Your First Week Of Blogging – 10 Actions To Setup Your New Blog Like a Professional Blogger

Hi dear reader and I hope you are doing great today.

I am so glad to tell you that, I am starting a series called 4 Weeks To Build a Super Cool Blog . The very purpose of this series is to help you to quickly create and establish your new blog like a professional blogger in just 4 weeks Isn’t it incredible?

his article is first installment of the series. We will have 3 more installments in coming 3 weeks. And after 4 weeks, let’s meet again to check how is your new blog is doing. Let’s run a health-check.

It’s so easy for me for starting this new blog since  I already became aware of fundamentals of blogging and thanks to my two years spent on my personal development blog, which helped me to understand blogging to to great extent.

So, without much delay, let’s dive into the series straightaway. In the first week of your blogging, you should be able to setup your blog, give it a design and make yourself ready to start writing cool stuff. First week of blogging is crucial because, you should set up things in right way, else you may end up doing nothing but searching for the stuff all over the internet

I assume that you have purchased your domain name and got a decent hosting plan. So let’s quickly setup few fundamental things on your blog. I promise, this series will be fun. Also, I am going to share few images (which are hand-crafted by me for this series) which you can download and keep it for your reference.

So, here are the steps and actions you need to take during your first week of blogging These are the steps I just implemented for my new blog.

Install WordPress

There you go. WordPress is leading content management system and it’s the first and foremost tool you need for your blogging journey. Just go to your admin area of cpanel and install latest wordpress version. It’s a pretty fast installation procedure. Once you have installed wordpress, you can login to your wordpress admin area and get yourself familiar with the various settings and options available there. If you are using the Linux hosting, you need to delete the index.html (or rename it to something else) because wordpress installation will create an index.php in your www folder. You also need to make your htaccess file writable , else you won’t be able to do changes to settings in your wordpress admin panel.

Download FTP hosting software Filezilla

You need filezilla. It’s a tool for copying your local files to server. Or even for changing file or folder permissions on server, it comes handy.

Design a custom header for your blog

This is one of the overlooked step which is skipped or ignored by most of the new bloggers. Let me tell you, why having a custom header image for your blog is so important.  Custom header image makes your blog standout from all other blogs out there. A unique header acts as a brand for your blog. It doesn’t matter how simple it is, your must have a custom blog header. Just head over to tools such as Photoshop or Gimp, create a header for your blog. If you have issues in creating a header image for your blog, just contact me. I will design a header for you absolutely free. I am a design addict

Install a nice looking theme for your blog

Once you have your header ready, it’s time to install a wordpress theme on your blog. A theme is collection of php (code) and css (styling) files. There are thousands of free themes available for you to choose from. However, twenty ten and twenty eleven themes are great to start with. In fact, with some customization, you can build your complete blog using free themes. However, if you don’t know how to tweak the free themes ( I will teach you later anyways in this blog), you can go for premium themes such as Thesis or Genesis.

Install plugins

Again, you need few life saving plugins that make your blogging life easy. Having said this, don’t overload your blog by installing every plugin out there. Just pick up few  fundamental plugins and keep the blog light. Get following plugins from wordpress.org without any delay.

Google XML Sitemaps, Ultimate Google Analytics, Anti Captcha, All in one SEO Pack, Advertisement Management, Google Privacy Policy, Facebook like and send button, TweetMeme Button. I know that’s lots of hyperlinks.

Create a mailing list

I want you to build your email list from day # 1.It’s important  for your blog to have bunch of really interested audience. Let the people opt-in and become email subscribers. Go to Mailchimp or Feedburner and start building your email list. If you want to know how to build a list in mailchimp, checkout their guides. They are really cool.

Design an Email opt-in form

Again, very important stuff here. Create an email opt-in form. You don’t need to create it from scratch.  Just get them from Derek Helpren for free. They are totally awesome

Write your first post and hit publish

Now, write an amazing article about anything you like. Be interesting. Tell a story and engage the readers. Proofread and hit the publish button. Your article is ready to be famous

Submit your blog to search engines

Submit your new blog to big daddy Google and of course to Yahoo and bing. Let them index your site. Confirm whether they have indexed your blog or not by typing site:yoursitename in google.com and similarly use respective commands in Yahoo and bing.

Track your blog in Google Analytics

I know, I missed to tell you how to install a Google Analytics code to your blog. But I suggested to install Google Analytics plugin which does this job decently. Now, just login to google analytics and observe the statistics about how is your new site doing?

So that’s all from my side for your first week of blogging. It might seem lot’s of work but it’s not. Because you have everything ready for you. You just need to implement. Any doubts or questions, ask in the comment section. I will reply you even if I am falling from roof

Good Luck and start taking action now.

As a bonus, I created a picture for you which can be downloaded and saved for your reference. You can refer it a quick guide and do your activities. Here it is (Right click and save as). I hate yellow color but this one is looking surprisingly cool

So let’s meet next week with more super cool tips to advance your blog. We will talk about more interesting and advanced topics on how to take your blog to next level.

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