Many of you are familiar with the open-source WordPress blogging system. What you may not know is that WordPress is among the best choices of a blogging or content-management system for generating income. After installing WordPress, you have a set of pages on your site that are compliant with W3C standards, needing a few free plugins to extend and enhance the SEO capabilities, and accessibility of the core system. That is why WordPress is so powerful. It can be extended in various ways to make your website properties stand out among the competition.
This series of articles will show you specific techniques and procedures that will help you build a successful WordPress website. Once built, you will need to perform some serious keyword research, which is the cornerstone of building qualified traffic on your site. Our focus is optimizing WordPress for income creation. Most of the tools and resources you will need can be obtained for free on the web, or at WordPress.org. We will, however, also include several tools and services that charge a fee. These will be well worth it, but are not absolutely required to build successful income-generating websites.
The Myth Of The Five Minute Install
For those who have never installed WordPress, get ready for a surprise. In their documentation, they make it known that the install process is very simple, and is usually completed in about 5 minutes. OK, if you don’t count the time it takes to download the source to your computer, unzip it, and then upload it to your machine, I can see their claim. You also need to create a mySQL database to hold the posts and other material in your blog. The mySQL part is simple, and most hosting companies provide a tool called PHPmyAdmin that is used for this purpose. You will need to know the location, user-name, and password for the database to complete the installation. Here is a general outline:
1. Download WordPress source files from WordPress.
2. Unzip WordPress on your local machine.
3. Use FTP (Filezilla) to upload the WordPress source files to your hosting account.
4. Create an empty mySQL database.
5. Run the WordPress install by navigating to your site. The default index file will start the install.
6. Fill in the forms with the correct information when they appear.
7. Supply an admin password when prompted.
8. Log in and configure your new WordPress website/blog.
Not bad for such a potentially complicated system like WordPress. This process will indeed probably only take a few minutes, and once you get to step 5, 5 minutes will be more than enough time to complete the install.
So the myth, is really not a myth at all. WordPress is simple to install, and can be simple to maintain, given you have a basic knowledge of the internet and website development.
In our next article, we will discuss what you need to do when WordPress is installed, to get your income-generating machine up and running.
