Set up your blog like a professional blogger

  Hey guys, welcome to this new lesson in thisvideo course. 

I hope you have already bought the hostingfor your first website. 

And for all of you that has sent us the hostingreceipt, you must already received the link for our free video bonus course. Also, if you still haven’t bought the hosting,please do so my checking our earlier videos as this course is all about practical knowledgeand you won’t be able to move forward without a website. So today we will be talking about the settingsand the configuration part of your website.

 So just follow my step-by-step process andyou will be ready with your website in no time. So let’s start. Hey guys, welcome to lesson four of this digitalmarketing mastery course and today’s video is all about setting up your first WordPressblog like a professional blogger. So in the last video I told you the importanceof starting a website or starting a blog and how important it is for your success as adigital marketer. So I’m sure and I really hope that all ofyou has already purchased your first hosting and also I hope that you have claimed yourbonus course that we were offering. And today’s video we’ll be setting upyour blog like install WordPress, install the plugins and get the first layout of yourentire blog. 

So follow me throughout this video step-by-step,just follow the video and implement the same things on your blog as well and within a fewminutes, you will have a professional looking blog. 

So the backend that we will be installingon your blog will be WordPress. Now WordPress is an open source software,you can use to create a beautiful website or a blog. All my websites today use WordPress for thebackend and the best part is, it is the easiest and most flexible blogging and content managementsystem. It’s very easy to learn, it’s very intuitiveand once you follow along this video with me within few minutes, you will also startknowing exactly how WordPress works. And you will be able to make the changes inthe future without even any reference.

 So here I listed five reasons why I use WordPress. The most popular reason being that it is themost popular CMS in the world. And it’s open source with room for expansionso you’ll periodically get free updates for the WordPress. So it can be the security update, it can bethe design update, etcetera, etcetera. So you keep getting free updates and so youdon’t have to pay any monthly fees. Also, it’s highly customizable for greatflexibility. So you can change the entire layout from thetheme, from the colors, all the plugins, the widgets, etcetera. Everything can be customized so you’re notlimited to a few fixed sets of settings. Everything can be customized. And also another very important trait forWordPress is that it is designed for everyone. 

Be it a beginner or an advanced person, everyonecan use WordPress to handle their website. And it has lower setup and maintenance costs. First of all, WordPress is free. So the SiteGround hosting already providesWordPress for free. Yes, there are a few plugins that you haveto pay money for to use them. But apart from that, most of the plugins thatI’ll be using are free. And… so let’s get started into the video,and setup your first blog like a professional blogger.

 So guys you must have already received thesales receipt of your hosting purchase of SiteGround hosting. So now I’ll be logging on to my SiteGroundhosting and setting up my first WordPress blog. So just follow along with me and not justwatch the video, rather login to your SiteGround panel as well. And start implementing all the settings thatI’ll be doing. So I would want this video to be interactiveand just keep on following what I am telling you. And if you have any questions you can askit in the Facebook group and we’ll sort that out. 

So all you have to do is open SiteGround. Go to the login section. Enter the email address that you used to buyyour hosting. Enter your password. Login. So guys this is the window that will openup. So save your password in the browser. So here are a few options, like setup yourfirst website, start a new website, transfer a website or don’t need help now. So let’s say you already have a websitein another hosting. Let’s say like, HostGator or GoDaddy. Then you can even transfer your website fromthat hosting. I would recommend you to kindly transfer itto SiteGround because this is ten times better than any other hosting provider at the sameprice. So if you are using GoDaddy or HostGator,kindly transfer it to SiteGround. And if SiteGround is something that you don’tlike then it’s no issue at all. So we’ll click here, “don’t need helpnow”. Because I will be telling you the more advancedversion of setting up your blog. And we don’t need this, 

so we’ll justconfirm. And I confirm, and… “Complete Setup”. So this is the backend of your hosting accountSiteGround. So now the first step is to go to your “myaccount” section. And this is the setting of your website. So go to “C Panel”. Click on this selection. Click “proceed”. So the first step is to… so on the leftside you will see all the settings of your website. This is the IP address, this is the serverhostname, and the plan that you have. 

So I recommend the GrowBig plan and… becauseyou can create multiple websites in it. So the first step is to install the necessarycertificate. So whenever you use a website you’ll seethat instead of “http” you’ll see “https”. This is the security protocol. So first we install the “https” certificateon our website. And the best part is SiteGround offers itfor free. Other hosting provider charge a monthly feefor this. So you’ll only get the necessary certificatefor free. So “ctrl + f”. Let’s encrypt. So click here on “let’s encrypt”. Click here on set an “action”, “httpssetting”. 

So click here in “https enforce”. “External link rewrite”, click here aswell. And click okay. So it’s already active now, so we’ll goback to “my account”. Click on “c panel”. Click on “WordPress”. Install. Here you choose the protocol, I want the “https”with the “www.” protocol. And “askankur.in” Directory, leave itempty. Here, the name of your blog. It can be anything. For me, it’s “askankur”. Site description, “my first website blog”. So, I’ll write here anything. You can change the settings later as well. So I’ll write anything like “ask me anything”. We don’t want multi-sites so we’ll leaveit off. Admin username, this is the username thatyou would want. 

So let’s keep any username here like “test123”. And admin password, we’ll keep it againanything, “test123”. Admin email, this is the email that you’llbe using where all notifications of your website will be going. So I’ll keep it to… “digimybusiness@gmail.com”. Select language, “English.” Ask me anything… and, login attempt. You don’t want this, you also don’t wantthis.  Let’s see what’s in the advanced option. This is the database name and the table preference. You wouldn’t want to mess with that. 

So this is what you have to do. Click on “install”. A password must be greater than fifty… let’schange the password to something... else. Let’s install. So WordPress is installing as of now. So your website must be live now. You can click here and check for yourself. So here’s the website, it’s opening up. And here is the backend URL if you are logginginto your WordPress. So it’s your website name slash the truepin admin. So once we click here, you will be redirectedto here. Since we already had the username and thepassword stored, that is why we didn’t have to login. Otherwise the username and the password youcan use is the one before, while installing WordPress. It’s the username and the password thatyou have to enter. So here you can dismiss this, you wouldn’twant that. And usually what I do is I remove the “quickdraft”, the “WordPress events and news”. And keep, only “at a glance” and “activity”. I also reduce the zoom tool around 80% soI can see everything clearly. 

So this is the backend of your website. And this is the website. So any changes that you want in the frontend,this is where you’ll be doing it. So let me first give you an overview. Here’s the “home” your basic… youcan change all the widgets here. You can add widgets as well, you can evendrag and drop here. Then there’s the “updated” if you haveany plugin update or WordPress update, it will be shown here. You can click here. This is the section that you’ll be usingfor adding the articles and adding the post. Here you can segment the articles throughvarious categories and tags. 

 Like “contact me at” , “about us”,etc. etc. “Comment” section will help you in moderatingthe comments. And “appearances” is where you’ll beadding the themes, the plugins, etc. Appearance section is where you’ll be addingthe themes and customizing then also changing the widgets. So, let’s first go through each option oneby one. So I think we should first start with thebasic setting that you have to do for your blog. So I use few paid instrument websites thathave extremely helped me in the monetization as well as on the overall management of mywebsite. So you can check my blog at the tool sectionhere at “ankuraggarwal.in/blogging-tools/” Here I’ve listed all the various tools andsoftware I use. In terms of one software or rather one pluginthat I highly recommend, is the “Thrive Membership”. So once you click on it, you will be redirectedto Thrive members.

 So thrive membership, and I have a discountlink as well. So all you have to do is visit ThriveThemesand at the bottom you’ll be able to get all these amazing plugins like ThriveUltimatum,headline optimizer, cleaver widgets, landing pages, architect… ThriveLeads and architect are two most usedplugins by me. And even ThriveThemes, the theme that I usein my website is from ThriveThemes. So instead of buying them individually, whatI have done is I have purchased a membership for all their products. So I just pay a monthly premium and I am ableto install all their plugins on multiple websites. So I think that has a 25 limit. So you can use all their plugins for a fixedmonthly fee on more than 20 websites. So currently I am running 7 to 8 plus websites,and all of them use plugins from ThriveThemes like the themes, the ThriveLeads and architect,that’s so good. So you can see here, I have the ThriveThemesmembership, yearly membership which only costs $228. And I highly recommend them if you are seriousabout digital marketing. So all you have to do this click here, visittheir landing page here, see plans and pricing. Here you will be getting all these amazingbenefits on their landing page as they mention. So, if you pay annually, you only have topay $19 per month. But if you pay quarterly then it will be alittle higher.

 So I already have paid annually and I am usingall their plugins on all my websites. So $19 per month is not a big amount for me. But the amount of benefits I get from thismembership is incomparable. 

So to install all their plugins, all I haveto do is… I have to login to my ThriveThemes dashboard. What I’ll do is, I’ll go back to my askankurWordPress admin. I’ll go to plugin. Add new. I’ll upload the plugin. File- open and install. Then I’ll click on activate plugin.

 Now as you can see you can come here in theproduct manager and see which all plugins you want to install. So first I have to login to my account. So let’s login to my account here now. So this plugin has already taken my emailID, because I already stored it in my browser. So here are all the plugins that I can installon my website. So the ones that I highly recommend are ThriveLeads. So let’s deselect all of them first. Let’s install this one, and ThriveArchitect. These are the two most used plugins by me. Other ones you can check their informationon their website. They’re also good, you can also use ThriveCommence,ThriveOptimize to test your landing pages on various variations. So I will recommend these two and also installa theme for the website. I use RiseThemes for my website “ankuraggarwal.in”So I’ll install the same here as well. 

So I’ll be installing, ThriveLeads, ThriveArchitectand RiseThemes. So here you can see that both of our pluginsare installed. So now, ThriveThemes is a paid membership. So you’ll have to pay some money to getall the plugins. But if you don’t want to spend the moneyand you want free options then you can go to appearance, themes. And here you’ll have some free themes alreadylike 2017, 2016 or 2019. So these are the active themes, you can usethem as well. If you don’t want to pay money. 

But if you are serious about your digitalmarketing career, if you really want to grow as a professional digital marketer, then Ihighly recommend to try out ThriveThemes at the ankuraggarwal blogging tools section. Click here and join the ThriveTheme membership. So this is the other option for going throughthe free option. Now let’s do some setting parts. Let’s go to our settings part. Settings, general. We’ll just change your settings. So here will be the website name, and herewill be anything related to your website. So if your website is about selling guitars,then you can write something like “selling word class, high quality guitars” here inthe tagline section. So whatever suits you.

 Having the main keyword also really helps. So like, if you are selling guitar then writingthe keyword like “we sell guitar” will really help in your search effort as well. So here will be the email ID associated withyour account. This is the email where all the notificationswill be going. Keep the rest of the settings just like that. Let’s check the writing part. Here also, leave everything just like it. You wouldn’t want to change anything inhere. Let’s go to the reading part. 

So blog posts, at most 10 posts. And syndication feed, each article full textsummary. Never click this otherwise Google crawlerwill not be able to crawl your website. And your website won’t be shown in the searchengine results of Google. So don’t enable this. Just keep it the way it is. Let’s go to permalinks. So make sure your permalinks are in the formof… post name is selected not the day and name. You would want the permalink as post name. This is extremely important for you and soyou’ll have a clean URL. So click here and click save changes. Now we’ll be installing a few more pluginsthat are important for your website, so we’ll go to plugins install plugins. So we already have a few plugins installed. We already installed architect, ThriveLeads,and ThriveProduct manager. As you optimize the plugin that is alreadyinstalled by SiteGround hosting. It really helps in making your website extremelyfast, so this is the power of SiteGround. They make your website automatically fastso you don’t need any technical knowledge or have to spend money to hire someone tomake your website faster. This plugin itself does all the job.

 So now we’ll be installing a few plugins,so we’ll click here. Add new, add new, add new. We’ll add a few plugins here. So first we’ll add the “contact us”plugin. So first we’ll add the contact plugin. So we install here, the contact form 7. Install now. 

Click activate. Here you also have to add the limit loginattempts plugin. This plugin will help you in protecting yourwebsite from hacking etc. When people might try different username andpassword combination. So this will prevent that. So this is related to the security of thewebsite. There are many other plugins that you caninstall, but we’ll keep these for now. So let’s go to the thrive dashboard at theThriveThemes settings. So we’ll check, thrive dashboard. Let’s go to “general settings”. This one looks fine. Let’s go to Thrive dashboard again. Let’s go to appearance, themes. We installed the Thrive rise theme, but wedid not activate it, so make sure you activate it. Click here on activate. So ThriveThemes is activate now. So let’s check the website. So you must see that the look of your websitehas changed now. So this is the thrive rise theme. So now once you have activated it, go to thrivedashboard and go to theme options. Here you can change a lot of things. Like you can add a logo, here. You can remove it and add the logo here. Let’s… like here, here it’s rise. You can change the logo to your… you cancreate a logo and upload it here. 

Also to change the logo background, logo position,header font. You can also change the footer copyright text. So the text here “copyright 2019 by askankur”you can change it. Footer copyright links, do you want this linkedor not, so we’ll just “off”. Enable footer popular post, I don’t wantthis. Display Breadcrumbs, yes. Let’s save all changes. And then you will refresh it now. 

You’ll see that the footer links are gonebecause you disabled them. Style and layout. What’s the color theme you want. Let’s go for purple. Blog post layout, I prefer the full width. I don’t want the right widget. Just like if you go to ankuraggarwal website. If you go to the blog section, and you clickany of the article, you’ll see that the article is spread across the screen. So there is no widget area here. So this article is spread across the screen. This is the part that means it’s “fullwidth”. Site blog alignment, you can keep it hereas well. So let’s save all changes. Let’s go to blog settings now. Show feature image in single post. Do you want to… so here it’s… Feature image is all about this… this iscalled the feature image of the article. Do you want this image here on the articleor not. So you can click it on or off. I have kept it on. Do you want the author name, do you want thepost date, or category. Like here is the author name, post date andthe post category. So, these three options is what is meant bythese three options here. So display about the author page. Like here is the author box. This is the author box. Do you want to display it or not. 

So I have kept it on. So similar things, just check all the settingshere and save all changes. Let’s go to “performance” now. Image optimization, I usually prefer losslessimage compression. Because the smaller your website size, thehigher will be the website loading speed. So always try to compress the images so theimages sizes are smaller and your website loads at a faster rate.

 So I usually lossless image compression. Lazy load comments I keep it on so that…this is another feature that will help in making your website faster. Image resize, I keep it to default. Save all changes. Comments... I usually show comments on pages. I don’t want the comments on pages, I ratherwant the comments on the posts or the articles of the website. Highly all the comments on. Comment count, on. You can also integrate Facebook comments. For that you’ll need to check their ID. You can also click here or click on the questionbutton to understand how to add Facebook comments to your website. So let’s check the social media, here youcan add your social… Twitter username, your Twitter buttons, socialmedia… Google plus button. You can also decide where it should be shown. 

So you can add your social media data here. As well as the URL of all your social media. If you already have the social media accounts,I would recommend them to be added here. Because these will be shown on your website. And the related post, we’ll leave it…we’ll leave the form at full page. As for the related post, I’ll keep it on. Because I want the people to check the relatedposts of my website. I’ll keep it to 4, and save all changes. Enable this feature. 

And save all changes. So this was it about the thrive themes setting. You can also customize further by going toappearance and customize. Here you have more settings related to yourthemes, like you can change the color here, you can also change the font format. You can change so many other things here aswell. Like outside entity. You can check the fonts. You can select which font you want. You can select the size of the font. Like, the body element, what font should be. What font should be the headline, what’sthe size of the headline. The background image. So make sure you also check these other optionsas well. If I go to each option then it will take around3 to 4 hours just for this video itself. So I would recommend for you guys to checkall these options and if you have any questions or queries, ask it in the Facebook group andI’ll help you there. So we’ll go back. 

So I forgot this plugin it’s called “YoastSEO”. This really helps in the SEO of your website. SEO means getting your website in the Googlesearch results for your target keyword. So I have installed the same plugin, it’sfree of course, and I have installed the same plugin in all my websites. This will really help in getting the websitesearch engine optimized. So we’ll activate it. 

You don’t have to change much setting inYoast SEO, it already has the best settings for you. So just install it and activate it. Now the next step is to add an article. So now I’ll tell you how to add an article. But first let’s create a menu searcher. So we’ll go to appearance, then menu. Here you can create multiple menu. So let’s say I create a menu name like,“top menu” and I’ll create menu. So before you can create a menu you’ll needa category, so let’s say… go to post. Categories. And let’s add some categories. Let’s say your website is about guitars. 

Then you might have a category on “how to”,so this will be the “how to” articles. So you can select the parent category or justkeep it like that. Or you can also add the description. I don’t like to keep the description, I’lljust add a new category. So this will be for my how to articles. Then one category for my videos, where I’llbe adding the video based articles.

 So this will be the… this is will be mereviewing any kind of product. I’m just making some arbitrary categorieshere. And you can create other categories as well. So once these categories are created, youcan create the menu items. So let’s go to, appearance, menu again. So here you can go to category section, youcan select “view all how to” product and video. Add to menu. You can also add a custom link like “home”. Click here “home” and let’s add it as“https”. “www.askankur.in”. 

Add menu… save menu. So keep it as primary menu if you forgot toenable this option. Folder menu will be shown at the bottom ofyour website, and primary menu at the top. So we’ll click, save menu. And now when we check our website, “askankur.in”You’ll see that we have the menu items here. Home, how to, product, video, etc. etc. Similarly, you can add more menu items. So now let’s add an article to the website. So we’ll go “add new”. So I am using ThriveArchitect for my articlesso let’s first add the title here. So we’ll add the guitar here, we’ll selectthe category that we would want, let’s say “how to” article, since this is a howto article we’ll select the how to category. In the tags, I might add “guitar”, “learn”,etc. Here is the Yoast plugin. Actually working it’s magic. 

So here will be… this is a snippet of howyour article will look in front of Google search results. So you can change everything here, like…let’s say I don’t want the site title. I can remove the separator as well. So let’s keep it here, something like this. “Learn guitar in ten days”. So this will be my title. So let’s say it’s 2019 optimized. I’ll add the date here as well. Similarly, I can add the meta descriptionon what should be shown about the article. Here you can give a brief on the article. What the article is all about. Like in this article… I comprehensively covered… in a step-by-stepmanner… how to play guitar like a professional. I just everything, whatever came to my mind. You can create a much better description here. So once this is done, click on save draft. So now this is saved in your WordPress backend. So now we’ll be creating a much beautifulversion of this article. 

So click here and launch ThriveArchitect. If you’re not invested in ThriveThemes membership,then you won’t see this button. Then you’ll have to use the basic editorof WordPress. And since it does not offer too many functionalities,I usually don’t prefer it, I usually prefer to make my articles lookbeautiful in a way that people would want to read. That’s why I purchased this membership. Now you can see that the author here is empty. 

So to change that, all you have to do is…click on, go to “user” and your profile. And you can change everything here like yourusername, your first name etc. Also the description that you would want here. Like, here you can see everything is empty. You can add all your photos as well, and yoursocial media URLs as well. So make sure you complete this about profileas well and save it. Only then it will be shown here. So let’s say that you want to create thisarticle in a much beautiful manner, so what we’ll do is, I’ll go to… I’ll select two sections, 2 by 3, 1 by 3. Here I’ll add a paragraph and here I’lladd an image. You can upload an image here as well. So let’s go to media library… and we don’thave any image. So here you can write anything. “Hey guys, welcome.” “This article will cover everything aboutbecoming an expert level guitar player even if you have just started.” I just wrote random lines there, just to showyou how it works. You can also add multiple other things.

 So these are all the elements that ThriveArchitectoffers. I won’t be covering all of them becauseagain, the video will be too long. I recommend you to go through the Thrive Membership’splugin of ThriveArchitect and go through all the features it offers. Because that’s how you learn digital marketing,you have to test everything. Like you can add a table of contents as well… You can add a style list. You can make beautiful lists. And here are options related to the list. So let’s say I want to reduce the depth. I can also delete the element, I can alsochange this check to any other icon. You can add even more icons. So let’s say I would want this, so I canclick this. 

So this is the power of ThriveArchitect. So you can click here on any elements andall the settings will be shown. You can change the background color, backgroundstyle, layout, position. You can also duplicate the elements, so likeclick here and a duplicate will be created with the themes settings. So you’ll just… you’ve already startedto see the power of ThriveArchitect. This is the reason I have invested some moneyin Thrive Membership. Because first you get free themes, then youalso get these amazing plugins and tools at a much, much cheaper price. If you individually buy these plugins, theywill cost you around $70 per year. But with just $19 per month, I get accessto all the plugins, all the themes. This is the reason why I highly recommendusing thrive membership. This is why I recommend you guys to go to“blogging tools” click on thrive membership and invest in that because that’s the mostamazing membership I’ve ever purchased. So there are many other things. You can also add tabs. You can add images, you can add gifs. You can add star ratings. 

And everything is customizable it’s notlike standard.  Let’s say you want to keep it in the center,you can also change that. You can also change the background style. If you want some color you can add some color. This way you can make a beautiful article. Like this page of my website you can see thatthere’s an image, there’s a text on the left, then there’s this box. Image, button. Then… how easily and how beautiful thiscontent is formatted. Like I’ve added this box and this beautifulbutton here. Now you won’t be able to create somethinglike this in the basic WordPress editor. You will need more power. This is the power that ThriveArchitect givesyou, the plugin that comes with Thrive Membership. So all of this was created through ThriveArchitect. Like these beautiful check marks, the properformatting and all.

 So you can also achieve such results throughusing ThriveArchitect. So my next task for you will be to set upyour blog. Just like I told you in this video. Complete all the settings, add all the plugins. Also write your first article and share thatfirst article in our Facebook group. So that I along with the moderators can giveyou reviews and that is how you’ll be able to become a better digital marketer. So once everything is done make sure you clickon “save work”, otherwise nothing will be saved. And if you are ready to publish your article,just go back to the article and click on ”publish”. 

Once you hit publish, your article will bepublished and you can click on “view post” and your article will be live on your website. Just like that. We haven’t added anything right now that’swhy it’s not showing anything, but you can create a beautiful article and then sharethe article in the Facebook group. Honestly guys, there’s too much to learnabout WordPress as well. But the things that I’ve shown you theseare the basics of understanding the backend of your website, the dashboard of your website. So this is the WordPress dashboard, I’llrecommend you to please at first complete all these steps and then sooner or later you’llstand understanding all the other options as well. I’ll also create a more comprehensive videoabout how to use the other options on this WordPress dashboard.

 So don’t worry, don’t feel too overwhelmed. At the same time, don’t feel that we arenot taking care of you guys. I want all of you to become a pro digitalmarketer. And this is very important because withouta website you won’t be able to learn the future videos. You won’t be able to implement everything. So starting a blog is an extremely importantpart, so if you haven’t purchased the hosting yet, I highly recommend you guys to go andmake that investment in yourself. And complete all these steps and share yourquestions or doubts if you have any in the Facebook group, and we’ll be answering allof them. So guys I’ll end this video here, and I’llsee you in the next video. 

Thank you for watching. Complete all these steps for our website aswell. And tomorrow is my favorite topic, searchengine optimization. And how to drive free traffic from Google. I will also be sharing my strategies on howto write a perfect post that drives hundreds and thousands of visitors for your website. Now, I have a checklist for you the ten WordPressmistakes that only newbie digital marketers make.

 I hope someone told me all of these earlier. All you have to do this, click on the linkbelow this video and you can download this checklist. And also I hope you’re getting tons of valuefrom our Facebook group, make sure you’re active and I’ll see you in the next video.