wordpresshubs: How to Start A Blog in 15 Minutes – Must Read Blogging Guide for Newbies

samedi 12 novembre 2016

How to Start A Blog in 15 Minutes – Must Read Blogging Guide for Newbies

alt="How to Start A Blog in 15 Minutes – Must Read Blogging Guide for Newbies" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/how-to-start-a-blog-in-15-minutes-500x233_c.jpg" />

Starting a blog is not as difficult as it seems.

Sure, it could get very tricky in the later stage; but generally speaking, blogging is do-able for everyone who has a computer with an Internet connection.

And guess what, I am going to teach you how to get a blog up and running in the next 15 minutes. The following steps are exactly how I’ve built WHSR and most of my other blogs.

TL;DR / Table of Content

In this (very) long post, we will discuss about both the easy part and the advance details in blogging.

The Basics – Get a domain and web host, install WordPress, and publishing your first post
Advance details – How WordPress works, the right plugins to use, and developing a beautiful blog yourself

To newbies – this is the “go-to article” if you want a blog but do not know where to start. Feel free to leave a question at the comment section if you have one – I would be more than happy to help! ;)

Note: We have plenty to cover in one post so I did not talk much on the marketing (SEO, SMM, content marketing, etc) and content creation in this post. Experienced bloggers or newbies who already have a blog should also href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blogging-with-whsr/">check out Blogging with WHSR – where we feature all the best blogging and marketing strategies.

So… shall we? We gotta get started before your coffee turn cold.

Let’s rock’n’roll.

Step #1: Get a domain name and web hosting (easy as pie!)

class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-9251" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/how-to-start-a-blog-in-15-minutes.jpg" alt="how to start a blog in 15 minutes" width="750" height="350" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/how-to-start-a-blog-in-15-minutes.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/how-to-start-a-blog-in-15-minutes-300x140.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />

There are two ways to host and operate your blog.

Host it on a web-based platform such as Blogger and WordPress.com; and,
Run it on a self-hosted platform (this means you will need to buy your own domain and web hosting service)

I have built a huge list of free blogging platforms back in 2009 but these days, Blogger.com, Tumblr, and WordPress.com are the three most popular ones. While free blogging platforms (! – what’s better than that, huh?) sound like a great option (!) at first, you might want to reconsider your options if you are serious about blogging.

Look around – Most pro-bloggers who make their living off their blogs host are hosted on their own hosting and domain, why? Gina discussed href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/web-hosting-guides/the-dangers-of-free-web-hosting/">some of the major pitfalls in free web (and blog) hosting in this article – if you want more details, that’d be the perfect post to chew on.

For now, we are going to focus on creating a blog in a self-hosted environment.

To start a self-hosted blog, you need two things:

A web hosting account (to store your blog content); and,
A domain name (the address of your blog on the WWW).

Getting a domain name

A domain name like the address of your blog. It is not something physical that you can touch or see; but merely a string of characters that give your website an identity.

To own a domain name, you need to register the domain with one of the registrars. href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/go/godaddy" target="_blank">GoDaddy and href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/go/namecheap" target="_blank">Name Cheap are the two domain registrars that I have been using since the beginning of time. GoDaddy is the world’s biggest domain registrar (managing more than 57,000,000 domains) and has a very user-friendly admin area; Name Cheap, on the other hand, is slightly cheaper and offer free domain privacy for first year.

Both registrars are good and recommended – just pick one that you are most comfortable with.

Picking a hosting for your blog

Web hosting is the place where you store your blog content – texts, images, videos, and so on.

My hosting recommendation for beginners is to always start small with a shared web host. iPage, BlueHost, A2 Hosting, InMotion Hosting, and SiteGround are some of the popular options.

I will use iPage as our example in this post. I picked iPage mainly because the company has a good business track record (you don’t want to host with a fly-by-night hosting operation) and is very affordable (with WHSR’s special discount – iPage is priced at .89/mo at time of writing, which is 2~3x cheaper than the rest).

To learn more, href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/hosting-review/ipage/" target="_blank">check out the detail review we have on iPage hosting here.

The following diagrams will walk you through the ordering process at iPage – just in case you got stuck in any of those steps.

1. Ordering iPage hosting from homepage

id="attachment_12091" style="width: 760px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">class="border wp-image-12091 size-full" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-blogging-tip.jpg" alt="ipage - blogging tip" width="750" height="469" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-blogging-tip.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-blogging-tip-300x188.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />class="wp-caption-text">To get started, visit href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/go/ipage">http://www.ipage.com and click ‘Sign Up Now’ at homepage. The current price for iPage is .25/mo – which is one of the cheapest among all.

2. Insert your domain

id="attachment_12093" style="width: 760px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">class="border wp-image-12093 size-full" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-blogging-tip-add-domain.jpg" alt="ipage - blogging tip - add domain" width="750" height="275" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-blogging-tip-add-domain.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-blogging-tip-add-domain-300x110.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />class="wp-caption-text">Shortly after you click “Sign Up Now”, you’ll be directed to “Step 1: Select Domain” page. Select “Register a new domain” if you are registering a new domain, which is free for all iPage first time customers, or insert your existing domain name if you already have one. For those who are registering a new domain for the first time, you will need to come out with a unique name that has not been registered by other bloggers. We use whsrbloggingguide.com in this example and just in case you are unsure, check out my href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/web-hosting-guides/domain-tips/">Domain Name Tips here.

3. Personal info and additional hosting features

id="attachment_12094" style="width: 760px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">class="border wp-image-12094 size-full" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-blogging-tips-credit-card-info.jpg" alt="Next, you will need to key in your personal info (name, address, email, etc), your credit card info, and the subscription period (2 years by default). As you scroll down, you will see a number of additional features to be added to your account. Some of these are actually unnecessary or can be done free (for example you can always use WP Total Cache to boost your WP performance) so my suggestion is to uncheck all. " width="750" height="950" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-blogging-tips-credit-card-info.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-blogging-tips-credit-card-info-237x300.jpg 237w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />class="wp-caption-text">Next, you will need to key in your personal info (name, address, email, etc), your credit card info, and the subscription period (2 years by default). As you scroll down, you will see a number of additional features to be added to your account. Some of these are actually unnecessary or can be done free (for example you can always use WP Total Cache to boost your WP performance) so my suggestion is to uncheck all. When you are done, just click “Check Out”. If your payment is successful, your iPage hosting account should be ready instantly.

As soon as you click “Check Out”, iPage will charge the payment from your credit card. Under normal situation, if your payment is successful, your hosting account will be ready instantly. You will receive a welcome email with all the login details to your account. And you are set to login to your iPage account for the first time to setup your blog.

Step #2: Install WordPress

As mentioned, your iPage account should be ready as soon as you made your payment. Now it’s time to login to your admin area. The admin area is like the cork pit of an aeroplane, where you can control all the aspects of your hosting account.

There are two ways to install WordPress – the platform where you are going to setup your blog. One, you can do it manually by downloading the files from WordPress.org and uploading them to your web host; or, use the auto-installation app provided by iPage. Both methods are fairly simple but for newbies – I don’t see why you should do this manually.

WordPress Manual Installation

Official step-by-step guide can be found title="WordPress installation" href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress" target="_blank">here. In a quick glance, here are the steps you need to do:

Download and unzip the WordPress package to your local PC.
Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.
Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.
Open wp-config.php in text editor (notepad) and fill in your database details.
Place the WordPress files in the desired location on your web server.
Run the WordPress installation script by accessing wp-admin/install.php in your web browser. If you installed WordPress in the root directory, you should visit: http://example.com/wp-admin/install.php; if you installed WordPress in its own subdirectory called blog, for example, you should visit: http://example.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php
And you are done.

Auto WordPress Installation

Okay, I suppose you just skipped the manual installation guide and come to this part. Wise choice ;)

The easiest way to setup WordPress in your iPage hosting account is to “auto” install it using iPage’s built-in app. With the support of iPage’s auto installation service, the process is pretty much idiot-proof and can be done in just a few mouse clicks. You can refer to the following diagrams for additional details.

id="attachment_12095" style="width: 760px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">class="border wp-image-12095 size-full" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-install-wordpress.jpg" alt="This is how your iPage admin area looks like. Under "Website" section, there's a WordPress icon in second row, click on it to begin. " width="750" height="453" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-install-wordpress.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-install-wordpress-300x181.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />class="wp-caption-text">This is how your iPage admin area looks like. Under “Website” section, there’s a WordPress icon in second row, click on it to begin.

id="attachment_12096" style="width: 760px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">class="border wp-image-12096 size-full" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-mojo-lace.jpg" alt="iPage one-click installation is now supported by Mojo Market Place - which could be helpful should you wish to purchase a premium them and get it installed to your WordPress. But for our example, we will just focus on installing a free version of WordPress. " width="750" height="468" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-mojo-lace.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipage-mojo-lace-300x187.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />class="wp-caption-text">iPage one-click installation is now supported by Mojo Market Place – which could be helpful should you wish to purchase a premium them and get it installed to your WordPress. But for our example, we will just focus on installing a free version of WordPress. Simply click “Install” once you come to this screen and the following steps are pretty straight forward (select the domain to install your WordPress, insert your email address and click finish – that’s it!).

Note that things might look different if you are doing this (auto-installation) on other web host but the process is generally the same. As long as you are sticking with an auto-installation app like Fantastico or Softaculous or Simple Scripts, the process shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes.

Step #3: Write your first blogpost

Once you have got your WordPress system installed, you will be given an URL to login to your WordPress administrator page.

In most cases, the URL will be something like this (depends on the folder you installed the WordPress):

http://www.exampleblog.com/wp-admin

Tip: It’s a good idea to bookmark this wp-admin login URL since you will be coming in here very often.

More tip: It would be even better if you change this login URL to something else (ie. exampleblog.com/login-page) for security purposes.

Now, go to this admin URL and login with your preset username and password (the one that you key in when you installed your WordPress earlier); and there, you are now in the WordPress administrator area. This will be the part of the blog where only you as the administrator can access.

Here’s a quick view on how WordPress (version 4.1 Dinah) dashboard looks like. Pretty cool, isn’t it? And we are ready to publish our very first post.

id="attachment_12097" style="width: 760px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">class="border wp-image-12097 size-full" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/wordpress-4.1.jpg" alt="WordPress 4.1 Dinah" width="750" height="381" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/wordpress-4.1.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/wordpress-4.1-300x152.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />class="wp-caption-text">WordPress 4.1 Dinah – Click “Add New” to start posting on your blog. We currently have more than 700 posts published on WHSR – so there’s a lot of catch up to do for you! :)

To write and publish a new post, simple navigate to the left sidebar, click ‘Posts’ > ‘Add New’ and you’ll be directed to the writing screen. Click ‘Preview’ to preview how things look like on the front-end (what your readers will see), click ‘Publish’ once the post is complete.

Hola! You now have your first blog post published.

More than 15 minutes – Blog designs & Plugins

Okay, I knew that I promised that this post will not get longer than 15 minutes. But there’s more I’d like to share. You have your blog setup and first post published. What now? Sooner or later, you will need to understand a little more about how WordPress system works and figure out you can finetune and add more functionalities to your blog.

So before I end this post, I will dig a little deeper into the details – which people normally don’t cover in such “start a blog” guide. If you are feeling confused and couldn’t digest everything in one read, just bookmark this page and come back later.

How WordPress themes work & where to find beautiful themes?

class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-7891" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/wordpress-general-outline.jpg" alt="wordpress general outline - theme, core system, and plugins" width="750" height="375" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/wordpress-general-outline.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/wordpress-general-outline-300x150.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />

Generally speaking, a WordPress blog is supported by 3 core elements:

WordPress Core – Bunch of PHP, JS, CSS, etc files that build up the core system of your blog.
WordPress Plugins – Addon files and functions that give additional features for your blog.
WordPress Theme – The design of your blog.

The beauty of WordPress is that your blog design, known as theme, is separated from the backend system.

A WordPress theme is merely a group of different files (normally in .php, .css, .js, and image formats) that control the appearance of a WordPress blog. Although some advance WordPress themes nowadays can be used to control more than just the outlook part of your blog; we will leave them on the side for easy discussion.

Your next question might be “Do I need to create this WordPress theme myself?”.

Well, yes, if you want to. But it’s not a must.

Truth is, most individual WordPress bloggers do not create their own blog themes. Rather, what most of us do is to pick a ready-made theme (or a raw theme) and customize it according to our needs. There are endless numbers of beautiful (and useful) WordPress themes around the Internet – a simple search on Google will lead you to millions. If this is your first time establishing a WordPress blog, my suggestion to you is to start with a ready-made theme and tweak it along the way.

Here are some theme-related resources to get you started.

style="line-height: 1.5em;">Official WordPress Theme Directory

href="http://wordpress.org/themes/" target="_blank">class="border aligncenter wp-image-7892 size-full" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Wordpress-theme-directory.jpg" alt="Wordpress theme directory" width="750" height="458" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Wordpress-theme-directory.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Wordpress-theme-directory-300x183.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />

This is where you can get all the free WordPress themes. Themes listed in this directory follow very tight standards provided by the WordPress developers, hence in my opinion this is the best place to get free, bug-less theme designs. However, as this is a free directory, you might not get the kind of professional designs and comprehensive theme functions you wish.

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style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="WordPress Theme Directory" href="http://wordpress.org/themes/" target="_blank">WordPress Theme Directory

More Free WordPress Themes Directories

Here are some other good places where you can get free WordPress themes.

title="WP Themes 360" href="http://www.wpthemes360.com/" target="_blank">WP Themes 360 – sort of outdated but huge collections of different design styles.
title="Web 2 Feel" href="http://www.web2feel.com/" target="_blank">Web 2 Feel – owned by Jinson Abraham, lots of free WordPress goodies.
title="New WP Themes" href="http://newwpthemes.com/" target="_blank">New WP Themes – 790 free modern WordPress themes!
title="WP Themes Dir" href="http://wpthemesdir.com/" target="_blank">WP Themes Dir – Freshly updated (and pretty organized) WordPress theme directory.

Paid Themes Directory

When it comes to paid themes directories, title="Visit Elegant Themes online" href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/go/elegant" target="_blank">Elegant Themes is definitely my favorite. In fact, I have been an Elegant club member from the very beginning – I love Nick’s codes and design, the club membership is very affordable – setup fees plus /year for 89 professional themes (the numbers are always increasing as they keep adding in new themes; also if you compare this with Woo and Mojo, Elegant’s price is ridiculously cheap), and most importantly, the theme at Elegant are always updated according to latest design trends and security measures.

For your reference, here are some of the WordPress themes available on Elegant. You can go check out title="Elegant Themes Directory" href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/go/elegantgallery" target="_blank">all their theme designs in this directory.

href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/go/elegantgallery" target="_blank">class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-7893" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/elegant-themes-samples.jpg" alt="elegant themes samples" width="750" height="450" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/elegant-themes-samples.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/elegant-themes-samples-300x180.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />

More paid WordPress theme directories

title="Woo Themes" href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/go/woo" target="_blank">Woo Themes – The pioneer in premium themes market. Standard club subscription starts at /mo after 9 setup fees. Woo Themes is not cheap but it has one of the best WordPress e-commerce tools (Woo Commerce) – a must see if you are setting up an e-shop using WordPress.
title="My Theme Shop" href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/go/mythemeshop" target="_blank">My Theme Shop – Limited themes but some of the designs are quite good.
title="Mojo Themes" href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/go/mojo" target="_blank">Mojo Themes – Another giant player in themes market, offers a wide range of different templates.

Essential Plugins for WordPress newbies

One of the big reasons why WordPress is so widely accepted is the ease of use of plugins. Plugins are additional functions that you can add to your blog, such as site backup or social media share buttons. Plugins not only make your life easier, they can enhance your blog and protect your work. Contrary to popular belief, a well-designed plugin does not slow down your blog. There are some plugins that you must at least know about and have.

Here are my recommendations.

For Security & Spam Protection

style="text-align: center;">href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/" target="_blank">class="aligncenter" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/akismet.jpg" alt="akismet" width="750" height="339" />

For security and spam protection, Akismet, Vault Press, Limit Login Attempt, and Better WP Security are the four plugins that I recommend.

Akismet is one of the oldest plugins that comes along with your WordPress by default. This plugin helps check all your comments against its service to see if they are spam. It collects all the spam and lets you review it under your blog’s ‘comments’ admin screen. Vault Press, on the other hand, is a real-time backup and security scanning service designed by Automattic, the company that operates more than 24 million sites on WordPress. This plugin gives you the functionality to backup and synchronize all your posts, comments, media files, revisions and dashboard settings on the servers. WordPress allows unlimited login attempts by default. With the Limit Login Attempt plugin, you can limit the number of login attempts through normal login and using auto cookies. After a specific number of retries, it blocks an Internet address from making further attempts to log in, making it difficult for attackers.

Last but not least, Better WP Security is the one plugin that combines all major WordPress security features. The main function of this plugin is to tighten a blog’s security without having to worry about conflicting features or missing anything on your site or blog.

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Plugin downloads and more details: href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/" target="_blank">Akismet, href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/vaultpress/" target="_blank">Vault Press, href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/limit-login-attempts/" target="_blank">Limit Login Attempts, title="Better WP Security" href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/better-wp-security/" target="_blank">Better WP Security.

For Search Engine Optimization

href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/" target="_blank">class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6905" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/google-xml-sitemap.jpg" alt="google xml sitemap" width="750" height="331" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/google-xml-sitemap.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/google-xml-sitemap-300x132.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />

Although WordPress is a SEO-friendly blogging platform, there is quite a lot more to do to improve your basic on site SEO scores with the help of plugins. WordPress SEO developed by Yoast and All In One SEO Pack developed by Michael Torbert for examples, could be very good additions in your plugin list. Furthermore, you might also want to check out Google XML Sitemaps as this plugin comes very handy in helping search engines to index your blog better (via generating a XML sitemap).

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class="icon-file-text-alt" style="color:inherit !important;">
Plugin downloads and more details: style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/" target="_blank">WordPress SEO, style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/">All In One SEO Pack, style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/" target="_blank">Google XML Sitemaps

For Blog Performance

href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/cloudflare/" target="_blank">class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-7896" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/cloud-flare-plugin.jpg" alt="cloud flare plugin" width="750" height="336" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/cloud-flare-plugin.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/cloud-flare-plugin-300x134.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />

When it comes to blog performance optimization, W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular options. It improves the user experience on your site by increasing the server performance, reducing the time taken to download and increases page loading speed. W3 Total Cache is recommended by many top web hosts and used by quite a number of big blogs. The two other plugins that come close in this category are Cloud Flare and WP Super Cache. Cloud Flare is a free plugin provided by the CDN company, Cloud Flare; while WP Super Cache is developed by href="http://profiles.wordpress.org/donncha/">Donncha O Caoimh and Automattic (the company that developed and operates WordPress now).

class="meteor-icon" style="font-size:130% !important;">
class="icon-file-text-alt" style="color:inherit !important;">
Plugin downloads and more details: style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/" target="_blank">W3 Total Cache, style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/cloudflare/" target="_blank">Cloud Flare, style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/" target="_blank">WP Super Cache.

For Social Media Bookmarking

href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/flare/" target="_blank">class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6906" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/flare.jpg" alt="flare" width="750" height="360" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/flare.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/flare-300x144.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />

Once you have your blog live and are writing compelling content, you are going to need an easy way for visitors to share your content. In fact, this needs to be part of your marketing strategy to gain more traffic. The best option is a social media plugin, which will automatically position small icons above, below or beside your content so that people can share it. There are href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/wordpress-blog/30-free-social-media-plugins-for-your-wordpress-blog/" target="_blank">tons of good plugins for social media sharing but ~~Flare and Share This~~ Easy Social Share and Shareholic are my two favorites. For the sake of variety, I have added a few more options to the list – go check them out and pick one that suits your style the best.

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Plugin downloads and more details: style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/flare/" target="_blank">Flare, style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/floating-social-bar/" target="_blank">Floating Social Bar, style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/share-this/" target="_blank">Share This, style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/sociable/" target="_blank">Sociable.

For Blog Management

href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/editorial-calendar/">class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-7898" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/editorial-calender.jpg" alt="editorial calender" width="750" height="328" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/editorial-calender.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/editorial-calender-300x131.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />

There are tons of productivity tools available to keep bloggers organized – both free and paid – but in case you are just starting your own blog, I suggest you to just stick with the free ones.

If you are blogging alongside multiple writers, Editorial Calendar could be your life saver. It’s a handy plugin that helps you oversee and manage your blog efficiently. The calendar-view of this tool provides a clear overview of your blog – you’ll get to see clearly when your posts are going to be published; as well as to reschedule, edit, and delete posts easily. Another blog management plugin you might want to check out is Edit Flow. This plugin lets you collaborate with your editorial team that works inside WordPress. You can customize this plugin to your needs with a calendar, statuses, comments, Metadata, notifications and many other details to help you manage everything efficiently.

Is that all?

Well, yes – for this post. Getting a web host and installing WordPress is just a start.

Now that your blog is ready, what comes next are the more challenging parts – content creation, marketing, SEO, social media marketing, blog designs, and so on. Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t be – because we are here for you. title="All the best blogging guide in one page" href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blogging-with-whsr/">Check out our expert blogging guide in “Blogging with WHSR” section, where we share our A-to-Z tips and strategies in starting and managing a successful blog. Have fun, and I see you on the playing field!

Page 14 – Web Hosting Secret Revealed

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