Setting Up Your Wordpress Blog To Earn Money

Blogs are one of the quickest and easiest ways to set up your website.

If you web hosting company is one of the many that give you the option of a "one click" installation of Wordpress then this is far and away the easiest way to get a basic Wordpress installation on your website. It will take care of the database that your Wordpress blog will use and will unzip all the files into the right place.

The only downside to using this method is that Wordpress regularly introduces updates, which means you may have a version that isn't quite the latest one. You may or may not be worried about this, although I would strongly suggest that you do keep your version of Wordpress as up to date as possible because the updates they released often deal with new security bugs.

The next thing to do once you've got the newest version of Wordpress installed on your website is to make some small changes that will have a big influence on making it as attractive as possible to the search engines.

This involves modifying some of the default Wordpress settings and also uploading what are known as "plugins" to improve the functionality of Wordpress.

Don't go mad adding lots of plugins. Keep to a short list like this:

• Akismet, a useful plugin that helps cut down comment spam on your blog
• All in one SEO pack, which will help you optimize your blog for the best search engine results
• Sociable, so that your blog readers can easily add your blog to a selection of social bookmarking sites
• Wordpress stats, which offer a quick overview of your most popular pages and the links your readers have clicked on, all easily accessible from your main Wordpress dashboard

The other thing to change is the "permalink" structure. You can select this from the Settings menu in Wordpress. Once you've chosen Permalinks, go down to the box called custom structure and type in:

/%postname%/

then save your changes.

This will alter the way your blog posts are named and makes them friendlier for the search engines to index.

Get more free information with my series of free videos that show you how to earn money with blogs. You'll soon be up and earning more money from your blog.