Setting up a blog on your website should only take a few minutes and the return can be hundreds of extra visitors. Here are the steps you need to know to set up a blog on your own website.

First Step – Sort your hosting
The easiest blogging tool to set up on your website is WordPress. There are other tools that you can use, but this one is free and my preferred tool. So, before you even attempt to install it, you need to check your website hosting. You will need PHP enabled and access to a MySQL database.

What if for some reason you cannot add PHP to your existing website, for example if you have an ASP website? Well, maybe your hosts can allow you to set up a subdomain of your website (e.g. blog.yourdomain.com) that you can use and give this the required PHP.

Second Step – Install WordPress
There are 2 ways of doing this:

1) Go to WordPress.org, download the latest version of the blogging software to your computer, unzip the files then using an FTP tool, upload the files to a directory on your website – for example either blog.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com/blog.

You will need to look at the config file before uploading it to your website. There is plenty of information within this file itself, but you basically need to change the database access to those given to you by your host.

2) If you are very lucky, go to your host’s control panel and click a button to install WordPress!

Third Step – Activate It
Now, just go to your blog URL and it will automatically activate the software and finish the installation. You are automatically allocated a temporary password for the Admin user, use this to sign on to the blog and then immediately, before you do anything else, go to the user maintenance screen and change the password to one that you can remember.

After this, there are some standard security features and other quick alternations that you can make to set up WordPress to the best.

You should also look through the list of available themes and find one that you would like to use for your blog. These themes are the basic style of the blog – the website design. Choosing a nice lookign theme will give it a good look and make it look presentable to visitors when they start to arrive.

You can also have a look through the list of pluggins that are available for WordPress. These are little add ins that you can install to your blog to add extra features and functions, such as a statistics package or a list of posts that are related to the one currently being read.