Update: I’m happy to say that KeriLynn and I finally sorted out the mess of that other designer’s theme! She was able to create a new template file and I set it as a home.php file to override the designer’s functions which were already overriding WordPress settings for what should display on the homepage. Whew! It takes a lot of patience to sort out and fix bad coding in some cases, and most designers won’t help you do this for a third party’s theme (and I can’t blame them!). I couldn’t recommend KeriLynn highly enough, whether you need help sorting out an existing theme or creating a brand new one. She has the patience of a saint and the stubbornness of a mule (that’s a compliment!) — exactly what I needed to help me through this most recent WordPress nightmare. So a huge thanks to KeriLynn!

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen some recent rants about WordPress theme designers. You see, I’m launching or redesigning around a half dozen sites at once. I figured the quickest option in this case was to purchase premium base themes and then customize them to get exactly what I wanted (which is what I did with this site recently — it kicked off this series of launches and re-launches).

Two theme designers I purchased base themes for were ridiculous. They made the themes unnecessarily complicated — overriding basic WP functions with custom versions that simply didn’t work as they claimed. The support for these problem themes was terrible. While I did get this one fixed up after some drastic optimization (extra weeks of time lost), the other theme for my new fiction author site (AriaKlein.com) hasn’t been so lucky. I had to make design concessions I’m not happy with because the theme designer’s back-end options didn’t work as labeled, he took a long time to respond to support tickets, ignored questions and complaints on the sales site comments, and when he finally gave a solution it wasn’t even what I asked for.

I’ve wanted to pull my hair out for weeks over this. But I had a chat with KeriLynn Engel of Dreaming Iris Design over on my pen name Twitter account, and then she was referred to me again by Evelyn Lafont. Now I rarely turn to WP designers for help with customization. I can generally get any theme to do what I want. But this one stumped me. She was the only person who had ideas that could potentially work around this designer’s problems. (Many designers I know won’t even look at another designer’s code for you because of the sheer mess they might be asked to clean up.)  Even though I haven’t implemented all of the possibilities yet (as I’m considering just scrapping the theme altogether for fear of more problems with every update), I wanted to bring KeriLynn to your attention.

While I can always go back to designing and coding my own WordPress themes from scratch, I know that isn’t possible for every reader here. I recommend WordPress highly as an ideal platform for both a professional site and blog to promote your freelance writing services. But sometimes you’ll need help troubleshooting or customizing something small, and you won’t be able to find an answer easily online. And sometimes you’ll want a fully custom design developed for a new website or blog. If those things happen, you should have someone in mind to go to. And for that, I wanted to recommend Kerilynn. She has been one of the most responsive and insightful WordPress designers I’ve had the pleasure to deal with.

So the next time you need WordPress help, make sure you have Dreaming Iris Design bookmarked.

Rather than making people browse through page after page of posts (they never do get to the really old gems that way it seems), they can see a list of just the post titles — all post titles for a category on one page. As I mentioned in that post, that change led to around a 10% increase in traffic when we implemented it, despite having fewer visits to category pages. People were visiting more actual posts, which is what we really want as bloggers anyway.

A reader wanted to know how to make that change. So I promised to post my code. And here it is. This is the code I used to format our category pages the way they are now. This code was added to the archive.php template file:

<div style=”margin-left: 40px;”><?php /* If this is a category archive */ if (is_category()) $description=category_description(); echo $description; ?></div>

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<div style=”margin-left:50px;”><ul><li><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></li></ul></div>

<?php endwhile; ?>

Now I tossed some CSS formatting in there in my case because the alignment was off with the rest of our design. You can remove that or alter it to suit your own design needs. Here’s what the code looks like with that removed:

<?php /* If this is a category archive */ if (is_category()) $description=category_description(); echo $description; ?>

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<ul><li><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></li></ul>

<?php endwhile; ?>

Please remember that if you copy / paste this code from the site directly you might not get plain-text quotes. So you might have to retype them manually in your plain-text editor or template file.

Now I don’t claim that this is the “right” way to do it or the “best” way to do it. But if quick and dirty gets the job done, it works for me (within reason). And in this case, it just worked.

I make no promises that this code won’t royally f*ck up your blog. As always, before you make any changes back up your original archive.php file so if there’s a problem you can quickly put it back the way it was. I take no responsibility if it doesn’t play nice with your particular theme. If you already have special category page formatting in there, you might just be able to alter that a bit to get what you want. Some themes even have a separate category.php template which is a bit of a different beast. So use this information at your own risk. (Oh, and it’s only for WordPress.org blogs — I do not know if you have access to these template files on WordPress.com blogs.)

I’m making a bit of a change from now on and am going to start  looking at DIY projects that are less focused on building and construction and look more at aspects that will benefit your actual freelance writing business.  Plus, you’ll now be getting four DIY projects each month, rather than just the one.

Starting right at the beginning this month, it’s important for all freelance writers to not only have a freelance writing blog, but a theme on it that fits your needs and circumstances, whilst being attractive and welcoming to your clients, both current and prospective.

On the assumption that you’re using WordPress (for the simple fact that it’s the most popular freestanding blogging platform), the following 6 steps are explain how to move from the WordPress Default 1.6 theme to any other theme you like.

1. If the theme you’ve found and downloaded is still in zip format, unzip it onto your desktop (for ease of finding) and delete the zipped version
2. Open open your chosen FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client and log on to the the hosting account where your blog is.  I use Mozilla’s Filezilla as I’ve always found that it’s quick and easy to use, but there are thousands available for free – just have a search in Google
3. Once you’ve logged onto your hosting, navigate to wp-content > themes.  Assuming that you haven’t been in here and deleted any files before, there should be two themes already saved here – classic and default
4. In the opposite window, navigate to your computer’s desktop, right click on the folder of theme that you want to install and choose ‘upload’ (or a similar phrase, depending upon the FTP client that you’re using)
5. After the files has been uploaded to your server, open up your browser, login to your WordPress user panel and head to ‘Appearance’ and then ‘Themes’
6. Every theme that you have uploaded to your wp-contents/themes folder will be displayed here, with the current theme displayed at the top of the page.  To change the theme that’s displaying on your blog at the moment, simply scroll down the page, find the theme that you’ve just uploaded to your hosting and choose ‘Activate’.

Although changing the design of a standard website can mean a mass overhaul of the entire website, one of the wonders of WordPress is the fact that you can completely change the look of the blog within a matter of minutes.

Questions, comments or if you want instructions on how to change a theme on another blogging platform, let me know and I’ll do my best to answer.

This theme is more specifically designed to work as a portfolio / professional site. Actually, it’s a combination professional site / blog — something I’ve recently recommended here. Make sure you read all of the information below before downloading.

What’s Included

• The coded theme
• The .psd files (download those separately here)

Terms

Please remember that all free Web templates and free WordPress themes from All Freelance Writing are made available under the following terms: You’re free to use it on your own sites (and you do not have to include a credit link), but you may NOT distribute this template to others in any way. You cannot forward the files to someone via email. You cannot post the files for download on your own site. You cannot link directly to the download file on this site. If someone else wants it, they must visit this page and download it directly from this site. Also, derivative works made from the template may not be released (in other words, you can’t change the design and then distribute it to others – it’s for use on your own sites only).

Screenshot / Demo

You can view a temporary demo site at FadMarketing.com to see the theme in action.

JBlog: Free WordPress Theme from AllFreelanceWriting.com

Notes

• Remember that I do not offer technical support for the downloads. If you have simple questions, please post them as a comment on this post (do not email me about them), and if I can help I will. This way when I can’t help, maybe another member can. I don’t make any guarantees regarding these templates and themes, and I don’t have most of them up on demo sites yet.
• You can find more free WordPress themes and Web templates for freelance writers released exclusively through All Freelance Writing by browsing our full list of free stuff for writers.

To Download

1. Click the download link below.
2. Save the file to your hard drive.
3. Unzip / decompress the file (in Windows, right-click the file name and go to “extract all”).
4. That will save it to a decompressed folder.

Once you have the folder decompressed, you can upload the theme into your WordPress installation and activate it by clicking the “themes” link under “Appearance” from your WordPress admin. You can edit your theme files by visiting the “editor” link from the same menu.

You MUST also download and install the Twitter Widget plugin if you want the Twitter feed in the sidebar. The widget will go in the top sidebar section of your theme. Make sure you set that plugin to display only 1 recent tweet. There is an option in the plugin settings to hide @replies, but when I tried that it failed to pull the tweet stream, so you might not be able to do that.

I had our coder setup the test site for this theme, so I haven’t really played with it yet. So please, if you have questions just leave a comment here and I’ll take a look at the template files and try to help you get things sorted.

What’s Included

• The coded theme
• .psd files for various theme elements so you can easily change the look of the design

Terms

Please remember that all free Web templates and free WordPress themes from All Freelance Writing are made available under the following terms: You’re free to use it on your own sites (and you do not have to include a credit link), but you may NOT distribute this template to others in any way. You cannot forward the files to someone via email. You cannot post the files for download on your own site. You cannot link directly to the download file on this site. If someone else wants it, they must visit this page and download it directly from this site. Also, derivative works made from the template may not be released (in other words, you can’t change the design and then distribute it to others – it’s for use on your own sites only).

Screenshot

InBloom: Free WordPress Theme

Notes

• Remember that I do not offer technical support for the downloads. If you have simple questions, please post them as a comment on this post (do not email me about them), and if I can help I will. This way when I can’t help, maybe another member can. I don’t make any guarantees regarding these templates and themes, and I don’t have most of them up on demo sites yet.
• You can find more free WordPress themes and Web templates for freelance writers released exclusively through All Freelance Writing by browsing our full list of free stuff for writers.

To Download

1. Click the download link below.
2. Save the file to your hard drive.
3. Unzip / decompress the file (in Windows, right-click the file name and go to “extract all.”
4. That will save it to a decompressed folder.

Once you have the folder decompressed, you can upload the theme into your WordPress installation and activate it by clicking the “themes” link under “Appearance” from your WordPress admin. You can edit your theme files by visiting the “editor” link from the same menu.

As usual, I try to purchase or contract designs that are suitable for use either for a blog or your professional freelance writing website hosted on WordPress. Enjoy!

Soho Press WordPress Theme

Calcium WordPress Theme

1. My page order — let’s you change the page link orders (for the static-like pages) so they don’t have to be alphabetical.

2. My category order — does the same thing, but for categories. It makes it easier to feature categories.

3. All-in-one SEO pack — lets you easily add meta keywords, descriptions, and titles to every page and post (and to the homepage).

4. Akismet — it’s in the default WP installation, and does a good job of catching spam comments.

5. What Would Seth Godin Do? – this lets you include a message either before or after posts, and you can have it change based on how regular a member is. For example, here I show an ad above posts to new people on their first five pageviews (to hit one-time search engine traffic), and for regular readers after those five pageviews it’s just a reminder to subscribe to the blog.

6. Feedburner Feedsmith — this automatically redirects normal wordpress feed links to your feedburner feed URL (lets you consistently track subscriber stats more easily)

7. Feedblitz Member Mail — I was talking to Feedblitz’ founder quite a while back and mentioned that it would be nice if they could integrate with WP memberships. He had this plugin put together, and it’s outstanding. When people register on your blog, they’ll get a tick box allowing them to sign up to your feed via email / email newsletter (depending on how you use Feedblitz). You can see this one in action at the Query-Free Freelancer blog.

8. Google XML Sitemaps – This creates an xml sitemap letting Google know about all of the pages on your site — if you use Google’s Webmaster Tools, you’ll know how to upload these. if not, the plugin probably won’t help much.

9. Live comment preview — It lets commenters preview their comment in real time just below where they’re typing it. No preview click needed. Sometimes themes have funky spacing in comments, so this lets them know what to expect. Start typing in the comments box below and you’ll see what I mean.

10. Subscribe to comments — It lets readers check a box if they want to be emailed when people comment on a post (like one they commented on).

11. Category Description Editor – Want to add category descriptions, but you don’t like the basic text options available by default? This plugin gives you a full editor (like you have when writing posts) so you can easily add links, images, and text formatting for category descriptions. Most themes don’t show descriptions by default, so you might have to change your template file to display them. You can see an example on our freelance writing jobs page.

12. WP Keyword Link — This is like the old aLinks plugin. You can set it up so that certain keywords or phrases will automatically become links. For example, I could have “portfolio” automatically linked to an article on this blog about writer portfolios. You can use them to interlink your articles. You can use them automatically add affiliate links (I’m not doing this because it’s more difficult to go in and add disclaimers for those). Because you can add no-follow to the links on a keyword-by-keyword basis, you could even sell private text link ads without worrying about being slapped by Google (although I personally wouldn’t let Google determine my income models). It’s a nifty little plugin.

13. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – This is a nice little “set it and forget it” plugin. Just set it up and at the end of each post you write, you’ll automatically get a link to related posts. It helps keep visitors on your site, and it’s pretty much effortless on your part.

14. Tweet This — I got tired of the Sociable plugin this year on this blog, and needed an alternative. I went with Tweet This, and I like it a lot so far. Despite the name, it’s not just for Twitter sharing. You can also choose to add other services including Plurk, Buzz, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Myspace, Ping, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.

There are some other, bigger, plugins that I’m currently using or will soon be using, but since they’re not publicly ready to show you yet, I’ll leave them off here. What about you though? What are your current favorite WordPress plugins?

Previously I talked about why I consider residual income sites and content mills to be bad business decisions for freelance writers. I also promised to later talk to you about how you can earn decent residual income, but by writing for yourself — your own blog. Let’s talk about that now.

Why Blog for Yourself?

For some reason, many writers I talk to are afraid of starting their own niche blog. They’re afraid it will take up too much of their time. They’re afraid they won’t see a decent return on the effort put in. They’re afraid no one will want to read what they have to say. And sometimes they’re just afraid to start something new because they’re not sure where to start. To those writers, I have one thing to say — Get over it.

Blogging is a fantastic residual income stream (don’t mistake “residual” for “passive” — in most cases you’ll continue to work as your blog, and its income, grows). I won’t go so far as to say it’s the best residual income stream for freelance writers (informational products like e-books are fantastic for earning more in shorter periods of time for example), but they are one of the more consistent options once you build some stable traffic. And stability is a good thing. You don’t always get a lot of it when you work as a freelance writer.

Managing your own blog isn’t as difficult as some people initially think. There’s this misconception that you can’t earn much money with your own blog, so you’d be better off going with content mills instead. Wrong! It’s not difficult at all if you’re willing to work for it. The only real excuse for choosing content mills over writing for yourself is that you don’t want to be bothered with the work — you just want to write. And frankly, that’s lazy (and you know how I feel about lazy freelancers). If you’re a hobby writer and you just want to write to get paid a few bucks, fine. Good for you. But don’t call yourself a true freelance writer if you’re not willing to work on the business end of your freelance career.

If you’re willing to do learn how, do the work, earn more residual income, and take full control over what you write and when, then keep reading. Hopefully I’ll be able to give you some new insight that will help you get started.

The Keys to Successful Blogging Income

No two blogs are really the same. There are no rules about what you have to post. There are no rules about when you have to post. There are no rules about how often you have to post. But there are a few things that will give you a better shot at earning some real income in no more than a few months’ time. Here are some of the keys to successfully earning through your own blog:

• The right niche — If no one is searching for information in a niche, you won’t get traffic, and you won’t be able to convert that traffic into blogging income. That said, you could take a traditionally low-income or low-interest niche and twist it into something more attractive to readers, such as by combining two niches, broadening it, or even narrowing it.
• Self-hosting – If your goal is to earn money through your blog, this is non-negotiable. Host it yourself (and yes, that means paying for a domain registration and hosting account). Personally I recommend GoDaddy for domains and HostGator for hosting. They’re the combination I use for the majority of my blogs. Why is this important? Because if you want to effectively monetize your blog, you need complete control over monetization options and access to thorough site statistics. The easiest way to guarantee access to both is to host your blog yourself.
• Basic marketing ability — You will not earn a decent income from most blogs if you don’t market that blog in some way. That doesn’t mean you have to market aggressively or feel like you’re whoring yourself out with a constant sales pitch (more on that myth later). The most important thing you’ll do marketing-wise is actually completely on the back-end — evaluating your stats, testing ad placements, and just overall optimizing the site.

That’s it. With those three things you can earn a decent income blogging. I mean it.

Nice, but Less Necessary

I’ve run over two dozen blogs since 2004. I’ve successfully monetized new blogs across a variety of niches including writing, music, education, small business, marketing, PR, and technology. I still run several of those blogs (like AFW, NakedPR.com, and AudioXposure.com). Others I’ve monetized only to then flip them for a profit. Either way, I’ve found it’s fairly easy to bring a variety of blogs to three or even four figure monthly incomes in a pretty short period of time — no more than a couple of months (which is faster than writing the same amount for most 3rd party residual income sites).

Other bloggers often have much longer lists of what they consider must-have skills or tools if you want to monetize a blog reasonably well. I say “nah.” But although you don’t need all of these things, they certainly won’t hurt:

• Financing — Sure, it’s great if you have money to invest in a custom blog theme, advertising, or to hire other bloggers to help out in the beginning, but it’s certainly not necessary. In fact, my highest-earning blogs were all started without spending a dime over the domain name and hosting (and since several are hosted together, that saved on the startup costs after the first). You can afford $10 or so per year. If you can’t, you probably need to re-think your entire freelance career before you start planning new residual income streams.
• Personality – Personality’s great if your intention is to build a community around your blog. But newsflash: that’s not the “right” way to blog (nothing is), nor is it the only option. My small business blog went from $0 – $2000 per month in just a few months, and it was pretty much devoid of personality. There aren’t many comments there. I’ve never made an effort to change that. The posts are simple new and how-to posts. They’re not opinions in most cases. There aren’t many reviews. I never blogged there to build conversations. I blogged there to earn from my writing. And I have. On the other hand, my PR blog also monetizes rather well. That blog completely revolves around my no-bullshit personality when confronting PR and social media issues. On the other hand, AFW has personality injected, but is also more instructional than NakedPR is — it falls somewhere in the middle. No method has really proved better than the others overall. It’s all about knowing what the niche audience really wants (community vs news vs instructional content or some mix). Sometimes you’ll guess wrong.
• Frequent updates — Sometimes you just won’t feel like blogging, and that’s okay. Don’t stress yourself out feeling like you have to stick to rigid posting schedules or that you have to post every day. Are frequent updates nice? Sure they are. But they’re not always required. I mentioned my two highest-earning blogs (small business and PR) before. Both of them can go for months at a time without an update. In fact, I took an announced 6 month hiatus from NakedPR.com previously. During that break traffic nearly doubled, and income followed suit. Even here, where I try to post more frequently (even twice a day a lot of days), I see subscribers and traffic increase when I go a few days without posting. It’s become pretty predictable. So go ahead. Feel free to take a break every now and then. It gives your readers a chance to catch up or dig into your archives (where some of your best content might be hidden away). Don’t decide on a solid schedule up front. Play with it and see what works best for your niche and your readers.
• Link-building campaigns — My SEO-centric pals might want to hit me for this, but frankly I’ve found that most traditional link-building is a royal waste of time. Don’t submit your site to every free directory you can find. Don’t waste time submitting news releases to all of the free press release distribution sites you can. Don’t post short, garbage comments on other people’s blogs just to get the link back. Don’t engage in link exchanges. Don’t get me wrong. There are ways you can increase links early on that I do recommend, but I suggest them far more for the exposure value. Those things would include linking to other blogs from your posts (the bloggers often know who’s linking to them, and they might come to check out your post — it’s a good way to start networking with others in your niche). You could also comment on other blogs and include your link, but only do this if you have something substantive to add. Otherwise you just look like a schmuck. The absolute best way to build links to your blog however is to simply create great content that people deem worth linking to. Remember, it’s not just about linkback quantity. It’s about getting quality, relevant links back from sites who cater to your audience (who not only provide link juice, but direct traffic).

How to Earn Money From Your Blog

Now you have some of the basic dos and “do it if you feel like its.” But how can you actually earn money from your blog? First and foremost, if your blog is in your specialty area, you should absolutely use it to promote your freelance writing services (even if just linking to your professional site). It can be a highly effective way of increasing business in general. But let’s forget about that and think about more direct income from your blogs. Here are the tools and strategies I used to take my small business blog from nothing to a four figure income in just a few months:

• Quality content — The most important thing is to build trust with readers. The more they trust you, the more they’ll link to you and refer others to you, and the more money you’ll ultimately make. So forget about spammy rewrite crap if you want to earn a significant and steady income with your blog over the long haul.
• Private link sales – These were held to strict quality standards, and had to be relevant to my audience.
• New post sponsorship — Companies appreciated the blunt honesty on the blog, so they’d hire me to review their products or even their websites. They knew up front they wouldn’t get glowing reviews, but instead critical and balanced looks at what they were doing well and where they could improve. Sponsors had absolutely no editorial control or impact whatsoever (the only ethical way to incorporate sponsored posts in my opinion).
• Existing post sponsorship — These sponsorships were when companies liked existing content on the site, so they would sponsor the individual post (and again, they would have no impact on the editoral aspects, and posts would not be edited for them).
• Affiliate links — This is one of the bigger tools I use now (on several of my blogs). Affiliate products would only be promoted if I’d honestly recommend them to readers. It goes back to the trust factor. When readers know they can trust your opinion, they’re much more likely to make purchases when you do finally recommend something.
• Contextual ads — These are text or image-based ads that vary with the content on each page of your blog. Google’s Adsense is one example of this.
• Information products – I didn’t only promote other people’s products. I also sold my own. At the earlier point, I was selling a short e-book for $17. That’s no longer for sale, so now I promote my Web Writer’s Guide e-book instead.

There are other ways to earn from your blog. For example, you could sell banner advertising. You could survey-based cost per action — CPA — ads (you’re paid when users fill out a survey or complete some other action). You could sell video ads. Yo and I are launching FreelanceTheater.com soon, and we might eventually sell jingle ads or other audio ads in the audio plays there. Get creative and brainstorm some possible income streams for your blog that would work with your niche. There’s a reason you won’t see a lot of banner ads or even contextual ads here at AFW. Years of testing told me that they weren’t the best ways to monetize a site targeting freelance writers. That testing also demonstrated that far better options were to incorporate job lead based income streams and promoting my own products for sale here. Don’t simply assume the easiest option will be the right one for you.

Your Blogging Quick-Start Guide

Okay. So now you have an idea of what you should think about and what you can do to monetize your blog. But where do you start? Follow these few steps to get you moving in the right direction, and fast!

1. Get your basic blog set up. This involves choosing a niche (use the Adwords keyword tool to find out if people are really searching for information in the niche first), registering a domain name, getting a hosting account, setting up your basic blog installation (I recommend WordPress.org), and choosing a theme (design). Rather than go through these steps in detail here, you can follow my instructions on getting WordPress set up over in our 30 day marketing bootcamp series for freelance writers over at QueryFreeFreelancer.com.
2. Make a list of some post ideas. I’d say if you can’t come up with a good 20-30 post topic ideas up front, you should reconsider your niche. While you don’t have to post daily, there should be enough to talk about that your blog won’t completely run out of steam in a few months either.
3. Setup your basic pages. I strongly suggest adding an About page and / or Contact page to your blog. Share some information about yourself and why your background makes you qualified to write about this niche topic in some way. It can go a long way towards building trust with readers. Also set up a privacy policy, comment policy, or any other pages you feel would be relevant.
4. Draft your first five posts. I like to have a few posts ready at launch time for a new blog. Do not write a generic “welcome to my blog” post to kick it off. Blah. What does that really offer? Nothing. Put up a temporary post if the site is up pre-launch if you want to build some anticipation, but if you’re ready for launch now then get right down to business.
5. Figure out a monetization plan. Decide how you want to try to monetize your blog (knowing up front that it might change after testing for a while). Get some kind of ad model in place. Contextual ads are some of the easiest early on, but affiliate products are probably a better early option if you can find decent products to promote in the niche.

Those are the basic elements you should think about. Did that? Then launch the thing already!

Teaching by Example

I know some people assume monetizing a blog is just easier for me. After all, I can use the “juice” of my existing sites to bring a new blog attention in the beginning. Others assume it’s easier because I come from a marketing / PR background (although that’s no excuse, since I teach you all about that here if you take the time to look). Still, I’ve decided it’s project-time yet again (when is it not with me?).

I’m going to be choosing a niche and domain name this week and launching a new WordPress blog. The only money I’ll spend will be for the domain name (I’ll use existing hosting as you might do if you’re already hosting your own professional site). No paid advertising. No paying for custom designs or coding. I’ll be launching the blog in the same way many of you might — spending as little as possible up front.

I won’t announce the blog here (I won’t use an existing domain name I have so you’ll be able to verify when it was registered through the WHOIS records after the experiment ends to make sure it wasn’t a longer-running site). I don’t want to use this blog to push traffic to the new one (or any of my other blogs). Marketing will all be things you can easily do yourself. I’ll use my networking environments like forums and social media sites. I’ll follow simple PR and marketing principles to build some exposure, traffic, links, and income.

Then, at the end of three months from the date of the domain registration, I’ll let you know how much the blog is currently earning. I’ll share traffic stats (you’d be surprised how little traffic you really need in order to earn a decent start-up income). I’ll share specific revenue stats (as much as I’ll be allowed to based on the ad networks’ policies). I’ll tell you exactly what I did to get there. My goal is to show you that you can at least hit a three figure income in three months. Obviously I’m not aiming for $100 to just call it a day. I will do the best I can using as little as I can in a model that anyone can follow. Some general updates will be posted here just to let you know the project is still under way. I hope that teaching by example will help to alleviate some of the fears some freelance writers have about blogging for residual income. Will you be along for the ride?

EDIT: I just remembered the Depeche WordPress theme can’t be installed directly through the WordPress admin interface, so I removed that section of this post. Tomorrow, or soon, I’ll do a separate post explaining that since it involves some special steps.

Today I’m going to walk you through the process using Kathleen’s domain registrar (GoDaddy) and host (HostGator– affiliate link) — convenient because I just happen to use them both. I’m going to setup the Depeche theme on an unused domain of mine — cWriter.com. Let’s get right to it:

Setting Your Domain’s DNS Settings

In order to have your domain pull your site files from your host, you need to add the DNS (domain name server) address from your hosting account (you should contact your host for these DNS settings if you didn’t get them in a welcome email or something). To super-simplify, the DNS settings simply tell your domain registrar “hey, my site files are over here on this server!”

When you have the number, login to your registrar’s account (GoDaddy shown below). Go to your domain management area (Domains > My Domains in GoDaddy) and click the domain name you want to use. You’ll get a screen that looks like this. You’re interested in the area I’ve circled.

Click the “Manage” link in that Nameservers section. You’ll get a pop-up that looks like this:

Click on the bottom radio button (round button) that says “I host my domains with another provider.” Now enter the two nameservers your hosting company gave you in the format shown above (note: the 01 and 02 will vary in addition to the host name). Click “OK.”

Not too hard so far, right? Let’s move on.

Setting Up An Add-On Domain Using Cpanel

Kathleen uses HostGator, which uses Cpanel (personally I’ll only use Cpanel hosts). Now that your nameservers are set to point to your host, it’s time to tell the host about the domain name. This is being done as an add-on domain (meaning you already have another domain setup as the primary domain name on your hosting account).

First log into Cpanel. Your login URL will look like this if you’re using HostGator: . You’ll get a popup asking you to login. Once you’re logged in, scroll down to the domains section. It looks something like this (might vary depending on the version of Cpanel you have installed):

Just click on the icon for “Addon Domains.” You’ll see the following form on your screen:

Type your domain name into the first field. The next two fields should automatically fill themselves in. (Note: The third field usually adds the TLD — the “.com” part — but I always remove it. Cpanel didn’t used to do that, and I don’t like them in my folder names. I do that for consistency’s sake with my older add-on domains.) Choose a password and enter it twice. Click the “Add Domain” button.

Again, not too bad. You’ve now setup your domain name with your hosting account. Yay!

Installing WordPress With Fantastico (The “Easy” Way)

Installing WordPress manually isn’t difficult at all. You can get full instructions for their 5-minute installation at WordPress.org. But since Kathleen has Fantastico through HostGator’s hosting account, I’m going to show you how to do it that way, because it’s even easier (you won’t have to manually setup a database for example). Here’s how to do it:

First go back to your Cpanel homepage (there’s a little home icon at the top left of the page). Once there, scroll down until you see the Fantastico De Luxe icon. It’s in the “Software / Services” group and is just a smiley face. Click it and look in the left column. Click the “WordPress” link under the blogs heading. You’ll get this form:

In the first field, it’s just a drop-down. Click it and find your new add-on domain (not the subdomain version, but the full regular domain name – YourSite.com).

If you want WordPress installed on your main domain (you want www.YourSite.com to go directly to your WordPress installation), leave this blank. In the majority of cases, you’ll leave this blank, so let’s do that for the example.

Choose your login information for the WordPress admin area (you don’t have to use “admin” like I did here — you can use your name or whatever you want). Choose a good password.

You can fill in an admin nickname if you want (it’s blank on the image above, but I ended up entering “Jenn”). The nickname is what will show up on your posts as the author. You can change that later from the WordPress admin area after it’s installed.

Then just enter your email address (where any admin emails will go for you), the site name and a slogan or tagline if you want to. The email address is required, but you can also change that later from the WordPress admin area.

Hit the “Install WordPress” button.

You’ll go to the next screen that just tells you that it setup a database for your WordPress installation. If you have a bunch of databases on your hosting account, write that database name down so you can more easily find it later if you need to.

Click “Finish Installation.

Wheeeeeee! We have WordPress!

You can install and activate many themes easily by going to “Appearance” in the left column. Click it and then click “Add new themes” to search for some and install them.

You can’t install the Depeche theme through your WordPress admin though, so tomorrow I’ll put together another post specifically on how to set up a Depeche theme installation (since it requires some special steps anyway — which you can find in the theme’s Readme file if you don’t want to wait).

Congratulations on getting your domain setup and your WordPress installation ready to go in a relatively quick and painless manner. :)

I upgraded some of mine only to find the same repeated problem: the visual editor wouldn’t work correctly. The buttons disappeared, the text was whited out, and you couldn’t work in that mode.

I’ve also had another minor issue that comes and goes as it pleases. When I go into the theme editor, sometimes the stylesheet (which shows up by default) extends over the links on the right, meaning I can’t see or click the template page I want. Since one or two are usually visible near the bottom of the list, clicking on one of them clears up the issue. But it’s a royal pain in the neck.

Visual Editor Fix

I can’t say this will work for everyone, but if you did upgrade and you’re having a problem with the visual editor, here’s what worked for me.

Go to the tools section of your admin, and click on the “upgrade” link. Click the button to “re-install automatically.” After that, clear your browser cache and navigate back to your post edit page. At that point the editor worked fine for me.

If you know HTML and are comfortable writing in it, then you can do without the visual editor. But I know all writers here who blog don’t necessarily work in HTML. For those of you who don’t, I hope that fix works.

Other than that, I’m keeping my eyes open for other problems, but am hoping they come out with an update asap fixing these issues. *crosses fingers*

EDIT: The 2.8.1 beta release is available if anyone wants to use it. (Thanks Ed!)