Money Online, The First Steps – Establishing Net Presence (3)

So, I owned a domain name and set up an account with HostMonster. Next thing to do was to get content up in the air. I have previously decided that I would rather have a blog than a web-site. A blog would better serve the purpose of journaling my progress and sharing with others interested in Internet marketing and making money online. 

What I like about this project is that I found myself being committed to it. I have already invested my money in this, and I’m not going to quit until I see results. 
I don’t know anything about html and I was pretty clueless about what to do next. My blog hopping showed many bloggers were using WordPress. Visiting WordPress’ website revealed that it is a publishing platform that you can install on your hosting and start publishing with the same ease as a hosted blog platform (e.g. Blogger.com), but with much greater flexibility of features and design. I discovered a huge community of people developing plugins and themes, and this is the support I thought I am going to need. Great!

Part of my strategy is to see what others do well and do the same, so, WordPress was going to be my platform.

When looking for a hosting provider, see if they have Fantastico among their features. I know that many do, and HostMonster is no exception. Fantastico is an auto-installer that can install many applications for you on the server. WordPress is one of the applications on the list and it takes under a minute to install.

At the time I didn’t know about this and was installing WordPress manually. This is not very difficult, but you have to create a database on your hosting, use an FTP client to upload the files, modify a .php file (I was really freaked out at this point), run the installation script and hope for the best. Each step took me about 10 minutes to figure out, so I was beating myself on the head with a frying pan when I found out (and tried) Fantastico.

Anyway, after 40 minutes of messing about with databases and php files (who would have thought) I was the proud owner of my own self-hosted blog.

Now I was out there.
Despite having only the default WordPress theme and the “Hello World!” example post, it felt good. It was like walking into a house you just bought, when it is a mess and smells really bad, but you feel on top of the world, because you know you this is now yours.
It felt really good.

- Alex

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