Welcome to this exclusive edition of ShoutMeLoud, where you will be learning how to create and setup your WordPress blog. This guide is exclusively for new bloggers who want to set up their blog on WordPress platform.
For existing WordPress bloggers, I have also listed down pro tips that you should start implementing right now to make your WordPress blog professional.
This WordPress guide will ensure following things at the end:
- How to buy your Webhosting and domain for your WordPress blog.
- You have your WordPress blog installed in next 10 minutes.
- Essential setup after installing WordPress
- Things that you need to do after WordPress installation & configuration ( Step by step tutorials with pictures)
- WordPress plugins that you should install and how to set them up.
- Pro tips to make your WordPress blog grow faster
- SEO of your WordPress blog
Do remember, this WordPress for beginner’s guide is crafted with utmost care and is regularly updated ( Last time updated on March 2015) and you should also bookmark it for future reference. You are free to browse our WordPress catalog where you can find more articles, apart from what i have listed in this article. So. let’s start with our guide:
Update: Click here to download exclusive WordPress guide for ShoutMeLoud readers.
Creating your WordPress blog (First step)
The first thing that you need to create a WordPress blog is Webhosting and domain name. Web hosting is where your files will be stored, and domain is the name of your blog. You can buy hosting from Bluehost, which comes with free domain and cost $6.95/month for unlimited hosting space and bandwidth. This process will take 5 minutes and here is a video guide to help you. Click on the below link and get one hosting package for you.
Now next thing you need to do is install WordPress blog on your domain. This process will take another 5 minutes and below is the step by step tutorial that you need:
Now you have your WordPress blog ready, and you need to make few changes such as setting up Permalink, and few other settings. Don’t worry it’s not technical, and you can quickly do it with the help of below guide:
Well done job so far, and before you play with more stuff, lets quickly watch few videos that will make you understand WordPress better.
Few things to learn before moving to next level:
Here are few things that you need to learn before moving to next level. This will help you to do other things quickly and without getting stuck anywhere. These guides are for your reference:
With all the above steps, you are graduated from newbie to beginner level, and now it’s time to pimp up your blog with important things. Here are those:
- Burn your blog feed using Feedburner (This way you can offer your readers to subscribe via RSS feed or email updates)
- Adding Google Analytics to your WordPress blog (This is important as you will be able to see how much traffic you are getting and where are they coming from)
- Set up Google tag manager ( This is little pro-tip but you should read it and implement it right now, as this will help you to manage all tags including above Google analytics tag from one place).
- Update WordPress Ping list ( Go to the post and copy paste all the list as guided, this will help you to get more traffic to your blog)
Beginner tip to WordPress Pro Blog:
One of the major mistakes that many newbie makes after creating WordPress blog is, they don’t bother setting up other stuff that create a huge difference. These few setup will create a lot of difference, and every step won’t take more than 5 minutes. In the case of any confusion you can drop me an Email at admin@shoutMeLoud.com, and I will reply to your queries within 24 hours.
Now it’s time to set up few WordPress plugin that will make a huge difference and is important:
- Activate Akismet plugin ( You will need Akismet API key and this tutorial will help you to get your free API key and how to add it on your blog).
- Install and activate WordPress SEO by Yoast ( This is an amazing free plugin to make your blog SEO friendly, and this tutorial will guide you on how to set up. This is quite easy to do and if you are stuck in any step, just drop a comment and I will reply to you)
- Smush.it WordPress plugin (Compresses images on your blog)
- W3 total cache plugin (This plugin is important for making your blog load faster. Make sure you don’t use any other cache plugin with this).
- No self ping wordpress plugin
- WordPress related post plugin (Use any of these plugin to add related posts with thumbnail after your post. This will help your readers to discover more content on your blog)
- WordPress Social media plugins ( This will help you to get more social media sharing. You can pick any one from the list, but I recommend Monarch)
- OptinMonster plugin will let you capture email leads for your auto-responder service such as Aweber, Mailchimp and so on. It’s responsive and offers ready to use opt-in forms.
- Roost plugin: Free WordPress plugin to make your blog web-push ready. Highly recommended technique for 2015.
WordPress SEO: From Beginner to Intermediate Level
Welcome to next level, and this is going to create the biggest difference for your WordPress blog. You need one hour to understand everything here and if you have been learning and implementing everything continuously so far, take a break for an hour. Come back with a fresh mind, and you will be learning something that will make you stand apart from other bloggers.
- Exclusive WordPress SEO Training video from WordCamp ( This video will answer most of your SEO queries in next 30 minutes)
- A DIY guide for WordPress Blog SEO
- How to SEO optimize Individual post in WordPress
- How to submit your blog sitemap to Google webmaster tool
- How to submit your blog sitemap to Bing
WordPress Pro Tips:
As promised here are tips for those WordPress bloggers who have been using WordPress for long and want to learn some advanced tips.
- How to reduce database size of your WordPress blog
- Broken link checker plugin : This plugin will find all broken links (Internal and external) of your blog and you can quickly fix it.
WordPress Security
- How to change WordPress default username for Security
- 7 Essential WordPress security tip
- 9 steps to secure WordPress Blog