okay by the end of this video here's what you're gonna have you are gonna
have your blog up and running you're gonna have free access to my 20 lesson
blogging course that will teach you everything you need to know about your
blog and how to use it and additionally you will have your blog set up in a way
that will be the best possible chance to make money from it because unfortunately
there are so many different types of blogs you can start that actually hinder
your ability to make money from that and as someone who's been making full-time
living for my blog for a decade now this is important it's important that we get
compensated for the work that we do that we put into our blogs and so I'm gonna
help you do that and maximize the amount of money that you can earn from your blog
alright so with all that out of the way if you're ready to get started let's dive right in
so we should be able to move through this pretty quick and get
like all this underlying stuff taken care of and hopefully about 10 minutes
or so so just feel free to pause the video and just follow along right along
with me as we go through this now if you do want to get our free 20 lesson course
after all of this then here is a link that you can use and you should be able
to click on it down below but if it's not there you can just type this in and
you can use that additionally if you go through this link you're gonna save 45% off
of the standard price for hosting ok so that sounds really great and you
might be wondering why we would give you this course for free well the truth is
is that almost any guide that you follow on how to set up a blog they're gonna
get a commission from the hosting company that they're pointing you to
so in our case you know we're gonna get a commission as well but I just feel like
let's just kind of toss that back to you a little bit and kind of share in that reward
but anyway we can get into those details in a little bit but for now
let's get going let's get you up and running and get your blog started and
then we can kind of talk about those details later
now I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time talking about why we're choosing
Hostgator but I will say this I've been doing this for 10 years I've used six
different web hosts from price points from the absolute cheapest to really
really expensive and I have recommended Hostgator to thousands of new bloggers
over those years and all in all this is just my favorite host for new bloggers
once you're a bit more established I don't think it's the best host I think
there are better options for you but as a new blogger I think this is the best
place to start it is the best value in terms of price that you're
paying and customer support that you are going to get alright now that we have
all that out of the way this should be something similar to what you're seeing
when you land on the page they're always tweaking and changing these pages so it
might be a little bit different don't worry about it but essentially they
should have a hatchling plan which is of cheapest and then a baby and then a
business plan for most new bloggers I would recommend the hatchling plan or
the baby plan the big difference between the two he was with the hatchling plan
you can only have one domain on your hosting account meaning you know if it's
Joesblog.com that's all you can have so if you wanted to start Joesblog.com
and then you wanted to start a cooking blog and then you wanted to start you
know a travel blog you would have to purchase a separate hosting package or
upgrade your hosting package to do that so if you're thinking that you might
want to create another blog in the future the baby plan might be a little
bit better because you can have multiple blogs on that one hosting account we'll
just start with the hatchling plan for now so you can just click the little
button to get started so if you do not have your domain picked out here's what
I recommend doing go over to a website called domize.com
and this is one of my favorite places to find domain names that are available so
if we're looking for "joescookingblog" so what we can see so whatever we're
typing here you can see what is available so the red is not but the blue is
so if we wanted to get Jose cooking blog we could get that com we could get
that .com or we can get that .net or that .org and so that's what we're looking for something where
you're seeing blue here what's cool about this is you can just kind of
search different keyword phrases related to your blog that you're thinking
about doing and this will help immensely all right so let's just say we're gonna
go with mycookingblog.org so we know that that's available so what we'll do
is we'll come back over to Hostgator and then we'll enter in that domain that
we're gonna get cooking blog we're gonna get the .org which they have down here and then
it says that is available it shows that it's available and there's a whole bunch
of other ones but all we need to do is get that one right now
now if you already have your domain what you can do is just enter that in over
here so now that we have my cooking blog org what we're gonna do is come on over here
select our we got this selected hatchling plan now to get the absolute
cheapest price you need to sign for the longest term so the they have a
three-year term and that's how you get the $3.82 a month so what you can do you
know if you don't want to sign a 3-year thing which you know I understand
you can get a much shorter term it's short as even a single month and so it's gonna
be a little bit more expensive but it's still six dollars a month so it's still
ridiculously cheap and what you want to do at this point is just so we'll just
change that to one just for this one you can enter in your username you can enter
in your security pin and then you can enter in all of your billing information as well
now for the additional services personally what I don't do the SiteLock
I don't do the site backup I don't do any of their stuff the only thing I might do
is back up above where we have domain privacy protection I might do
this it's a $1.25 a month and so essentially what this does is when you
buy a domain your information is out on the internet so it shows people who owns
that domain so my cooking blog it's gonna say that Bob Lotich owns this and
it's gonna show my business address and possibly even whatever phone number I
provide so if you want to stay private with that and keep that information
private then you can add this on for a $1.25 a month so it's your choice
but I tend to do that with most of my domains oh and I should add that
$1.25 a month is not tied to your hosting but to do domain itself so in this
particular example even though we're only getting one month of hosting we're
going to have the domain for a year and it's gonna charge us a $1.25 each month
so that would be fifteen dollars additional that we would need to pay
today for that but all these additional services I don't get you can always get
them later if you'd like and then enter in the coupon code it should put this in
automatically if you click the link if not you just type in "seedtime" and then
I'll knock off 45% for you all right and then down here we can
see everything we're going get 365 days a year phone chat and email support
which is great instant account activation money-back guarantee
see 45 days to get your money back if you decided not to do it
you're having your domain registration for one year and then you have the
hosting plan for one month in that six bucks and then you have the discount
there and that gives you a total of $18.97 today and so then you just click
checkout and one more thing I should add they are changing their prices somewhat
regularly so these prices might be a little bit different for you and I do
apologize if they're a little bit higher than what we're showing here but the
bottom line is trust me this is a really low cost host that provides great
service so it's still worth it alright and then now we're just waiting
for them to get the account all set up and this just might take a couple
minutes for you so just be patient all right and then this is the page you're
gonna land on after your account is set up so the next thing you want to do is
head over to your email you're going to be getting two separate emails from them
one is for all the billing information and then the other is for the account login information
normally it comes pretty quick but if it happens to take a while
for you you can jump on the chat box with the folks over at Hostgator
let them know you just set up your account you're waiting for your login
information and sometimes they can expedite that for you
so this is an example of one of these account information emails and what you will be receiving
it'll look something like this so right here where it says control panel
you can just click this link and open this in a new tab and then you can
copy and paste your username and we're gonna paste that in and just second here
and then just go ahead and copy your password and we'll paste that in as well
alright and now that we're logged in this is what you were going to see and
this is the cPanel area and this is kind of the under the hood area of your
hosting account and so honestly like I almost never come in here this is one of
those things where you just setting this up at the beginning and you really
shouldn't have to come in here very much and honestly there's still a lot of
stuff in here I just don't even know what it does and so you just don't need
to know much about what's in here but we need to get WordPress installed and
that's why we're going to come in here so what we're going to do
just go ahead and click this click install button and then click WordPress
we're just gonna select our domain name from the drop-down and then hit next
now we're entering the information for us to set up our Wordpress blog so we have our
hosting account set up and now we're setting up the Wordpress blog and that
is where you're going to spend most of your time as a blogger is in the
WordPress blog itself so put it in the blog title we'll put in the admin user
first and last name and then our an email address and then you can just hit
Install Now and we can get Wordpress installed all right so now it is
installing so just hang tight and then once it is complete you will
see this little installation complete or some variation of it again this is one
of those things that they occasionally are changing so if it looks a little bit
different don't worry so what you can do at this point is just click this link here
this will take you over to your blog and you're not gonna see much yet
but will you just click that and your site again might look very different
than this but at the time of this recording this is how they're handling it
after you have installed your WordPress installation and so what
you're gonna want to do here is click admin login alright and I should add if
you click on the link of your blog and you are seeing something here showing
that it's not set up then what that probably means is that the DNS is still
propagating around the internet and essentially what that means is that it's
just gonna take a little bit more time for this information
to get all through the internet over to where you are and so a lot of times this
happens really really quickly but sometimes depending on where you're
located and what kind of Internet service provider you're using it takes a
little bit longer in some cases it can take over 24 hours like I rarely see
that happen in most cases it seemed to happen within a few minutes and
sometimes an hour but it is possible so just be aware of that if you're not
seeing it and again this is a great time to jump on chat support with Hostgator
if you're having any issues and if you're seeing something different than
what we're showing you here but if you are seeing something like this and you
have this admin login option just go ahead and click this button and we will
get you logged in and this is where you go to get logged in
your WordPress dashboard so I would bookmark this link because you're gonna
need to come back to this often every time you write a new blog post you're
going to come here and this is where you're gonna be spending a lot of your
time okay so the username and password information is what you just entered a
minute ago to create the quick install for WordPress and so I know there's a
lot of usernames and passwords and things so but I'm gonna break it down
into three main things you have going on so the first one email that you got was
billing for Hostgator and so that's gonna manage all of your billing stuff
it's all gonna be taking care through that the next one is for cPanel and this
is like the server stuff with your hosting and both of those two things I
very rarely go into in and the third username and password for WordPress and
this is where I spend most of my time and where you will spend most of your
time as a blogger so that's the one that you'll be using on a regular basis but
the other two are important and I would save them for those times when you will
need them and are in the username and the password that you just entered when
you were setting up your WordPress site all right so you are now logged in and
this is the backend of your WordPress and this is gonna be where you create
pages where you create posts you know if you were gonna upload any kind of videos
or audio any of that stuff this is all where you're going to be making those changes
so our start your blog 20 video course is going to teach you everything
you know about WordPress and how to actually use your blog and to get access
to that course all I need you to do is forward one of the Hostgator emails that
they sent you over to lauren@seedtime.com and as soon as we get that
information from you we will forward you a coupon code that will knock off a
100% of the price so you can get that course completely for free but
for now I want to talk just for a few minutes and give you a little bit of a
primer on what you need to know to start making money from your blog first thing
you need to do is you actually have to write a little bit of content and so I
would suggest getting about ten articles out on your site before you actually
start trying to make any money from it the other reason is that one of the best
and easiest ways to make money from your blog is a ad program called Adsense
and this is Google's program it's and I'm sure you've seen these ads because
they're probably on like 80% of all the websites on the entire Internet
they're just really really common and it's one of the easiest ways
to monetize a website or blog and to be approved for the Adsense program you
have to have a little bit of content on your site the Google Adsense people want
to know that you didn't start your blog yesterday and then you actually have a
good amount of content on there before they allow you to put ads up so to get
you started off on the right foot here's what I suggest
write 10 articles on your blog and then I would go over to Adsense.com and sign up
for their Adsense program once you get that they will give you just a little
piece of code that you can easily add to your blog if you go through our video
course there will be a lesson in there that will show you kind of where you
would want to put that and if for some reason you don't get approved for the
Google Adsense program there's an alternative that I would recommend
called Media.net they're pretty big competitor to Adsense there are some
things they do a little bit differently but if you can't get into Adsense that's
probably the next best option of how you can start monetizing the articles on your blog