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Ok.  We get it. After posting Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies, we learned a thing or two about your needs.  Although we know there are bloggers galore on every topic imaginable out there, there are also a number of you who are just stopped cold at the thought of starting a blog.  You might like to, but it seems too complex, too involved, too frustrating, too….whatever.

You’ve probably heard that saying: “To anyone whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” (Kind of like tunnel vision or having blinders on when it comes to others’ perspectives.)  To those of us who’ve already taken the high dive off the cliff and into the warm and welcoming waters of the blogosphere, the whole process seems rather user friendly and simple.  We perhaps forget where we started from.

I remember the first time I ever looked at a WordPress page, with no training and no preparation.  I thought “What on earth is this and how am I supposed to learn it”?  ( I think mild panic sets in at the first glance of the unknown, particularly when we know we’re supposed to do something with it…….like produce a published page, but how do your do that?)

I know Arthur, one of our blog readers, commented that he liked the post, Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies, and thought it was great to challenge women to make their own blog and create a community but regretted that the process was too complicated and long:

“I wonder if a step by step approach wouldn’t have been easier to follow…In a perfect world there will be some videos made from actions on both main platforms (Blogger and WordPress).”

Well, this post is an attempt to make the process easier for Arthur and all the hopeful bloggers, many of them women, for whom he speaks.  If any of you can add to this or enrich it with your own expertise or experience please do. For now, let’s see if we can break this down into bite size pieces:

1.  Free WP installation

There are sites out there which specialize in WordPress and will install and set up or transfer your WordPress site free.  One such site is SiteGround.com You have to get hosting with them at $5.95 a month. But you also get Free WordPress themes and WordPress tutorial. That sounds to me like a good way to get your feet wet.  They say they are the #1 WordPress Host, but there are probably others who offer the same services.

2. Gettting Started With WordPress tutorials

When you sit down, shake off that little twinge of “beginner’s anxiety”, and start to use it, WordPress has extremely intuitive administration: you will be able to compose a post and publish it on your website with just one click! The following are 2 different tutorials, both using screen shots, but the second is video, so also has a guide talking you through the process.

SiteGround.com offers an Easy Start tutorial with screen shots of every action telling you exactly where to go and what to click, step by step. It very clearly explains and shows a graphic of each of the following:

• Instructions on how to install WordPress via Fantastico tool or without it;
• How to get started with WordPress by writing posts, creating pages in WordPress, etc.;
• How to arrange your blog posts in categories;
• How to manage comments in WordPress;
• How to change the theme of your WordPress site;
• How to install WordPress plugins, such as images, Recent comments, Spelling checker, Google AdSense;
• How to create a backup of WordPress;
• How to upgrade the WordPress version.

If you prefer to learn using video goto Ithemes.com Tutorials

NEW! WORDPRESS 2.6 BASICS

• WordPress Overview
• How to login to WP Dashboard
  
• How to write a Post
• How to write a Page
• How to edit Posts/Pages
• How widgets work
• How to moderate comments
• WordPress Settings Overview
• How to Upgrade WordPress Using the Automatic Plugin
• How to Add new Users
• How to Change/Activate Themes

I was going to share with you how to start writing posts, the quickest and simplest way I know, again, just to get your feet wet.  But since I promised this would be in simple, bite size pieces, I’m going to save that for the next post : How Do I Do This Faster & Easier?  Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

I hope this post has helped Arthur and all of you get started with your own blog.  Write and let me know how it’s going and what your experiences have been.  If there’s something specific you want to know, just tell me.  Our goal is to get you up on the Net, blogging your heart out, sharing all your stories with us.  Just remember: You make the path by walking on it.

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Ok. This post is not for all you bloggers on the Jedi Warrior level. We know you know how to blog. This is for all those out there, and particularly women, who have a lot they want to say and just haven’t gotten the hang of blogging yet. ( We’re telling you this because, as you know by now, if you have been reading this blog, we are encouraging women to jump on to the Net and develop their own communities and blogs in support of other women.)

Maybe you haven’t started your own blog yet because you’re intimidated. Maybe you’re just discovering the blogosphere. Whatever the reason, we can almost guarantee there is such an ease and an immediacy and a sense of shared community with similarly minded bloggers, that once you start, you’ll be hooked, like the rest of us.

Whether you want to start a business or a women’s community or a news magazine, you can blog.

The start up is the hardest part – which is probably true of most things – and it is not so much hard as detailed.

If you want to spend a lot of time weighing your platform options and strategies, Choosing a Blog Platform at ProBlogger will walk you through all that. You may want a hosted blog at a company like Blogger or a stand alone platform powered by WordPress.org or MovableType or one of many others. You may want to build your own brand ( highly recommended) , and if you do, you will need a stand alone platform. Personally, I prefer WordPress.org. It is feature rich, continuously updated, with thousands of man hours in development time. It boasts communities of developers offering plug ins which automate hundreds of the most useful tasks imaginable, from SEO ( search engine optimization so your blog can be found) to spam catching to putting in Google Adsense or Yahoo ads on every post. New plug ins are offered almost daily and there is ample support for whatever your needs are. There are many ways to customize the plugins, widgets, and themes or change them with a single click. And did I mention, it’s free?

There are several ways to set up your WordPress.org blog.

WordPress.org offers its own Quick Start Guide, which, incidently points out the advantages of self hosting. It’s pretty straight forward and intuitive, with a well known “5 minute install”, but if you’re not comfortable with mildly techie tasks, such as using ftp, this is probably not for you.

Making A WordPress Blog adds screen shots to the process of walking you step by step through the set up of your blog, using a hosted platform at WordPress.com. Simpler, ( since there’s no ftp or techie tasks involved) but still, possibly not what you want if you are trying to build your own brand, which, one day, you hope to sell.

Paying a pro WordPress guru a couple of hundred bucks to install your blog is simple, stress free and a good investment. We Fix WP Blogs is one example of a provider who can perform this task for you, simply, seamlessly and relatively inexpensively. I just used We Fix WP Blogs for a pretty extensive installation of mine – 3 blogs – so I can personally recommend them. And the bonus is that you will have a WP guru already familiar with your blog, should you ever need help, an upgrade, to migrate servers or simply some quick advice on the fly. There are a number of WP gurus out there, some mentioned on the WP site and others you may have to Google to locate.

Once you’re at this point, you just have to be able to write in plain English ( or French or German or Spanish or whatever language you speak.) Although the program is really intuitive and very simple to learn you can return to Quick Start Guide or Making A WordPress Blog with screen shots, to walk you step by step through the process of writing your content, saving it, then publishing it to the Net.

Whatever moves you or stirs you, motivates or inspires you, we want to see it on the Net, in your blog. When you fulfill yourself, we are all one step closer to fulfilling ourselves and to creating real progress on the Net. So start your blog. And please do share your story and experience with us.

For more, see these:

Yes, Some Blogs Are *Very* Profitable – And Some Of Them Are Women’s Blogs

Community on the Net – The Platform To Network, The Power to Mentor

Women Power: From The Ballot Box To The Blogosphere

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