Congratulations, you just set up a WordPress blog, now what? WordPress is pretty much a turn key platform but there are still a few things you need to tweak in order to unleash its full potential.

In this article, I will share with you 7 options that I like to set right after installing a WordPress blog. Obviously these settings will not fit every one but I think they are good base for a solid blog.

Deleting the Default Admin User

Security first, right? When setting up a WordPress blog, the system will automatically create an Admin user. Hackers sometimes hack their way into your blog through this Admin user (don’t ask me how). The solution is to this is simple: we just have to create a new user and delete Admin.

1. Log in to your WP admin panel.
2. Go to Users > Add New.
3. Create a new username. My advice is to NOT use your name for the username and to use a strong password with letters and symbols.
4. Make sure you set the role of this new user to Administrator.
5. Finish adding the user.
6. Log out.
7. Log back in under your new user credentials.
8. Go to Users and delete the Admin user.

Your blog just got this much safer and it took you just about 2 minutes.

Setting Up Spam Protection

Next on my list is to make sure those spammers don’t waste your time. WP comes with a great plugin called Aksimet. It’s a spam filter for your comments.

To set it up, follow the following instructions:

1. Go to Plugins > Installed.
2. If Akismet is not activated yet, click on Activate.
3. After activation, you will get this message: Akismet is almost ready. You must enter your WordPress.com API key for it to work.
4. If you don’t have one yet, you will have to register for a free WordPress account (different from your blog).
5. Create your account and get your API key.
6. Copy/paste your new API key in Akismet.
7. Make sure to check the box that says Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month.
8. Click Update Options.

You are now very well protected against spam comments. Akismet is a must-have! Don’t think you’ll be safe from receiving spam comments because you won’t.

Installing A Temporary Theme

When you install WordPress, it usually comes with pre-installed themes (aka templates). I like to get my own themes and I cannot stand the default theme that comes with WP so I usually install one very quickly, until I find a better one.

To do so,

1. Go to Appearance > Themes.
2. Browse the various themes that are available.
3. To see a preview, simply click on the thumbnail of the theme you want.
4. If you like it, click Activate.

You now have a not-so-boring-looking blog. Later on, I suggest you get a better looking template. There are thousands of them available online. Just search for “WordPress themes” or similar queries.

General Settings

I like going through all the settings of my blogs, one by one, to make sure everything is set to my liking. The first settings to tweak are the General Settings. From there, you can change the following information:

• Blog title – you can change this at any time.
• Blog tagline – you may change this at any time as well.
• The admin email address – make sure it’s correct.
• Membership – I make sure to uncheck that box because I do not want people to register for an account on my blog.
• New user default role – leave it to subscriber.
• Timezone – make sure to select the timezone you are in. It’s handy when you receive email notifications because they will display the current time in your area.

There is more information available there but that’s all I really care about.

Writing Settings

There you can change a few settings that are almost useless. I don’t touch any of these settings except XML-RPC under Remote Publishing, which allows me to publish posts from iPhone apps and more.

Discussion Settings

These are the settings for relative to people leaving comments on your blog. You obviously want people to leave comments, but you don’t want them to abuse it by spamming you either. Here is a screenshot of what my discussion settings look like.

This way, I receive an email anytime someone posts a comment on my blog. I don’t have to moderate comments unless they contain one link or more. That’s how you recognize some of the spammers out there. They come to your blog and leave a comment full of links.

If someone leaves a genuine comment with a link, I then have to approve it manually, which is never a burden.

Permalinks

Basically, permalinks are the structure of your URL and how they appear. This is a pretty important one to me because it will influence how search engines will index and rank your content. By default, WordPress will display your URLs like this: http://www.domainname.com/?p=123. It’s ok but it could be more descriptive.

I like to set up my custom structure like this:

This way, my posts URLs will display as follow: http://www.domainname.com/title-of-my-post.

See the difference? Doesn’t it look cleaner and more professional? Google will love you for that!

Conclusion

As I mentionned at the beginning of this article, these settings may not apply to your usage of WordPress but I’ve found them to work incredibly well for me and my clients. If you have any question, please feel free to ask by leaving a comment below.

This article is going to show you how to set up a WordPress blog. Before setting up WordPress and starting blogging, you will need to register a domain name and find a hosting plan. That might sound obvious to most of you but I want to make sure to be as clear as possible for beginners.

In my last article, I suggested you use DreamHost for several reasons. I use this hosting company and have been very satisfied with them. For the purpose of this article, I will assume that your domain name is registered with GoDaddy and that your host is DreamHost. If you have a different domain registrar and host, steps would be somewhat similar.

Adding A Domain Name to Your Hosting Account

First things first, we have to add your domain name to your hosting account. We are going to tell your hosting company that we want to host your domain name on their servers. By doing so, we are going to create some space on your server so you can install WordPress (or whatever you want for that matter).

1. Log in to your DreamHost panel.
2. Go to Manage Domains.
3. Click Add New Domain / Sub-Domain.
4. Under Domain to Host, enter your domain name.
5. Don’t touch any other settings.
6. Click Fully host this domain to finish the set up.

If successful, you should see the following message:

See the note about nameservers on this image? That’s the next step in setting up your WordPress blog.

Changing the Name Servers

Every time you use a domain name, you use the internet’s Domain Name Servers (also known as DNS) to translate the human-readable domain name into the machine-readable address. In other words, a DNS is the location of your domain name on the web.

Consider your DNS as your internet address. You have to give this address to your domain registrar so it knows where to send people when they access the domain. I don’t want to be too confusing here so check out this great explanation of what DNS are.

1. Log in to your GoDaddy account (or whererver your domain is registered).
2. Select Domain Manager.
3. You should see a list of your domains. Select the domain for which you want to change the DNS information.
4. Look for DNS or Nameservers in the menu.
5. Select I host my domains with another provider.
6. Then enter the information for nameservers 1, 2, and 3 (NS1.DREAMHOST.COM, NS2.DREAMHOST.COM, NS3.DREAMHOST.COM)
7. Done!

How to Install WordPress

We are almost done. Now we need to install WordPress on your server. This is actually pretty easy because DreamHost offers a “one-click install” service for this.

1. Go back to your DreamHost web panel.
2. In the sidebar, under Goodies, select One-Click Installs.
3. Select Install New Website Software – Advanced Mode.
4. Several options will be offered to you. Click on WordPress (it should be selected by default).
5. Under Install To, select the domain name for which you want to install WordPress. If you have only one domain name, it will be selected by default.
6. Do not touch the other settings.
7. Click Install it for me now!
8. Done!

You should now see this message on your DreamHost panel:

You should also receive an email with instructions to finalize the set up. In this email, click on the very first link. That will take you to the backend of your new blog. From there, simply enter the name of your blog and your email address, then click Install WordPress.

This will create a default Admin username and will generate a random password for you. This information will be emailed to you as well.

Now login using the information that was provided to you. I suggest to change the automatically generated password right away so you can set it to something you will remember.

That’s it! Congratulations, you have successfully set up a WordPress blog. In future articles, I will teach you how to configure your blog efficiently, install themes and plugins.

In the meanwhile, feel free to leave a comment below. Also, if you like this article please make sure to share it on Twitter and to subscribe to my RSS feed.

In a previous article, I gave a few tips on how to find and register a domain name. The next step to setting up your own blog is to find a good hosting plan.

People are sometimes confused about what hosting is. Many think the hosting is the domain name. It’s not. A domain name is the “address” of your site (ie. http://www.DomainName.com). A hosting plan is where the actual content of your site will reside online.

Think about it as a hard drive. The hosting company provides a hard drive where your website will be stored and accessible to everyone thanks to the magics of the Internet.

There are tons of information online on how to find a hosting plan and I’m certainly not going to try to reinvent the wheel. I’ve been working with the same host for about 3 years now and I couldn’t be more satisfied with them, so I might be a little partial here…

What to Look For in A Host

When looking for a hosting plan, I think it all comes down to the following criteria:

Price – if you’re just starting your blog, you certainly don’t want to spend $150/month in a hosting plan. I’ve been blogging for a few years and I own several websites that generate some nice income, but there is no way I’m going to spend that much money on hosting.

Service – what’s included in the price? How much disk space do I get? How much bandwidth? How many domain names can I install on one hosting account? How many databases am I entitled to? How many email addresses can I set up? Does it provide one-click install for blogs (very important)?

Support – is it easy to get in touch with customer support? Are they fast to respond? Support is something you may not be able to rate until you become a client and actually have to deal with the customer support. Just ask around in forums to get a quick idea of what people think of a potential host’s customer support.

Reliability – how reliable is the hosting offered? Again, ask around. If they are down half of the time, that might not be worth your money. Serious hosts guarantee you at least 99% of uptime. That means your website is going to be online 99% of the time.

Respectability – how reputable is the hosting company? Hosting company can offer very cheap plans but if they are out of business by the end of the month, you’ll end up losing time, money and efforts. Just like for domain registrars, I like to work with serious and established hosting companies. Safety first!

My Recommendation

As I said above, I am completely partial to DreamHost (affiliate link). A friend of mine recommended I use them a few years ago and I have been a loyal client ever since. I like DreamHost for several reasons:

• They are cheap: it costs me about $120/year
• I have pretty much “unlimited everything” (emails, domains, databases, bandwidth, etc…)
• The customer support is very fast and helpful
• They are a large company and I know they’re not going bankrupt anytime soon
• My websites are up over 99% of the time (they claim 100% uptime but I don’t believe them)
• They provide “one-click installs”, which allows you to easily set up blogs
• I can host unlimited websites on one hosting plan (that’s a great plus!)

They’re obviously not the only hosting companies out there but they are the one I use and recommend to every one because I know they offer a high quality of service.

If you’re looking for a reliable and inexpensive hosting plan for your blog (or website), make sure you check out DreamHost.

Next…

Once you have found a good domain name and a reliable hosting company, the next step will be to set up your own blog.

Instead of replying to him, I thought that would be a good case study about duplicate content and how to create good content for your site.

If you have questions you’d like me to answer, feel free to contact me.

I have an attorney friend who is looking to add a blog to their site. They were wondering if there was a way to add content articles to their blog, to keep it fresh, without them adding unique content each day.

I told him that it is best to try and write something weekly, but he was hoping to have the page update with some other law related articles… Is this possible?

The Rise and Fall of Duplicate Content

The short answer is “yes”. It is possible and fairly easy to do. Simply install FeedWordPress or WP-o-Matic to your WordPress blog and start leeching content left and right via RSS feeds. Is this a good thing to do? Certainly not!

First of all, replicating someone else’s content without their approval is called copyright infringement. While it is widely done everywhere online, it doesn’t necessarily means it is ok and you might get into trouble if you copy articles from other websites.

But now let’s assume you have the consent of the article’s writer to place their article on your site. In most cases, the author will ask you to link back to their site to give them credit, which is a common practice. You might think “great, free legit content populating my site every day/week/month”.

Well let me tell you that’s a big mistake because you are now generating duplicate content. And if there one thing Google doesn’t like, it’s duplicate content. Google sees duplicate content as a waste of space and while it might index both articles in the beginning (the original, and the one syndicated on your site), it will sooner or later realize that the content is coming from the author’s site and will start removing the duplicated articles from its index. Even worth, it might even “ban” your site and remove it completely from its index.

Think of it this way. Imagine that both the author’s site and your site are newspapers. Every time the original author writes something in his newspaper, it shows up in your newspaper the following day. Who would buy your newspaper? Right, no one would because they can have the same news from the original source before getting it from you. That’s exactly how Google sees the duplicate content issue.

You may still be a little skeptical about all this. Well, why not try it for a while. Find someone willing to share his articles with you, or use articles from an article directory such as GoArticles and you’ll see how your site will slowly but surely drop in search engines. Been there, done that!

Blogs Are About Hearing Your Voice

People or companies are always very quick at starting a blog because they read somewhere that it’s good for search engines. Yes, a GOOD blog is good for your search engine rankings. If you’re just blogging to replicate content, what value are you bringing to the table?

See, blogs are good for search engine rankings because if you have a good blog, people will comment on it, they will link back to it, and that is how a blog really helps search engine wise. People go back to a blog because they like what YOU have to say about XYZ topic. It’s all about the way YOU say things. They don’t care about reading rehashed articles from another site. They want to hear what YOU think.

On my iPhone blog for example, most people come back to it because they like how I go straight to the point without beating around the bush. They also know my voice. My voice is basically to complain about how restrictive Apple is with the iPhone. That’s my voice. That’s what I am known for and that’s why people keep coming back.

Blogging is about finding your voice and sharing what you have to say with others. It’s very probable some people will not like your voice. Who cares? You can’t please everyone. I know some people don’t like my voice and they call be a whiner. Fine, I’ll take that. I’m an iPhone whino but you know what? Even among people who don’t like my voice, many of them keep coming back to my site. I know that because they often leave comments (including their names) and after a while, I get to recognize them.

Create Your Own Content

Content is king! The best way to have Google love you and crawl your site on a regular basis is to create your own unique content. Yes, it does require some work from you but this is the best way to bring quality traffic to your site.

There are several ways you can easily create original content:

• Write a mash-up of an article you read: you just read a good article? Simply write a little blurb about it and tell us why you liked/disliked this article.
• Pay someone to write for you: you can find freelancers that can write articles for you for very cheap. The downside is you don’t really control the message or the quality of the writing.
• Create a case study: this is what I’m doing here. I took a real life example to create a blog post.

Perhaps the hardest part about writing good content is to find good topics. Once you have the topic, the writing will come quickly. I have a few tricks to find topics when I don’t know what to blog about:

• Yahoo Answers: look for questions asked about your expertise in Yahoo Answers. If someone asks the question there, it’s probably because they didn’t find the answer else where.
• Forums: just like Yahoo Answers, forums can be a good way to find a topic.
• Twitter: I usually find iPhone-related topics on Twitter in seconds. Just go to the search option and type “yourexpertisekeyword ?” If you have a blog about olive oil, search for “olive oil ?” on Twitter. You’ll be amazed to see what kind of questions people may have.
• Other social networks: do the same as I do with Twitter on other sites such as Delicious, Digg, etc…
• Ask: sometimes you can just simply ask your clients/friends/employees what they want to hear you talk about. I sometimes ask my Twitter followers what I should write about. If a similar topic comes back several times, I will write a post about it.

The Bottomline

The bottomline is, as I said above, if you have good content and you have an original way to deliver it (that’s your voice), people will read you, they will trust you, and they will recommend you. In the end you will gain from it not only in the search rankings of Google, but you might also generate new leads, maybe some consulting jobs, or whatever may apply to your industry.

If you’re not ready to make the effort of blogging and you just want to blog to create yet some more crappy content, just don’t do it. You will waste your time and money and it might hurt you more than you will benefit from it.