How to Setup Your Niche Content Website with WordPress

After you have chosen a niche to cover, you will need to purchase a domain name. Godaddy is a popular domain registrar, but you are free to choose any domain registrar that you like. Next, you will need to purchase a hosting plan. Shared hosting from HostGator is a cost effective choice and they are a reliable provider with top-rated customer service. You will not need to move to a dedicated server until you have many sites that are all getting a large amount of traffic, so save your money and use shared hosting until you are at that point.

You may think that you can use shared hosting forever since they advertise unlimited disk storage and unlimited data transfer, but that is not the case. If you read the fine print, you will see that your account cannot exceed a certain percentage of the total server resources, which means at some point the host is going to ask you to move to a dedicated server or to host elsewhere. When that day comes, you should be excited that you are getting enough traffic that you need a dedicated server.

Now that you have a domain and hosting, you are ready to setup your site. WordPress is easy to use and there is a large community to offer help. It is commonly used for blogging, but it is also a very good content management system. If you are using HostGator, you can login to your cPanel and click on Fantastico and you can quickly and easily install WordPress.

Now that you have WordPress installed, you will need to choose a theme. There are a lot to choose from, but it is up to you when deciding which one you pick. All themes offer the same basic functionality; it is just a matter of aesthetics.

After you select the theme that you want, you will need to use an FTP program to upload the theme. You can use the free FTP program FileZilla for Mac OS X, Linux, or Windows. You will upload the theme into the wp-content/themes directory.

Another great feature of WordPress is the use of plugins. Some of the plugins that you should use are Advertising Manager, Akismet, All in One SEO Pack, Contact Form, Google Analytics for WordPress, Google Sitemap Generator, and Really Simple Captcha. Akismet and Really Simple Captcha help fight spam with comments and emails. Advertising Manager does exactly what the name implies and easily works with setting up Adsense ads. I recommend creating a contact page for every site so that visitors and especially potential advertisers can contact you. All in One SEO Pack and Google Sitemap Generator both help when optimizing your site for the search engines. Google Analytics is a great resource for viewing visitor behavior on your site. You will upload the plugins into the wp-content/plugins directory.

Now that you have WordPress installed and uploaded the theme and several plugins, you should spend some time learning about how WordPress works. There is too much info to be covered in this article, but the developers of WordPress do an excellent job writing documentation to teach you how to use it. Click here to go to the WordPress Docs main page.