Before I start Week 2 of 7 Weeks to Success, I’d like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas. I hope everyone enjoys spending time with their family and sharing gifts.

This is most likely going to be the hardest week. Setting everything up is a pain the butt. For Week 2, I am going to be showing you how to install the blogging platform Wordpress, along with themes and plugins. There are many reasons why I choose Wordpress over other blogging platform, such as Blogger and Typepad, and the reason behind it is because it’s the best. This can be debated forever, but from my experience, Wordpress is the best. Period.

Let’s download Wordpress before we start doing anything else (the ZIP version is fine). Be sure you get the latest version by going to the download page. Once it’s downloaded, go ahead and extract it into a folder.

Everything easy so far? Here’s the “fun” part. You’re going to need to access your FTP (file transfer protocol) so you can upload Wordpress to your webhost. To do this, you are going to need an FTP client. Personally, I use CuteFTP Professional, but there are many free ones out there such as FileZilla, SmartFTP, and AceFTP. Each do the same thing, so take your pick.

Once you have your FTP client downloaded and installed, it’s going to ask you for your FTP information. Unfortunately, each web host has a different cPanel or interface to them, so I can’t guide you on how to find out that type of information. If you don’t know your FTP information, I would recommend you go into your web hosts FAQ or just give them a call. That’s what they’re there for!

Assuming you can now access your website through your FTP client, we are now going to create the MySQL database. This is another strenuous task and I am again unable to help you since each web host has different cPanels and interfaces. I recommend you again look through your web hosts FAQ or call them. Once you have your MySQL database set up, be sure to keep the username, server host, and password it gives you in handy. Now we’re ready to open up our extracteWordpress folder and find a file called “wp-config-sample.php”. Go ahead and open that with Notepad (or you can use Dreamweaver if you have that). Find the first six lines that talk about your database name, password, etc. Fill this all in with the information you used while setting up your MySQL database. When you have properly filled out the MySQL information, save the file as “wp-config.php”.

Great! Now we’re ready to upload Wordpress into your FTP client. To do this, open up your FTP client and use your FTP information to access your website. Double click that folder to bring you into a completely blank directory. Access your wordpress folder and highlight everything in there. Now just drag and drop it into your FTP program. It should now begin to transfer Wordpress onto your website. This should take about 5-10 minutes. Once it’s finished, you can complete the installation by going to your domainn and adding “/wp-admin/install.php” to the end of it. For example, www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php. The rest is easy .

Congratulations, you made it past the most difficult part. Now you’re able to pick out a theme for your Wordpress blog. Two of the best of the places I get my themes from is the Wordpress themes site and Wpthemesfree. There so many themes on each of these sites, so be sure to go through them and find one you like.

Once you have selected your theme, go ahead and extract it and drag and drop the folder into your wp-content/themes folder in your FTP client. This will put the new theme on your website. Now all you have to do is activate it. To do this, log into your Wordpress admin page (www.domain.com/wp-admin) and go to the “Presentation” tab. Now just pick your theme and you’re set.

Now it’s time to get you some plugins. Here’s some that you’ll most likely end up needing:

All in One SEO Pack - Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your Wordpress blog. This will help increase your traffic from search engines.

Askiment - This help prevents spam comments on your blog. You’d be amazed how much wonders this can do. This already comes installed by default when you first install Wordpress.

Dagon Design Form Mailer - This is what I use for my Contact page. It’s a simple mail form that your visitors can use to contact you.

Google Sitemaps - Sitemaps are very important to search engines, especially Google. Sitemaps help ensure that all pages get updated, and when search engines should crawl your site again. This plugin will create a sitemap.

Got Banners - This is what I use to rotate the 125×125 buttons up and down the page. It’s very useful and easy to use.

Popularity Contest - Ever wonder which posts are most popular? This plugin will help tell you exactly that. You can also display them in your sidebar or on a page.

Related Posts - Related Posts will help display a certain amount of posts that are related to the current page your visitors are viewing. This will not only help them find more information on the topic, but also get these posts indexed by Google.

WP-Ads - This is what I use to rotate the 468×60 ads on the top right of the site. This will be one of your good sources of income. For me, I am able to make $75/month in total for the five slots I sell on MrGPT.

WWW Redirect - This is a simple plugin that will just redirect all users that go to http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com. This helps to keep the PageRank pointing at one domain instead of splitting them between the two.

How to install plugins: After you have extracted the plugins, simply drag and drop the folder into your wp-content/plugins. You can then activate it by logging into your Wordpress admin page and select “Plugins”. Find each plugin and activate it. Read the readme for each to find out how to activate/integrate them.

You should now have Wordpress set up, along with a theme that you like and some plugins. I know this is a lot of information to take in, so if there is anything you don’t understand about Week 2, please shoot me an email by using my Contact page.

Play around with Wordpress and mess around with some of the options. You may want to start thinking of some categories to use for your niche, and possibly start writing some posts (but save them as a draft so they are not yet published).