Plain English

Blogging
‘Jargon Buster’
[Just For YourNicheBlog.com Customers!]

Never Get Confused By

Blogging Terminology Again!

Written by:
Lewis Smile
www.YourNicheBlog.com

© Smile Web Creations 2009

All Rights Reserved
 Welcome to Another YourNicheBlog Help Guide!

Hello. Lewis Smile here. Creator of YourNicheBlog.com

Note: This is the 2nd YourNicheBlog help

guide. If you are looking for specific action
steps on how to do certain things with your
blog then you will need either the Basic Help
Guide or the Advanced Help Blog.

It is my aim with this guide to take you from

a complete Blogging beginner to a seasoned
pro able to walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk
with the best of ‘em.

When entering a new arena online it is

sometimes very difficult to understand
what’s going on around you simply because
you don’t understand the terminology used.
The lingo is new and confusing. So I put this guide together for all customers
of YourNicheBlog.com, to help you get past the initial confused stages of
blogging. I will explain everything in super-easy-to-understand plain English
to make sure you completely understand everything you need to know.

If you read your way through this guide you won’t miss a thing, and you’ll
come out the other end feeling a total sense of achievement. Because you
will be able to read any post, article or lens about blogging and understand
everything taught. You’ll be an INSIDER!

It is in my interests to write this guide for all YourNicheBlog blog-owners

because an educated customer able to properly utilize their blog [and
everything is has built-in] is a happy customer indeed.

So without any more delays, let’s just jump right in!

If you still have any questions by the end of this, or if there are terms you
think should be included here, or if you loved it to bits, please let me know
at lewis@smilewebcreations.com. All feedback is welcome!

Lewis Smile :-)

www.YourNicheBlog.com
CONTENTS
BLOGGING BASICS:
1. Blog
2. Blog post
3. Wordpress
4. Wordpress Theme
5. Gravatar
6. HTML code
7. Stylesheet
8. Opt in form
9. Text Link

BLOG TECHNOLOGY:
10. RSS
11. Podcast
12. Ping

CONTENT AND PROMOTION:

13. Social Bookmarking
14. Twitter
15. Squidoo
16. Ghostwriter

SEARCH ENGINES:
17. SEO
18. SERP
19. Backlinks

MAKING MONEY:
20. Banner ad
21. Affiliate products
22. Adsense
23. Google Adsense Pub ID

WEB HOSTING:
24. Domain
25. Web Hosting
26. Nameservers
27. Cpanel
28. FTP
BLOGGING BASICS
1. BLOG:
What exactly is a blog, and how is it different to a
regular website?

Firstly, a blog IS a website. A blog usually has it's

own domain name [like example.com], will rank in
search engines, and can be edited and added to by
you or your employees.

The word 'blog' is a mashup of the words 'Web Log',

which has a blog defined more like an online diary
than a static website.

When you post an update to your blog it will

appear at the top of the screen, and all your other
updates will be pushed down to accommodate it. A blog allows you to build
up a giant web presence bit by bit. Just like a diary allows you to build it
page by page.

It may help to think of a blog more like a journey, a road, down which you
post interesting articles, news, videos, and anything else your audience
might be interested in. Your static company website can be seen more like a
destination.

The other main difference between a blog and a website is that your blog
posts are 'syndicated' via the blog RSS feed. An RSS feed allows your blog
posts to have a reach far beyond that of a normal static webpage. RSS is
explained shortly.

2. BLOG POST:
When you think of your blog more
like an online diary than a static
website, you can think of your blog
posts as diary entries. When you
want to publish something to your
audience from your blog it is a
blog posts that will do it. Your
blog is like a timeline, and writing
a blog post adds an extra entry on
top of the pile for everyone to
see.
Anyone who is subscribed to your blog will get the update in their email
inbox or their RSS reader, and anyone visiting your blog will see your latest
blog post at the top of the screen. Writing a blog post pushes all your other
blog posts down the list. None of your blog posts will be deleted, and they
will all remain in the Archives, like a real timeline or diary.

Most blogs will also display the date next to each post, so your readers will
know when each post was published.

You can see a good example of this on a blog I run at

www.SquidooCool.com. You can access the archives in the sidebar, and see
the most recent post at the top.

3. WORDPRESS:
Starting a blog requires a LOT of clever code
working its magic in the background. And
because there are an awful lot of passionate
clever folk in the world, lots of 'blog software'
exists.

You could start a blog running the 'blogspot'

software, running the 'Moveable Type'
software, running the 'Wordpress' software,
etc.

In the opinion of millions of people, Wordpress is the best blogging software

you can use. Defined in it's simplest form 'Wordpress' is a platform for you to
use to publish your blog. It installs on your web hosting, and acts like a
stage for your blog to stand on. It is the software that does the heavy lifting
that makes writing posts/pages/comments possible.

You install wordpress [or in this case, I do], then you're ready to start
making your blog work exactly as it should and customising a Wordpress
Theme to make your blog look perfect. The work I do for YourNicheBlog.com
customers is turning the default wordpress blog software into a custom-
theme marketing machine built for your online marketing efforts and
maximum search engine exposure.

The Wordpress software is the skeleton that I build the body on top of.
4. WORDPRESS THEME:
Bearing in mind that wordpress is a platform, the
skeleton that your blog is built upon, a Wordpress Theme
is the skin on top that makes your blog look how it does.

You could use Theme A, but maybe one day you see
another theme you like and want to test out on your blog.
No problem. You can install Theme B whenever you like
and change the entire look of your blog in a couple of
clicks.

It's just like you changing your clothes in the morning. New style, new look,
and everything under the Theme remains exactly the same.

So how you log in, add posts, write comments, etc etc all remains the same.
The only thing that changes will be the look and feel of your blog to your
visitors.

Great for the fashion conscious blog, but remember that your visitors won't
appreciate you swapping the themes all the time! Improve by all means, but
every time you change your theme there will be a different way to navigate
your blog so your visitors won't tolerate it for long if you change your blog
theme every week.

The theme I built for your blog [for yournicheblog.com customers] is

incredibly powerful and has a lot of great features built in that give you blog
extra power compared to most other themes. So I would advise against
changing it unless you really really really need to. But the power is there.

5. GRAVATAR:
The clever folks who built the Wordpress platform have also
built something called Gravatar. It is short for Globally
Recognizable Avatar, and is a small picture associated with
your email address.

You can join gravatar.com, tell them what your email

address is, upload a picture you want to represent you, and
press Save. Now whenever you use your email address on
gravatar-enabled websites, like when you leave a comment on a wordpress
blog, your cute little picture will show up too!

And instantly your picture makes both your comment more attractive and
you more memorable. Voila. You are beautiful.
6. HTML CODE:
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.

HTML is the simplest form of code behind a webpage.

It’s a coding language.

There is a strict logic to HTML, and once you

understand the basics it’s really easy to learn the more
advanced.

A HTML command will begin with a letter or word

inside diagonal brackets, like <b> for bold text. That
command makes everything after it bold. And to stop
everything being bold you just put a closing-command
like </b>. The slash makes it a closing command.

Here are some examples of HTML in action:

<b>this will be bold</b>

<i>this will be in italics</i>
<center>this will be centered</center>
<u>this will be underlined</u>

So in a sentence, <b>this</b> would be bold, <i>that</i> would be italics,

and <u>this</u> would be underlined.

See how the commands open then close? Congratulations – you have now
mastered basic HTML! Now you just need to learn a few more of the logic
rules and you’ll be a real pro.

7. STYLESHEET:
If you look at almost any page online you will be
seeing a stylesheet at work.

Your blog has a stylesheet too.

A stylesheet is essentially a big list of rules that

make certain things look the way they do.
For example, the sizes of the fonts on your blog
are specified in the stylesheet. The height of the header text in the sidebar
sections is specified in the stylesheet. The width of the page is specified in
the stylesheet. If something is pushed left or right, if something has a
border around it, if something is certain color on every page, etc.
A stylesheet is like a color/design control center.

So why bother with a stylesheet instead of just specifying these things on

the pages themselves? Because every time you created a new page you
would have to do it allllllll again. Every time you wrote a new sentence you
would need to enclose it in html code to specify the color/font/size. But
with a stylesheet any new page/text you create just refers to the stylesheet
defaults. It also means that to make changes to your blog colors/sizes you
only need to edit one place.

A stylesheet will most likely have the filename style.css or stylesheet.css,

and for your blog will be stored in the /wp-content/themes/yournicheblog/
folder.

8. OPT IN FORMS:
When you enter into the world of online
marketing, and work towards earning a
living online, you’ll hear this a lot: “the
money is in the list”.

What these repetitive people are talking

about is having a mailing list which lots of people have signed up to. You
build a mailing list by putting your ‘opt in box’ on your blog/website/lenses
etc. Just like the image shown here, you will have seen these opt in boxes
almost everywhere.

The idea is to make some kind of offer that people will find attractive, and
to get what you are offering they will plop their name and email address
into the form and subscribe themselves. Your offer could be anything from
‘free guide’ to ‘news updates’.

Your opt in form is connected with your Email Marketing software, which
emails your subscribers when you tell it to, either when you write a new
newsletter or when a certain amount of time has gone by. You can also set
your Opt In Form to automatically send out every new blog post you write to
your subscribers.

If you don’t know where/how to set up your own Opt In Form: I use a
company called AWeber. They are the best in their industry, have very
reasonable prices, and are constantly improving almost every aspect of the
online admin interface you use to manage your mailing lists. I highly
recommend them [it’s why I use them myself].
9. TEXT LINK:
A text link is simply when a word or words are
clickable, and link to another website.

So in this sentence, it is this word that is a text

link.

Simple.

In SEO, the more text links you have on other

websites pointing to your blog the better. The
higher the quality of those websites the better,
too.

And in HTML, a text link looks like this: <a

href=”http://www.YourDomain.com” target=”_blank”>Clickable Text
Here</a>
BLOG TECHNOLOGY
10. RSS:
In the old and ancient days of the internet, all
webpages were static. If you wanted something to
show up on your website you would have to jump
in to the complex code and put it in there yourself.
Things were slow and... static.

But now it’s completely different. Few websites

are built that way because it was all so slow and
inefficient. Now most websites are built with
Content Management Systems [CMS]. If you need
an extra page on your website you just log in to
the admin area, write the content, hit publish, and voila.

With this new ‘non-staticness’ comes another great tool. RSS. RSS stands for
Really Simple Syndication.

It means that whenever you publish anything new on your blog it becomes
portable. The content will be ‘syndicated’, or sent, to wherever it needs to
be. This could mean your new post will:

• Be picked up from your blog and sent via email to your subscribers.

• Be shown in RSS readers (inbox-like tools which pull in new updates

from blogs automatically)

• Notify the search engines. Your new RSS items will 'ping' search
engines to alert them that they've been updated.

Almost anything you can do with content online can be done automatically,
or semi-automatically, by syndicating the feed.

And with every blog I build for YourNicheBlog.com customers I set

everything up so that every new blog post is automatically bookmarked
social bookmarking sites too!

All because of the truly delicious powers of RSS :)

11. PODCAST:
A podcast is to spoken word what a blog is to
written word.

Just like a radio show, you sit down and record

yourself talking about whatever you like. But
instead of broadcasting it over the airwaves like
a normal radio show, you release your little
recording online.

You could do a show a week, for example, and your listeners get your latest
creation when you hit the ‘publish’ button.

So just like how on your blog you can publish something new whenever you
like and your subscribers see it when it goes live, a podcast is essentially the
same but with audio.

You can even get your podcast included in iTunes so your subscribers can
get new episodes automatically downloaded to their iPods.

12. PING:
A ping is a way for web services to keep up to date
with new posts on blogs. A ping is a little packet
of information. When you publish a new post it
generates a little ‘ping’, which sends itself
across the web.

The ‘ping’ contains one simple message about

your blog: “Hey! I’m updated! I have a new
post! New stuff, right here! Come look!”

Pinging a web service like technorati [the

blog search engine] will get the technorati web crawler to get up off it’s
butt and take another fresh look at your blog. A ping means you will get
noticed across the web sooner rather than later.
Any blog from YourNicheBlog.com is set to Ping over a dozen different web
services every time you publish a new post, so you get extra exposure for
doing no extra work. You’ll find that with this kind of technology your new
blog posts will get ranked in Google very quickly. The standard for any of my
own blogs is less than 12 hours.

You don’t need to do anything with regards to pinging – it’s all automatic for
your blog.
CONTENT AND
PROMOTION
13. SOCIAL BOOKMARKING:
Social Bookmarking is a method for web users to
save, tag and categorise website links on a number
of ‘social bookmarking’ websites. It’s like building
up a collection of links to pages you like.

If you see a great website and want to save and

share the link, just ‘bookmark it’ on any number of
these social bookmarking web services.

As you can imagine, being able to publicly share a

link to any page on the web is very good for
marketers like yourself. You get to bookmark your
latest blog posts, your business pages, and your
new Squidoo lenses, as well as the great webpages
you find as you surf round the web. It’s important
to create a mix of links, of your own and other
people’s stuff.

Social Bookmarking is good for a number of reasons:

1. You get to instantly broadcast a link to a whole new audience on the

social bookmarking websites
2. You get to connect with the other web users who have bookmarked
your links too
3. Social Bookmarking is a way to build Backlinks to your blog posts,
which helps you with regards to SEO.
4. If you tag and title your blog posts properly then Google searchers
will be able to find you not only through your blog but through the
Social Bookmarking sites too.

All blogs from YourNicheBlog.com come with an incredible benefit:

automatic social bookmarking. This is such a huge benefit that it would be
difficult to over-emphasise the advantage you have over other bloggers and
content-publishers.

You can see one of the most popular Social Bookmarking sites at
www.delicious.com

14. TWITTER:
Twitter is a social networking site with a different
take on communicating. Imagine your Twitter
profile as a mini-blog. Every Twitter post you make
[called a ‘tweet’] can be a maximum 140 characters, and can be about
whatever you like. When you post to your Twitter profile anyone who has
decided to ‘follow’ you will get your message, so it’s a great way to
promote your blog.

All YourNicheBlog.com blogs come equipped with a plugin that allows your
blog to automatically promote itself on your Twitter profile. Every time you
write a blog post it will be automatically linked to from your Twitter profile.

Instructions on how to set this up are in the Basic Help Guide.

To see an example of a twitter profile, try mine:

www.twitter.com/mrlewissmile

15. SQUIDOO:
You’ll hear the word ‘Squidoo’ a lot when you
are researching ways to promote your blog.

Squidoo.com is a website that lets you build

Squidoo Pages about whatever you like. They
call these Pages ‘lenses’.

A lens is a single page, written by a single

author. You can include on your lens whatever
you like about the topic you’re writing about.
You can embed youtube videos, flickr photos,
RSS feeds, articles, images, guestbooks, polls, links, etc etc. Because you
can have such a mix of different kinds of content your lens will end up
looking really interactive and interesting.

A lens is great way to promote your blog, your business, your affiliate links,
and anything else you want people around the world to see.

A link from a Squidoo Lens to your blog will count as a BackLink and will
help your blog in the search engines [see SEO above].

You can see what a Squidoo Lens looks like here: www.squidoo.com/tricks

Join Squidoo, make some lenses, promote your stuff, tell the world who you
are, and get visitors from Google for free.
16. HIRING A GHOSTWRITER:
A ghostwriter is someone who will write
content for you, and remain anonymous.
Any content you get a ghostwriter to
write for you will be owner by you and
you alone, and you get to slap your name
on it and claim it as your own. You hire a
ghostwriter to write for you and you can
multiply your effectiveness.

It makes a LOT of sense to hire someone

to write for you if you...

1. are not great at writing

2. are short on time to devote to your online business
3. are easily bored by the writing process
4. need more articles written than you could possibly write in time
5. need content written on a topic you are not familiar with

Ghostwriters are not as expensive as you may think. $10 per page would
probably cover it, until you start going to in-demand or specialised writers
who will charge more.

Some good places to find writers would be:

1. www.warriorforum.com
2. www.elance.com
3. www.getafreelancer.com
4. www.google.com [of course!]

Something to remember – check any content you have written for you with
the copyscape.com tool. It will tell you if the content has been copied from
anywhere online. If it has, or is simply a rewrite of another article you find
online, get your money back. A good ghostwriter will write quality unique
content, not rip off someone else’s work.
SEARCH ENGINES
17. SEO:
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.

SEO means making changes to your website with the aim of

coming up higher in Google and other search engines.

There are 2 kinds of SEO you will need to know about. ONsite SEO and
OFFsite SEO.

When Google looks at your website and sees how high it should place it in
the search results it takes a LOT of factors into consideration.

It looks at the ONsite aspects, such as how old your site is, how many years
the domain name is registered for, how focused your articles are, how you
use keywords, how many posts and pages your site has, how many websites
you are linking to from your site, how trusted those sites are, and a bunch
of other factors.

They will also look at OFFsite factors, mainly how many other websites are
linking to you [links to your site are seen as 'votes', as if the other sites are
passing along a kind of trust to you].

So in practical terms, for example:

• Perhaps when you are writing a blog post you are mindful of what
words and phrases you use, so Google will send you more traffic.
What words would you like to show up for in Google?

• Perhaps you use keywords in your blog posts titles.

• Perhaps you build a few Squidoo lenses on your topic and you link to
your blog from them.

• Perhaps you write interesting comments on related blogs and put

your blog address in the Website box.

The list is endless, the craft is impossible to master as things are constantly
changing, but the principles remain the same. Unique/interesting/updated
content will get people to notice, as well as the Google Robots that choose
how high you will rank.
18. SERP:
You will see the acronym SERP quite a bit if
you are researching SEO. SERP stands for
Search Engine Results Page and refers to the
page of results you see after you search for
something on a search engine. A SERP is the
big listing of sites that you want YOUR blog
to dominate.

Perhaps you'll see it used like this: "My site

is finally ranking high on the SERPs!" or "My
site has completely vanished from the
SERPs!!"

Dominating the SERPs is a good thing.

Dropping off the bottom is a bad thing. Easy
peasy.

19. BACKLINKS:
You should think of backlinks in terms of SEO. It
will help to read the SEO section just above this.

Backlinks are one of the main factors Google takes

into account when determining how high up on in the
search results your blog should come for any search
terms.

A backlink is when another website or blog links to your

website or blog.

If I put a link to your blog from my blog then Google will look at that and
see that I have effectively voted for your blog. With my blog saying ‘I am
willing to link here’ Google can see that your blog must be good, and it
gives it a little bit of trust and responsibility by ranking it high in the search
results.

Google has realised that the sites with the most links pointing to them are
most likely going to be the highest quality sites with the best information.
So really the Google secret is that the rankings are decided not by any one
individual but by the entire internet ecosystem, with everyone linking to the
good quality stuff.
So if you want your blog to rise ever higher in the search results, make sure
other websites and blogs want to link to you. This could be by writing
unique/interesting/updated content, combined with social networking,
social bookmarking, article marketing, and just plenty of blogging! The
more you quality content you write on your blog the better your chances.

See the SEO section just above here for more info on ranking higher.
MAKING MONEY
20. BANNER ADS:
A banner ad is one of the oldest forms of advertising online.

When the Internet was created the advertising people took what they knew
from the offline world and applied it to the online world. A banner ad was
their online version of a billboard.

A banner ad is basically just a picture that you put up on your blog that links
to the advertisers website. Banner Ads have some oddly-specific standard
sizes too.

You can display other people's banner ads on your blog and earn money from
the sales they generate, or you can get paid for every time the banner is
displayed. You can also let Google manage your banner ad spot on your blog
by using Google AdSense. Sometimes banner ads will be displayed,
sometimes text links.

This is a banner ad:

21. AFFILIATE PROGRAMS:

One of the easiest ways to earn money online is as an
affiliate.

Company A needs customers, and you want to earn

money online. So if you help Company A get a
customer then you’ll get a small cut of the profits
from whatever they buy. It’s a way for companies to
reach lots of people without spending a penny on
advertising – they only pay when a sale is made. It’s a
Win-Win!

Amazon.com has an affiliate program, which means you can link to any
Amazon products in your niche and any time someone YOU refer to Amazon
makes a purchase you’ll get about 5% of the order total – whether they’re
spending $25 on books or $25,000 on new underwear.

There are affiliate programs you can sign up to for almost any product you
can imagine. Almost any product which can be sold online is being sold
through an affiliate program, which means you can get paid for promoting
it.

For bloggers this is a great opportunity – you get to link to products that you
like and recommend and you get paid every time you generate a sale. You
don’t have to do anything except refer the customers to the affiliate
product website.

I actually run an affiliate program with Tiffany Dow for

www.BuildMyLens.com, the lens building service we have. The commission
we pay is as high as $120 PER SALE. You can read more and sign up at
www.buildmylens.com/affiliates

22. ADSENSE:
The easiest way to understand AdSense is to think about
all those classified ads you see in newspapers. The
advertiser gets just a couple of lines to write their ad
and hope you act on it.

Google took the concept of these small classified ads

and brought them into the 21st century. Go to
Google.com now and type in a search for something. Try
‘kitchens’. Now look to the right hand side of the page. See all those small
classified-style ads? Those are AdSense ads.

Thousands of different individuals and companies pay Google to display their

ad at the exact moment someone searches for whatever they’re selling. So
a kitchen company will want you to see its ad just when you search for
‘kitchen’. This makes good financial sense for the advertisers because the
only people looking at their adverts are their ideal customers.

Advertisers pay Google every time someone clicks on one of their adverts,
and the price will vary depending on how competitive the search-term is
[this is why Google is worth so much money. All those teeny little clicks…]

As a blog owner, you can profit from these ads too. If you embed into your
blog a small piece of code then these same AdSense ads from the Google
search will display on your blog. And every time someone clicks on one of
the ads displayed on your website... YOU get paid! You split the profit with
Google. How much you get paid will depend on how much the advertiser is
paying for her ad.

This makes Google AdSense a clever way of monetizing your blog.

23. GOOGLE ADSENSE PUB ID:
If you just read the explanation of AdSense
above, then you will understand that you can
display AdSense ads on your own blog or
website and get a cut of the profits.

When you are setting up your account to do

this Google will give you a special code to
embed into your blog. In that code is your
unique identifier. Your Publisher ID.

The inclusion of YOUR Publisher ID is what gets the ad profits credited to

you. If you were displaying the wrong Publisher ID code then you wouldn’t
be credited.

So during the blog building process I will have asked you for your Google
AdSense Pub ID, and that was so I could put AdSense ads on your blog that
will earn you a profit when they get clicked on.

You can find your AdSense Pub ID in your AdSense account at

www.google.com/adsense

A Pub ID will look something like pub-1234567890123

WEB HOSTING
24. DOMAIN NAME:
To start any website online you will need a
domain name.

A domain name will look like

www.DomainName.com. Instead of your
domain name ending in .com you can choose
to have .co.uk, .eu, .co.nz, .ca, .biz,
.net, .cn, .ru, etc etc. There are hundreds
of possible endings, at least one for every
country in the world, but .com is the most
popular and the most memorable.

You will need to pay for a domain name,

just like everybody else, and once you have paid for it it’s yours.

You pay for a domain name annually, but some companies will let you buy it
for up to 10 years in advance. If you forget to renew your domain name it
goes back into the pool of available names and someone else can buy it, so
it makes sense to pay for a few years in advance if you can. If your domain
name is coming up for renewal you will be emailed several times to remind
you, so you won’t lose it to someone else.

It’s just like owning a phone number. If you don’t pay your bills and get cut
off eventually the number is going to be freed up again and eventually given
to someone else.

One of the most popular sites for buying domain names is

www.godaddy.com. If you plan to use godaddy you can use my promo code
GB1 for a discount.

I also use www.namecheap.com, as they are very reliable and reputable

too.

The domain name is just one of two ingredients to getting a website

started. You’ll need the domain name, and a web host.

Please Note: Using GoDaddy will mean getting shown lots of offers as they
try to get you to add all kinds of extras to your shopping cart when you are
buying your domain name. I am pretty confident you can get by with none of
them, so don’t feel pressured into adding extra stuff. You just need a simple
domain name. If you are the kind of person who caves into that kind of
pressure very easily despite the advice then go with namecheap.com as they
are a lot cleaner and up front with that kind of thing.
25. WEB HOSTING:
Now that you have a domain name, you’ll need
some Web Hosting to go with it.

When you type in www.yournicheblog.com into

your web browser then the header image, the
page code, and the cool orange men, all whizz
down the phone lines from my web hosting to
your computer screen. You are downloading the
files to your web browser from my web hosting in
order to display them.

It helps to think of your web hosting as a bucket

which stores data online. I have this online-
bucket stored somewhere in the world labelled ‘yournicheblog.com’, and it
contains all the necessary files to make up the website. A web hosting
server actually looks like the picture shown here, a lot like a normal
computer. A web hosting company will have a specially-cooled warehouse-
type building where they have hundreds and hundreds of these servers
running constantly.

To get your website/blog up and running you will need the domain name to
point to your web hosting, and the web hosting itself.

To set up your web hosting I recommend you use Hostgator. They are the
company I use for my web hosting. You pay them about $5 a month to rent
your own web hosting space from their big huge army of servers. They are
cheap enough for anyone to afford [just drink one less starbucks coffee a
month to pay for it], and they have all the features of a pro host.

You can check out hostgator from my link at www.hostgator.com.

NOTE: When you sign up for web hosting [with any company], DON’T choose
‘Windows Hosting’. Choose Linux/Unix, every time. Windows hosting cannot
run Wordpress correctly.

26. NAMESERVERS:
When you have both a domain name and web
hosting set up, you’re almost done.

You will now need to link the two together. You do

this by editing the Nameservers.
Think of the domain nameservers as arrows. You need to point your domain
name to your web hosting in order to complete the circuit. If you don’t your
domain name will show nothing when you type it in, because it won’t be
reaching your web hosting.

When you set up your web hosting they will almost certainly have included
your nameservers in your welcome email. They will look something like this:

ns123.webhost.com
ns124.webhost.com

They will be specific to your particular web host, and have letters and
numbers specific to your particular account.

To make use of your nameservers you will need to log in to where you
bought your domain name from, find the settings pages for your domain
name, and delete the default nameservers and add in your own. If there are
more than 2 spaces for nameservers, don’t worry. Just leave the others
blank.

If you are unsure how to edit your domain nameservers you can take a look
on the help pages of the website where you bought your domain name from,
or give a quick call to their customer support. They will point you in the
right direction.

27. CPANEL:
Note: Depending on the kind of web hosting
account you set up, this may or may not apply
to you.

Cpanel is the admin interface to your web

hosting. Cpanel has lots of useful tools that let
you manage your web hosting, like a file
uploader, script installer, visitor stats, and
much more. If you need to change settings for
your web hosting [web hosting, not blog] then
the Cpanel is the place to be.

Typically you can access your web hosting

Cpanel at www.YourDomain.com/cpanel

A username and a password are required to access your Cpanel, and you will
have received these in your welcome email from your web host.
28. FTP:
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is a
quick way for you to transfer files and entire
folders from your computer up to your web
hosting space.

Your web hosting memory is just like the

memory on your own computer – it has folders,
files, folder inside folders, etc. You can browse
around these folders and files just like you do
with your own files and folders on your
computer, but you need a special FTP program
to do it.

An FTP program will let you upload/download/edit files and folders stored
on your web hosting. Most FTP programs cost money, but there is a free
Firefox addon called FireFTP that is more than sufficient for most website
owners. If you don’t yet have Firefox installed, head to www.getfirefox.com
and download it. It is a free alternative to the Internet Explorer browser
that is safer, faster, and less vulnerable to viruses. You can then install the
FireFTP addon under Tools>Addons.

To make sure the whole world isn’t able to rummage around your web
hosting, it is all password protected.

You will have received your FTP username and password in your welcome
email from your web host.
YOUR THOUGHTS
If you didn’t understand any of the explanations contained in this guide, or
if you think there is anything missing, please send me an email at
lewis@smilewebcreations.com with your feedback.

I’d love to hear from you, and I’d really like to be able to improve this guide
base don any feedback I get. So if you think about it... this is your chance to
change the world forever :-)

MY THANKS
I would just like to thank everybody who has been referring their friends
and colleagues to YourNicheBlog.com. It is because of all you happy and
delicious people that I don’t have to spend as much time on marketing as I
thought I would.

I plan to produce more free guides like this one to help you all with your
blogging adventures as my way of saying thanks, and to create even more
happy customers to recommend YourNicheBlog.com to the people they
know.

If you have any questions about your blog, or have a How To in mind for the
Advanced Help Blog, let me know and I’ll see if I can get it written up and
published for everyone.

Lots of love,

Lewis Smile :-)

www.YourNicheBlog.com

P.S. Are you a Squidoo lensmaster? Find me here:

Squidoo: www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/mrlewissmile
Squidoo Blog: www.SquidooCool.com
Squidoo Lens Service: www.BuildMyLens.com