I am now a whale leading a fleet of whales and dolphins. You are a ship, so tie on and let us pull. I’ll find birds who ride atop my fleet and sing your song. Digg. Digg. Tweet. Tweet. Flock, Flock.
via RJ’s Vimeo
1. Buy a domain name ($9.00/yr)
a) search on aplus.net
b) buy at 1and1.com
2. Buy website hosting from hostgator.com ($8.00/mo)
3. Login to your cpanel (cpanel.yourdomain.com) and find your “Name Servers” located on the bottom left corner of the page (e.g. ns1145.hostgator.com and ns1146.hostgator.com)
4. Change the “DNS settings” at your 1and1 account to “point to” your hostgator servers.
5. Install WordPress on your domain name.
Go to cpanel.yourdomain.com and scroll down almost all the way and click on Fantastico DeLuxe. Click WordPress on the left menu -> New Installation
Congrats your blog is now up and running!! You can post anything you want, but we’re going to help you make it super easy and efficient to create lots of attractive posts as well as get you some traffic with steps 6-15.
6. Download a theme – courtneytuttle.com has SEO themes
7. Download Filezilla FTP or Cyberduck (Mac)
8. Upload the unzipped theme folder to your domain using FTP.
9. Complete Basic configurations of your blog. (i.e. change permalink structure, delete the hello world post and wordpress blogroll links, etc.)
10. Sign up for and configure each of the following Social Media:
Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, Diigo, Flickr, PicasaWeb, Blogspot, WordPress.com, Tumblr, Plaxo, Posterous, YouTube, Vimeo, Scribd, StumbleUpon, Mixx, and Reddit.
11. Download Software:
My Firefox blogger addons collection: InfoMogul Blogger Addons 1.1,
Picasa, SnagIt, Camtasia, and Mindjet.
12. Download and install my InfoMogul Plugins Pack 1.1
13. Study some basic HTML. Not too much, but it’s helpful to know how to make a link and embed video.
14. Study some basic SEO. (Evaluate keyword competition, choose titles and anchor text, and add tags.)
15. Post away.
1. Use all the services that Posterous provides because I think the content that is generated from Posterous looks cleaner than that of Ping.
Blogger
Wordpress.org (custom domains)
Wordpress.com
Twitter
Tumblr
LiveJournal
Xanga
Delicious
Flickr
YouTube
Vimeo
Scribd
FriendFeed
Typepad
Drupal
Viddler
Jaiku
Picassa
Blip.tv
Plurk
MovableType
Shopify
Indenti.ca
LinkedIn
2. Then to not duplicate any posting, here is the list of sites offered by Ping that are NOT offered by Posterous.
Posterous
Plaxo (although this site if set up properly should be collecting all your activity from all your other accounts and publishing it into one feed, so you might not want to set it up to work directly with Ping.)
Bebo
Diigo
Multiply
MySpace
Ning
Gtalk Status
Aim Status
Brightkite
hi5
Friendster
Koornk
YouAre
Yammer
Utterli
Seesmic
Laconi.ca
Present.ly
Vox
Shoutem
StreetMavens
Radar
myYearbook
Photobucket
Yahoo Profiles
Tagged
Merchant Cafe
Yahoo Meme
3. I would type up a post and ping it to posterous which will then autopost it to all of its own sites. There you go, post once and get 53 times as many backlinks up! Enjoy!!
InfoMogul’s Social Media Guide contains a more detailed version of this post.
Profile / Real Life Network Sites
Facebook – photo sharing with friends, messaging, best network
LinkedIn – professional network, jobs
MySpace – more customizable than Facebook, ability to share more info
Micro blogging
Twitter – link sharing, web activity log
Mini Blogging
Tumblr – simplified, concise blogging, very easy to look at and scroll through, yet no sidebar or tags / labels
Blogging
WordPress – best blogging platform, most templates, best look, a bit more advanced than blogger, can install easily on custom domain
Blogger (blogspot) – most customizable layouts, can move “gadgets” or widgets around with ease, feeds and blogrolls look nice easily
Information Consolidation
Plaxo – next gen Facebook, “auto twitters” all of your online activity (facebook, bookmarking, flickr uploads, blog posts, etc.)
Delicious autoblog – this is a daily autopost of any bookmarks you add to delicious
Multiply – allows you to import specific posts from any of your blogs
Information Syndication (Simultaneous Publishing)
Posterous – post all your posts here, then you can select which blogs to syndicate the given content with only two clicks, great bookmarklet tool to grab content with, just looks nice without any effort, best blogging platform, but not meant for viewing since limited theme selection
Ping.fm – cool for updating your networks probably, might be obsolete because of posterous
Content Sharing (General/All Purpose, Bookmarks, Books, Songs, Videos, Pics, Websites, Articles)
Digg – links, to mostly articles and videos, good for pages as opposed to entire websites
StumbleUpon – websites as opposed to pages
Diigo – bookmarks, comments anywhere, highlighting important page content
Goodreads – books
Soundcloud – song sharing, this may be my new favorite
Blip.fm – song sharing, allows you to “DJ your own radio station”
Last.fm – music discovery
Youtube – videos you create
Vimeo – like youtube, but better because it allows longer videos than 10min
Flickr – artistic photos, good networking
PicasaWeb – personal / family pictures
Out of all of these I like Vimeo. It allows you to select which thumbnail your video displays, and allows 500MB of uploads per week, with no individual file limit, which means if you have a video over 10min it will work just fine, unlike YouTube where videos must be under 10min.
