I tend to be a very practical person, and when it comes to something like internet marketing, I think that practicality is very important. So many internet markers promise that you can make money without having any technological expertise, and you can expect to become rich and live the dream in a matter of minutes each day. I doubt strongly this is the case, but I do believe that making money online can successfully be done and you don’t need to be a genius.

 

However, you do need a reliable person who knows a lot about the technical aspects of marketing. For example, one of the most important steps to making money online is through building a website that people can visit so they can access the information that you are trying to sell. This important first step must include your providing information for free so that you can build credibility.

 

The best site to help you build a website is WordPress. This article will give you specific details about what to do once you have your WordPress site up and running. You will need help in getting the site running in the first place, so I won’t get into that. This article will help you know what to do once you have the site (and by the way hostgator.com is the place to go to for hosting of your site. They are very reliable, and often have sales for domains as low as a few dollars a year).

 

Anyway, the subject of this article is how to navigate around WordPress. If you want to write a blog, what you do is look on the left hand side of your ‘back office.’ You access your back office by typing in your website address, then a backward slash, then wp-admin. Then you type in your username and password, and on the resulting screen, you will see Dashboard, Posts, Articles, Media, etc. Yours might be slightly different depending on which format you are using but the idea is basically the same. Click on Posts, and when you want to write a new blog, click on Add New. Put in your title. Don’t type directly in the box that is there. Instead, click on the W sign for Microsoft Word. Then paste what you have typed in a Word document into the box that pops up. If you want the blog to appear on your front page, which you probably do, click on Visibility. Select the option that says Edit. Then put a check in the box next to Stick this post on the front page. Then click OK. Then decide what category or categories the article you are writing falls into. You will have to have predone these categories so that you have some to select from. In a future article, I will go into more depth on categories and how to create them but this article is just a preliminary overview of some of the important steps to get started. Then click on Tags and select the appropriate tags. Make a tag cloud so that people who are visiting your site can see which keywords pop up the most often on your site. This will let them know if they are interested in the context of your site or not. If they are interested in public speaking, and that is one of the keywords on your site that is mentioned a lot, then that person will likely be interested in the posts you write about public speaking.

 

Pictures are often very important in attracting attention to a particular post. Right under the title box for your post, you will see Add media. Click on it. Click upload files. Click select files. If you don’t remember the name of the picture you want to upload, type in a keyword and see if that brings it up. If you do remember, go to the location on your computer to retrieve the picture. Usually the default is on the desktop so if your picture is there, just type in the name, and it will come up, and you can double click on it to insert it in the post. If it’s not on the desktop, you will have to manually change the location so that you can get access to the picture. You can click open or double click. Then make sure that the picture you selected has a darker border around the box with a checkmark attached. If it does, then click on insert into post. If it doesn’t, click your way over to the appropriate picture and then look for the checkmark. If it is there with the darker border, then click on insert into post. You will see the picture show up at the top of the post. It won’t appear on the front page or homepage, but it will appear when a person clicks on your post to get to the page where the full post is displayed. If you want to remove the picture once you have seen it, simply right click on the image, and then click on the righthand image with a circle with a line through it. That will remove the picture.

 

I think that’s enough for today! If you have any questions, please email me at jaclyn@jaclynhollandstrauss.com or jaclynhollandstrauss@hotmail.com.

 

Happy making money online!