As I’ve settled a little with my blog. I am taking this opportunity to help the newbies with setting up their own wordpress blog. Following 5 tips which are in the format of a step-by-step guide would make it easy for people to set up their blog.

1) The first and most important tip is to get your own website and avoid blogging with blogging services like wordpress and blogger. What I mean by that is, you need to have your own website like digitally yours one and not something like http://xyz123.blogspot.com or http://xyz123.wordpress.com.

However, it is not mandatory that you have your blog hosted on a TLD (top level domain). What I mean is it’s not cumpolsory to have http://digitallife.co.in, you can have the website and host your blog on a sub domain like http://blog.digitallife.com or as a directory like http://digitallife.co.in/blog/. What’s important is that you are the owner of the TLD i.e. http://digitallife.co.in in this case.

2) If you are a hardcore programmer, please use your own ways of creating your blog. If you are novice, the best option you have is to install the latest version of wordpress (I personally feel that wordpress is the best blogging platform). You can download the latest copy (2.3.3) from here. Please avoid beta releases if you are not an expert. There is a famous five minute installation of wordpress here.

3) WordPress is such a versatile tool that it gives you enormous power and with power comes responsibility. The responsibility of not screwing up. So to avoid any screw up of your wordpress on your server, I suggest you to make a replica of you wordpress and run it on your localhost. For this you’ll need:

• A WAMP (WAMP is an acronym that stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or Perl or Python)). I use Vertrigo which can be found here. I will do an exhaustive post on the basic setup of wordpress on localhost using Vertrigo.

• After you have installed the WAMP, you can installed the wordpress (2.3.3) that you’ve downloaded. Start playing with installing themes and plugins as per the requirement of your blog. I’ll do a post on my favorite themes and plugins which I am using.

4) The next step is to ensure that your blog is seo optimized. Again, for this there are multiple plugins that you can find by visiting plugins section. Also, ensure that the URL of your post is not dynamic. What I mean by this, by default wordpress generates dynamic URLs for the posts that you publish. Something like this http://digitallife.co.in/?p=19. Instead your URL should be http://digitallife.co.in/highest-traffic-keyword-on-internet/.

This can be easily changed by customizing permalinks under the options section in your wordpress. Following snapshots will help you get a clear picture.

5) The last and most important thing is to take a regular backup of your blog. You must be asking me, how do I do that? It’s pretty simple, just use the plugin named WP-DBManager. I’ll do another post giving a complete tutorial on the usage and functionality of this plugin.

I hope, this post will be of some use to all the people planning to start their blog. These are just few tips when you are planning to start a blog. I’ll use another post with pictorial diagrams to tell you how to install wordpress on your hosting server.