Now that you have a great plan in place and have set up your blog it is now time to customize it.  Since the most popular blog management system is WordPress I am going to focus on it.  There are 3 major ways to customize your WordPress blog; themes, theme customization, and plugins. 

The appearance of any WordPress blog can be extremely easy to alter and there are nearly endless options for its appearance.  WordPress has built in a function that allows themes to be added to a WordPress blog and it will quickly and easily alter the appearance and often times the functionality of the blog.

There are many free WordPress themes available on the Internet and there are premium themes that you can buy as well.  Doing a quick Google search will find themes that work for just about any niche.

Once you have found the theme that you want to use follow these instructions to set it up:

• Download theme
  • If the file is zipped, unzip the file
• Upload the files to the theme folder
  • Main blog folder > wp-content > themes
• Log into your WordPress Blog
• Click on the Design tab
• Click on the theme tab
• Select the theme you just uploaded

Thats it!  The theme is now set up and you could begin to post on this new theme, but many people like to customize their blog even further.

Each theme can be customized to fit your needs.  Some people like to change the colors of the text, the links, or get very deep into the coding of the theme and heavily modify the theme.  To do this type of customization you need to be familiar with HTML, CSS and PHP.  These tasks are beyond this post, but there are many references you can find online to help you with that.

Once you have your blog looking the way you want it to, it is time to install some plugins.  Plugins are programs that add, or even remove, functionality to WordPress.  They range from adding a top commenter section to the blog to filtering out spam.

Some of the plugins I use on all my blogs are Akismet (a spam filter), Crawl Rate Tracker (tracks how often your blog is visited by a search engine spider) and FeedBurner FeedSmith (a plugin that helps track and organize RSS subscriptions).  There are far more plugins than this that are very useful and many can be found by doing a simple Google search.

The installation of a plugin is very similar to themes:

• Download plugin
  • If the file is zipped, unzip the file
• Upload the file to the plugin folder
  • Main blog folder > wp-content > themes
• Log into your WordPress blog
• Click on the Plugin Tab
• Select the Plugin you just uploaded
• Activate it and follow instructions included with activated

Now that you have you blog looking and working the way you want it is time to start to add content and promote it!  Stay tuned for part 4.

Now that you have sat down and figured out why you are going to blog, what niche you are going to blog about, what you are going to write about in that niche and what is going to make your blog unique it is time to set up the blog! When Setting up a blog there are 3 major things to consider, the domain name, the web host, and the Content Management System, CMS.

The first thing you have to be concerned with is your domain name.  The domain name is what your entire blog is going to be centered around and is how people will remember your site.  It is important that the domain name be relevant to the niche, memorable, and even catchy.  Once you have you domain name picked out you have to register it.

I recommend, and use, GoDaddy.com for all domain name registrations.  All you have to do is type in the domain name and see if it is available.  If it is, the registration process takes less than 5 minutes!  If you use GoDaddy.com  the promo code OYH3 will make each .com domain name $6.99 a year.

Once you have your domain name registered the next thing to consider is your web host.  There are thousands of host out there and many of them are quite good.  When picking a web host the things that are important to look for are the following:

• Amount of Ad-On domains allowed
• Amount of databases allowed
• Amount of bandwidth allowed

These are the most important.  Ad-On domains allow you to use the same hosting account for multiple domains and websites.  This is very useful because once you start one blog, many people want to start another.  And if you are starting multiple blogs, it is best to have the ability to use multiple databases.

Bandwidth is usually not that important to a new blog, but as a blog grows bandwidth can become very important.  If a blog becomes very popular and exceeds its bandwidth allotment substantial charges can be encored.  

The web host we use and recommend is HostGator.com.  We have found them to be extremely reliable and meet all of our needs.

Once you set up your hosting account (takes about 5 minutes with HostGator.com and most other web hosts) you have to set your domain names DNS servers.  This is a very simple process and, again, should only take about 5 minutes.  If you are using HostGator.com as your web host and GoDaddy.com  as your domain registrar here is how you do set up your DNS servers:

• HostGator.com will email you your DNS server names
  • Usually something like NS80.HostGator.com
• Log into your GoDaddy.com account
• Click on the My Domains Tab
• Find the domain you are setting up the DNS Server for
• Click on the domain, then click the Name server icon
• Input the DNS Server into the supplied field

If you don’t not use your recommended web host and domain registrar the process is fairly similar for all of them.

Now that you have your hosting plan and domain name set up it is time to set up your Content Management System (CMS).  For blogs there are 3 main CMS systems in use, Joomla, Blogger, and WordPress.  WordPress is by far the most popular and it is the easiest to use and easiest to customize so I will focus on it.

Many web hosts, HostGator.com included, have a program that will automaticly install WordPress for you, but if you do not have a host that will do that or you want to install it yourself I would highly suggest reading the instructions that come with WordPress. 

The basic method of setting up WordPress on your server is as follows:

• Download the most recent version of WordPress ( http://www.wordpress.org/download)
• Unzip the file onto your hard drive
• Set up a database on your server (see instructions provided by host and WordPress)
• Edit the Config.php file to reflect database settings
• Upload all WordPress files
• Goto your domain name and follow on screen instructions

On average the setup process takes about 15-20 minutes. 

Now that your blog is set up, it is time to customize it!  Stay tuned for part 3!