So why choose WordPress?

You may have heard that Google gives priority to these websites.

There's strong evidence that WordPress blogs get better search rankings than other sites.

WordPress Blogging

What is so special about WordPress?

WordPress gives you a plethora of themes, theme resources, and the ability to use images, plugins, and various blog designs and layouts.

Why WordPress instead of Blogger?

Unfortunately, there is one MAJOR drawback, you don't own the website. At any time your blog can be deleted without any advanced warning.

Lots of work and effort poured into your websites is not what you want to lose.

Unfortunately, Blogger.com reserves the right to kick you off.

You should never put your business and hours and hours of your work into a website you do not own and cannot control.

Features and Benefits of WordPress

WordPress websites also have some very positive features like themes, non-compiling changes to the website, and the ability to utilize plugins.

The most positive factor in the WordPress utility is that you do not need to know any programming language.

WordPress has the potential to be the perfect tool for your business to generate an average level of traffic to a central website.

The relative advantages are:

1. You don't have to know how to program at all.

2. WordPress automatically connects and configures with MySQL with virtually no effort.

3. WordPress allows for categories.

4. WordPress allows for customization of the sidebar.

5. WordPress allows for basic blogging posts.

6. WordPress allows archiving for posts.

7)WordPress allows for an "about" page.

WordPress Templates & Themes

Themes generally describe the "skin" of the website.

Themes are downloaded and put into the "themes" folder on your website.

These are the default themes that are provided with WordPress. You can do customized themes

Here are a few examples from these general categories showing plugins that serve each purpose.

Administration Plugins - These plugins help you administer your website more effectively.

These include spell check, crawl page generation for posts, and a host of other capabilities.

Business and Monetizing Plugins - These plugins can build a shopping cart, sell items, and create surveys that give you financial credit.

Design, Layout, and Styles - These plugins include customizable post listings, auto-archiving, recent comments, most recent updates showcased on the website, and recent posts.

Graphics, Video, and Sound - Allow multimedia content to play, and user audio online.

Odds and Ends (Miscellaneous) - These plugins include financial information, weather, geo-mapping data, user forums, and date and time information.

Links - These plugins include Blog links, a link checker, Google Pics, Incoming Links, and a random linking system.

Outside Information - These plugins import external data from outside the WordPress website.

Posts - These allow many other types of posts.

Why Plugins?

A plugin is essentially a small program that will give your blog an additional function that is not included in WordPress.

Plugins are very important. You need to understand that monetizing the blog is critical.

Plugins function to increase interest in your pages and provide extended functionality.

With the right site-building strategies, niche affiliate websites can offer some of the most reliable income for internet marketers.

WordPress Saves The Day

With a bit of patience and reading, anyone who can write an email can learn to build affiliate sites with WordPress.

WordPress is an open-source content management system.

Open source means that it is free to use and modify.

The basic principle behind a content management system is to allow someone without a lot of technical or programming knowledge to run or even completely build a website.

WordPress was designed and is still known as a content management system and website creation tool for bloggers, but many creative internet marketers use it to build sites that look nothing like a blog.

The best way to use WordPress is as a self-hosted installation to take advantage of everything that WordPress has to offer.

How to Use Self-Hosted WordPress

Installing self-hosted WordPress is simple, but it requires having all the necessary components to make it all work.

First, a domain name or possibly even a sub-domain is needed.

Then, a website hosting account is connected with the domain.

With most web hosts, there will be a "Quick Install" link within the administration area of the hosting account that is otherwise known as Cpanel.

By following the provided instructions, WordPress is automatically installed and ready to run on the domain name.

WordPress Themes

The first thing to do on a new WordPress site is to install a theme by searching available themes in the WordPress directory.

A theme controls the visual look, style, and layout of the entire website.

Many different themes are available to fit a wide variety of types of websites and can be used "as is", but there are also other themes that allow for easy design customization for marketers who want their site to have a unique look.

WordPress Plugins

To add extra capabilities to WordPress, simply install plugins by searching for features that are desired.

There are tens of thousands of plugins available that can do almost anything needed on most WordPress sites.

The extra features that plugins can add can vary quite a bit.

There are also plugins to help optimize pages on a WordPress site to improve search engine rankings.

The cost, if any, for these themes and plugins varies.

Generally, they are free or very reasonably priced, although some of them can be expensive.

However, it is possible to make a professional site with lots of good plugins and a nice theme for free.

Building a WordPress Site

Once this point is reached, the site is ready to be built. There are two main ways to add content to a WordPress site, by creating a "post" or a "page".

A WordPress "post" is typically used by bloggers to categorize content and also to have it indexed in a time-based archive.

A WordPress "page" is typically one of the main, permanent pages on a WordPress blog.

Using WordPress Pages Effectively

The most confusing thing to beginning WordPress users about creating a site that consists of nothing but WordPress "pages" is how to show those pages on the site.

By using the WordPress menu system, two different menus can be created for the site.

The first menu is for the top of the site, which should link to the primary pages of the site.

The second menu gets inserted as a custom menu widget, which goes in the sidebar of the site and generally links to secondary pages on the site.