After my announcement of writing a Freelance Writing Guide For New Freelancers I’ve received some encouraging support from some of you. This is great, because it tells me that I can hopefully help you with the things I have learned while establishing myself in this field. So without rambling on further, I’m going to get right into the meat of things to help you set up a blog site for your freelance business.

The first thing you will have to consider is what message you want to bring across to potential clients? This is more important than you think and if it wasn’t for my friend Khai and a rather lengthy conversation we had on Skype, I’d still be wondering how to portray myself. Khai’s insights and suggestions made me stop and think and re-evaluate my whole Monika Mundell Portfolio site. The result of this whole exercise is what you see know.

I think it is also clear to you if you are one of my regular readers that having your own self hosted domain is a must in this line of work. How can you expect clients to take you for a serious business person, if your blog is setup on Blogger or WordPress.com? If you want to do this right, then you need to spend some money to get your business off the ground. Having your own website or blog is one of these expenses.

So here is what you do: ask yourself the following questions before you rush out to get going. You will save a lot of time down the line by not having wasted unnecessary effort on things you could have done right in the beginning.

1. How do you want to portray yourself as a freelance writer?
2. What keyword would be great and fitting to your blog/site

The reason I mention a keyword is that you will want to rank high in Google eventually so that potential clients can find you. It is obvious that anything to do with writing, freelance writing, freelance writer, best freelance writing, writer, freelancer or else would be a fitting match. Alternatively you can also choose your own name.

Registering a domain name

Once you are confident about the keyword you want to target, you will have to find and register a good domain name. In general a .com domain name is always best. But if there is no other way, you can also make do with other extensions if you like.

Do do this, go to GoDaddy and register the domain. GoDaddy will allow you to search for available domains and then register. Here are a couple of things to consider when you do this.

• make sure to click the one year radial button at the registration
• choose public registration
• choose manual renewal
• click on no thanks to all the offers that appear before you pay for the domain
• search for GoDaddy vouchers before you pay
• insert you coupon code as per the last note and double check your URL for spelling mistakes (you’ll be surprised how often this happens)

Setting up hosting

Now that you’ve got your domain name for hopefully $6.95/year (for a .com domain) it is time to look for a reliable host. My number one choice is Hostgator. I have been with these guys nearly for one full year now and never had a single problem with any of my sites being down. I’m actually moving to a stand alone server right now to further protect my sites against sharing with a spammer on a shared account. Until now I have paid under $10/month for a baby croc shared account which has allowed me to build about 15 blogs and counting and there is still bandwidth for more.

The reason I’m upgrading shouldn’t affect you guys when you get started and a shared account will suffice for you until you are ready to contemplate this move too (if at all).

Their live support is also excellent and I can tell, since I have used them extensively for questions when I first started out. Also, don’t waste your time with a no name host “just” to save a couple of dollars per month. $10/month is like 3 cups of coffee at the most and everybody should have that kind of money to invest into a business. Bluehost is another well priced host but by gosh don’t bother with them if you don’t want to end up with the same problems Don of Making Sales Making Money had.

Creating your WordPress database

Once you sign up with a host, you will receive an initial welcome email with some data. This contains your user name and you password as well as some information for your DNS server. This looks something like ns123.hostgator.com and ns234.hostgator.com. Keep this email in a save place as you will need that whenever you are setting up a new blog/site. For the $10/month you can setup unlimited sites and email addresses by the way, as well as unlimited databases.

Now go back to GoDaddy and login with your user name and password. Once in your admin, hover your mouse over the Domains section in the top left window. Then click on My Domains. From the list of domains that open up now (in your case it should only be the one, unless of course you registered some before) click the radial button to the left of the domain name and then along the top click on the Nameservers icon.

In the new window that opens insert your two nameserver numbers like shown below and click save.

This will now point your domain name to the Hostgator hosting account. Normally it takes anywhere between 2-48 hours until the change has been affected and you’ll see it working when a general Hostgator page appears after you type your domain into a browser.

Now it is time to log into your cPanel account at Hostgator (these login details were also part of your initial welcome email) and setup your data base.

When you first login you’ll see a lot of icons and this can be very overwhelming. I tried to record my own videos to show you what I do, but to be honest I need some more practice. Meanwhile, the following two video links explain very well on how to do this. Don’t get confused by the display of Otis’s host account, as Hostgator’s cPanel does look a little different. But all in all you will get the whole idea on what to do and proceed with relative ease.

Video One
Video Two

I hope you paid particular attention to the editing of the wp-config-sample.php file, as this is a very important step in the whole process. That’s it! You should now have your very own WordPress blog on your domain, ready installed. I strongly suggest that you watch further videos on YouTube if you are confused about what to do next. There is plenty of information out there to explain this properly.

I hope this was helpful to some of you. It had to be done, to set the stage for what’s to come next. If you have questions, please ask in the comments section or send me an email to info [at] thewritersmanifesto DOT com.

Monika

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