software, but the site didn’t show up on the Web for a few hours.

The next step was to install some plugins:

• Askimet – this default plugin comes with WordPress software, you need a WordPress.com account in order to get an “API key”.
• One Click Plugin Updater – allows you to install any plugin by uploading or just linking to the zip file.  There’s a Firefox plugin too, but it’s not updated for the latest versions of Firefox.  Install this FIRST – it makes the rest of the plugin installation much faster.
• Postalicious – automatically creates a post of links you’ve saved to Delicious.  If you want to limit to those with a specific tag, don’t forget the upload the RSS.PHP file as described on the site.
• Google Xml Sitemaps – generated sitemap and created robots.txt
• WordPress Database Backup – backs up your WordPress installation and emails it to you on a regular schedule
• WordPress Reports – turned on reporting for Feedburner and Google Analytics, had it install the tracking code
• What Would Seth Godin Do – display a message to new visitors
• Twitter Tools – set up to post a tweet for new blog posts
• Delicious for WordPress – displays your latest bookmarks as a headlines feed
• Delicatessen – see who’s linking to your posts on Delicious
• Adsense-Deluxe – add Google advertisements – if you think you could/should monetize your blog
• No Self Pings – Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.
• Share This or Sociable – lets visitors share a page or post on various sites

Coming in Part 3 -Setting up Publicity and Statistics

Related posts:
Setting up and Marketing a New Blog Part 1 – Introduction