This series of articles on how to create a blog is being written to help you develop a blog that will bring visitors back over and over again.  We are setting up a blog called “Current Events Online” to act as a demonstration for this series of articles.  Current Events Online will eventually be made available on Blogs For Sale in the event that you are interested in purchasing a blog that is already set up.

In this article we are going to talk briefly about plugins.  WordPress plugins help you to customize your site to make it function the way you want it to.  I am going to suggest the following 8 plugins as a minimum for your blog.  You may want to add others.  All of them can be found at the WordPress.org plugin database and are available for free.

Advanced Category Excluder - With this plugin you can define categories for some parts of the site to be hidden.

Akismet -  Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

All in One SEO Pack -  Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.

Contact Form 7 - Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

EasyDonation - PayPal Donation Management plugin.

Exclude Pages from Navigation - Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation.

Official StatCounter Plugin - Adds the StatCounter tracking code to your blog.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.

WordPress Database Backup - On-demand backup of your WordPress database.

Each of these plugins will be very useful in developing your blog.  We will talk about how these plugins can be used for the maximim effect in later articles.  Go ahead and get these plugins downloaded and activated on your blog.  If you need help with that process you read the articles on Starting a Blog From Scratch available right here on My Newbie Blog.

Another important answer to the “How to Create a Blog” question is writing and marketing articles. When you market your articles properly you can get some good links to your blog. There are many directories where you can submit your articles. Here are a few examples:

Article City (articlecity.com)
Article Dashboard (articledashboard.com)
Article Directory (article-directory.net)
Ezine Articles (ezinearticles.com)
Go Articles (goarticles.com)
Idea Marketers (ideamarketers.com)
Internet Home Business Articles (internethomebusinessarticles.com)
Search Warp (searchwarp.com)

These sites are a good way to get your articles out into the world. The drawback is that it takes a lot of time to go through the process of submitting your articles. A faster way to accomplish the same thing is to use Article Marketer. This service will submit your articles for you. They offer a free service which has a partial distribution or you can pay a fee to take advantage of their full service. I pay for the full service because I feel like I can spend my time more wisely doing other things with the blog than hand submitting my articles to numerous directories.

Using Article Marketers

Go to the Article Marketers website.

Take some time to read about the services the site offers and then go ahead and press Open Your Account. This option works if you are signing up for either the free service or one of the paid services.

You will need to enter some basic information.

You then need to decide which of the services you want to use.

Once you have entered in all your information hit Next and you have an Article Marketers account.

Login to the site with the User Name and Password you just set up. Now you can enter a article for submission to the directories. One word of advice; if you have already posted the article on your own site you should rewrite it before you submit it to the directories. Keep the main ideas but change the title and the headers, etc.

You are going to type in the title of your article and then paste in the text of the article. The author boxes are where you get to add the text top get your link back. There are two author boxes, one that is a text box where you can enter the URL of your blog. The other box allows you to enter in your blog site URL and the URL of your post into the box.

The HTML that I enter looks like this:

Stephen Lawes teaches people how to <a href=”http://mynewbieblog.com”>create a blog</a>. He shows them <ahref=”http://mynewbieblog.com/create-a-blog-you-can-be-proud-of/”>how to create a blog</a>, and how to begin to make money from it.

You then need to choose what categories to submit your articles.

Enter in any special requests you have about when to submit the article and then click on the agreements and type in the spam code and hit Next.

The Review Process

Once your article is submitted it first gets reviewed by a computer (since Article Marketers wants to send you article to as many possible directories there are some pretty specific guidelines they follow). If there are any issues that need to be resolved it will point them out to you. Fix any problems and save your update.

The article is then reviewed by actual people. If they find problems you will have to fix them as well. Don’t get discouraged if you have to make numerous changes, it is making your article acceptable to the largest number of directories. The more sites that publish your article the more good back links you receive. Keep on writing and learning how to create a blog!!!