So a big question a lot of people face when they first start blogging is how to set up their blog. Should it be self hosted on your own domain or can you get away with just having a .wordpress.com domain?

So if you haven’t caught on yet there are these things called RSS feeds that your readers can use to keep up to date with your blog. The benefit of RSS readers is that your inbox doesn’t get overloaded with subscriptions. Many readers choose RSS over email. On this blog only 15% of subscriptions are by email the rest are RSS subscribers.
Here is a walkthrough for setting up a FeedBurner account right through to adding cool RSS buttons to your blog.
Set Up FeedBurner
FeedBurner is owned by google and will track your RSS …

This is something that many wordpress users overlook and the sooner you get it right the better. Search engine results are influenced by the URL so make sure you have good ones!
Permalinks
I have seen so many wordpress accounts lately who are using the standard permalinks. Permalinks are the way your URL is set up when you publish a post. The standard permalink structure looks something like http://yourblog.com/?p=5. And I am sure you can understand that ?p=5 isn’t very search engine friendly (or people friendly for that matter).

To set up great …

This is just a very quick overview of how to install all the fancy themes and plugins that make wordpress such a great blog platform. These tips are only for self hosted wordpress blogs i.e www.yourblog.com and not yourblog.wordpress.com.
Before you read this you should already be familiar with wordpress and be part way through setting up your blog. I would recommend you read the post “Blogs 101 The Essential Tips For Setting Up WordPress” before you start.
You can download and automatically install a majority of the plugins direct from the …

So this guide is based on what I have learnt while setting up my wordpress blog, the mistakes I made and how you can avoid them plus the good plugins I have found that will make your blog a raging success!
Why use wordpress?
It has an easy user interface, there are a trillion different themes and they are easily interchanged, it is SEO friendly and probably the most important is the plugins. With wordpress you can simply add a plug-in activate it and then add it to your sidebar. Simple
So setting …