WordPress is the most popular Open Source application for creating blog. It enables you to create and manage a great-looking news- and articles-based website. WordPress is free to download and use, and is suitable both for small and large blog portals. And if you want to have a blog, and you should want, you should know what to do and how to do it to have your wordpress blog ready to be filled with posts. I don't know if anyone has ever taken the task upon himself or herself to show others how to set up a WordPress Blog starting from scratch but a search in Google did not bring me the results I wanted. So, I am taking that responsibility upon myself to do just that.

Throughout these series of post I am going to show you exactly how I set up this blog "KosovoBlogger", which is also the same way I set up the other two blogs that I have. You are going to learn everything you need to know to have your blog ready to post.

Things you will learn on each step to building your blog:

• Picking a Domain Name
• Where to Host Your WordPress Blog
• How to Install WordPress 2.5 step-by-step
  
• WordPress 2.5 List of Plugins You Need
  
• Beginners-How to get free blog traffic
• When and How to Monetize your Blog

There is one thing I know and that is that you can find all these information elsewhere but not in one place like I am doing it here in this blog, so keep reading if you want to have your blog ready to start posting on it.

Picking a Domain Name

One should think before speaking and this goes for everything, meaning you have to do a research before you undertake something. Finding a domain name is a little tricky and it can also mean the difference between success and failure of your blog. That is why you should be picky on your domain name. So do a little research on the domain name that you want depending on what you want to blog about. Use the free online keyword searching services such as Wordtracker free keyword tool to search the keyword/s that you want to use for your domain name. When I picked KosovoBlogger as the domain name of this blog I researched the keyword Kosovo using the above free keyword tool and the term "Kosovo" was being searched 1649 times a month plus the same amount of times the term "blogger" was searched monthly and that made it a very attractive domain name. However, consider the following before you chose a domain name, this is the advice given by everyone but the one that made me remember is the author of SEOBOOK:

• Pick a domain name that is highly brandable. What this means is that someone can easily associate it with the product or service that you are offering.
• Use a short and memorable domain name, you see my domain name consist of two keywords 'kosovo' and 'blogger'. If the domain name matches the keywords that you chose Google gives you a relevancy bonus for your site. What this means is that when someone searches Google for "Kosovo Bloggers" and "Kosovo Blog" my site should rank well on these searched keywords.
• If you aim to enter highly competitive fields, or have large sites, you should be choosing different domain name for different language or field you are targeting.

The above are the points you should have in mind when you are thinking of the domain name you want for you blog.

After you have picked the domain name that you want you now need to register it with one of the domain registrars. As you might already know GoDaddy.com is the most popular as well as the most trusted domain registrars. So, go and register your domain name with GoDaddy.com and return to learn which hosting company to chose to host your site because some hosting companies are better than the others.

Now go to the next post and learn where to host your wordpress blog.