How to Build a Blog for Residual Income – Part 2

October 21st, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Blogging

This is Part 2 of the series How to Build a Blog for Residual Income.

In Part 1 of this post, I explained why residual income is a worthy goal, and presented one of my favorite books, The 4-Hour Workweek, which goes to great lengths to explain different ways in which you can create a sustainable flow of residual income for yourself. In this post, I’ll begin the process of showing you how to create a blog for one of these channels of residual income. Please keep in mind that blogs offer only one possibility for residual income in your life, and that to be most effective, you should strive to create other channels of residual income for yourself. When you do this, even if each stream of income is only bringing in small amounts of money, when you add them all up, the results can be overwhelming!

For my blogs, I tend to use either Blogger or WordPress, so my experience with other platforms is limited. For this series of articles, I’ll be focusing mostly on WordPress, but may mention Blogger in passing if I feel I can contribute something important. Now, without further ado, here’s a rundown of some of the things I’m planning to discuss in this series of articles:

• Finding a host for your blog
• Installing and setting up WordPress
• Choosing a WordPress Theme
• Integrating Adsense
• Signing up to be an Amazon Associate
• Setting up FeedBurner and MyBrand
• Utilizing the Buy Me a Beer WordPress Plugin
• Google Analytics
• Maybe more…

Finding a Host for your Blog

First things first… if you are going to start a blog, you are going to need to host it somewhere. If you want something quick and easy, I’d recommend Google’s Blogger. While Blogger is a great solution and can certainly make you money, you may wish to consider other options if you really want to have full control over your blog. For this reason, I recommend WordPress.

WordPress hosting is available from many different sources, including some free ones. The only way to achieve maximum flexibility in optimizing your earnings, however, is to pay for it. I use Site 5 for my WordPress hosting, and I highly recommend them. Signing up is easy. Just click on this link and follow the instructions to set up your own account. Their available plans vary from day to day, but they always offer a variety of inexpensive, yet very professional and feature-packed, hosting options.

Once they’ve got your account set up, login to SiteAdmin with your new credentials. Under CGI & PHP Scripts, you’ll want to click on Fantastico. This will take you to the management console for installable apps on your new website. Under Blogs, select WordPress, then select New Installation. Follow the steps to install the WordPress platform on your new site. You may choose to install it in any directory of your choosing, but it’s easiest to install it at the root. Once installed, you can navigate to http:///wp-login.php (assuming you installed WordPress at the root of your site) and login to check things out! Take this opportunity to play around with some settings and get yourself familiar with the platform. There’s only one way to get comfortable using a new blogging platform and that’s just to dive right in and figure things out. If you’re confused, don’t worry. In Part 3 of this series, I’ll give you some tips on configuring WordPress to not only host your blog content, but to maximize your earnings from that content. Thanks for reading!

Check out Part 3 of this series.

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