WordPress is the #1 blogging platform that virtually all the experts advise you to use. When you look at some of the most successful blogs on the Internet they invariably display ‘powered by WordPress’ at the bottom of the page.

But, if you’re not a techie, and you’ve ever tried to begin with WordPress, you’ll maybe find it difficult to get started. Here’s what I recommend:

1. Educate yourself first. If you’re new to WordPress, start at the beginning. Begin by starting a free wordpress.com blog as a training exercise. Download my free tutorial at
   http://wordpress2go.com/wordpress-tutorial/ to show you how.
2. Use your free blog as a prototype. Explore and experiment with themes, colors, layouts. Don’t worry if you make mistakes. It’s only a trial!
3. Create a few posts and pages and see how it’s shaping up. Do you want your blog to eventually work like this? If not, poke around the dashboard and find different ways of doing things. Change your theme, if necessary.
4. Compare your blog with others in the field. What have they got that you haven’t? Find out how to do the things they’re doing. Maybe you find things that you can’t do on a free blog (like plugins), in which case just make a list of the things you’d like to do.
5. Decide whether you want to stay with your free wordpress.com blog or whether you want to upgrade to the more functional wordpress.org platform. If you upgrade, you can have all the bells and whistles of a fully functioning WordPress blog, just like the experts whose blogs you’ve been admiring. But, if you’re happy with your wordpress.com blog, fine, you’ve got started in 5 steps!
6. When you’re reading to upgrade, get my ‘WordPress In 1 Day‘ video tutorial and I’ll show you how. In the 12 lessons of the tutorial I build an actual blog on a domain and you can follow along step by step as I do it. This isn’t free but it doesn’t cost megabucks. What I can promise you is that it will be a fine investment in your skills base and a lot cheaper than hiring a webmaster to do it for you!

Once you get started with WordPress you’ll discover that it’s not that scary. Why not get started on step 1 today?

Tags: starting wordpress

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 8:54 am and is filed under Learn Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.