As a continuation to our previous post “Creating your first online business” we are going to continue assuming that you already have your hosting account with Hostgator.

We are going to learn how to create our first blog. There are different blog platforms, some of them are free, and so we are going to go for one of these to build our blog.

Blogger.com and WordPress.com offer an online platform for you to have your blog hosted with them, but since we want full control of our blog, we are going to install our blog on our own hosting account which we created previously with Hostgator.

There are some other blog platforms like Typepad, or Squarespace, but we won’t cover them in this post.

When you login to your hosting control panel, you need to find the Fantastico Deluxe Script. This is a feature that many hosting providers offer, so you can easily install a blog, forum, guess-book and some other scripts in your website. Since we want to install a blog, we are going to use Fantastico for this matter.

When you click on the Fantastico Deluxe Script icon, you will be presented with the Fantastico menu window.

On the left hand side, you will see a sidebar with different options, in our case we are looking for the “WordPress” option. Click on WordPress and you will see some more information about WordPress. Here you will have the option of creating a new WordPress installation, which is what we are interested in at the moment.

Click on “New Installation” , you now are presented with a form to fill in about your blog. You can select the domain name where you want to install your blog and where within the domain you want to install it. This form is self-explanatory.

After you successfully finish the wordpress installation you are presented with the url to login to your blog control panel (Dashboard) and your login credentials (user name + password). Copy this information to a secure place and save it for later use.

When you login to your blog Dashboard you will probably have one post and a comment, those are a default post and comment that come with the wordpress installation. I usually delete them, since they have nothing to do with the content I plan to write about in my blogs.

On the top part of the dashboard, you will see a link “Visit site” to your blog home page. If you click on it while pressing the “Shift” key on your keyboard, it will open in a new window/tab. This way we can keep on working on our administration tasks from the dashboard window/tab and see how our blog looks on the other one.

Now you are at the homepage of your blog. That’s the default look of a wordpress blog. Although it looks very nice, this is the default look, so we can expect to find thousands of blogs with this same look.

Since we want our visitors to easily recognize our blog every time they visit it, we are going to change that look for a more unique one later on.

We are also going to install a few plugins to further enhance the functionality of our blog.

Stay tuned for the next steps to create your first online business and make money with it.

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