The Serge Is Working

Setting up everything to be up and running took about 2 hours. This included:

1. Finding and buying a domain:
The most difficult part here is finding a domain that is not registered yet. Since I’m on a linux machine, I just used the linux “whois” command to see if there are any available URLs that I can think of. Luckily this project doesn’t need to have a memorable URL, I’m going to depend more on links and SEO.

Next step was to register the domain and I used my GoDaddy account to register it.

Total cost =~ $25 (I used private registration on the URL).

2. Hosting:
Like all good software engineers, I have my own private hosted server somewhere out there in internet land and I just used that server to host my blog.

3. Picking a blogging platform:
This step was again easy for me. I chose to use wordpress because I have already installed, used and even modified the source code on some projects so I have a good working knowledge of the platform. I also like wordpress because it’s so popular you can pretty much find decent themes to modify the look and feel of your blog, and if you need some custom functionality chances are you’ll find an already existing plugin.

4. Some useful plugins:
Wordpress usually comes pre-installed with the Akismet plugin. I highly recommend activating this plugin or else you will soon be bombarded with tons of spam. Other plugins I had to download and install and they are:

• SI Captcah: Another layer of protection against spam registrations and comments.
• Feed To Post: Convert RSS and Atom feeds to automatic posts. This is my way of keeping the site refreshed while not writing every single day or even multiple times a day.

5. Track Usage with Analytics:
I highly recommend you have some way of tracking your site usage. The fastest way I do this is by simply registering for a Google Analytics account. It may not have as much detail as other, more advanced analytics software out there but it is extremely fast to set up and does a good job at figuring out trending. You can now link it to your adsense account.

6. Take control of your domain with the search engines (Webmaster Tools):
It’s extremely important to control how your site is indexed with at least the three major search engines. You should register and verify your site with them through their webmaster tools:

• Google: Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo: Site Explorer
• Bing (Microsoft): Webmaster Center

7. Adsense:
Finally you can’t make any money without placing ads. Make an adsense account, generate the ads and place them in your blog.

With all the above techniques, I’m not going into details as to how to do them because this is not a tutorial on setting up a blog, hopefully this will turn out to be a tutorial on how to make money off of your blog. There are tons of resources out there who explain how to set each one up, you might want to check those out if you are stuck at any point.