In this modern web 2.0 world, everyone seems to have their own blog. An unmoderated, and universal way of expressing your opinions. Some are personal, others are news based and some are just hilarious.

So why is it you don't have a blog yet?
> Price?
> Difficulty?
> Long set-up?
> Can't see the benefit?
> Price?
> Fear you might get repetitive?

Well now you can conquer all those issues and get your word out there, for a low cost, at a great quality and without having to rely on other people or a blog company where your blog just fades out of sight.

What do I need and what will it cost me?
You'd be amazed at how cheap it can be to get really nicely stuck into blogging, with your own domain name i.e. Lifelong-newbie.com or whatever, and a good hosting package.

> Domain name: This is how people will find your blog, a domain name is the address in the bar at the top of your browser e.g. http://'''www.instructables.com'''. You can get some really nice deals on domains at GoDaddy at the moment, there selling .com .net .org .us and more for less than 10 bucks a domain, and that sets you up for the whole year, and will include a big bag of extras for your domain courtesy of GoDaddy

> Hosting: Find a web host that gives good rates and is well reviewed. Be wary of hosts that offer unlimited services, as they may be overselling there servers.

Step 1: Set Up Your Domain

Your web host will email you and tell you their name servers, give them to GoDaddy and wait for GoDaddy to set that up, it should only take a max of 24 hours, meanwhile start planning your blog, or read the first chapter of a Harry Potter book, or something else that takes 24 hours.

Step 2: Your First Time...

Now we'll set up your blogging software and get everything ready for your release unto the web.

For these examples we will use an old website of mine to demonstrate the set-up, this won't be complicated even if you're completely new to working on the web, using cPanel, or building websites.

I've put these instructions on each individual picture to which they are relevant.
Here they are listed in order anyway in case there are some problems with the pictures.

Click on Fantastico in the cPanel and install a lovely new copy of Wordpress

Step 3: Set-Up Your New Blog

Now click the New Blog button and fill in the form to get your new blog set up. Then fill in the form to set up your details for the blog. Then you can start posting to your blog.

After this step is complete your clear to start using the blog, as you intend to. The steps after this one are for advancing your blog.

Step 4: Making Your Blog More Accessible.

This consists of two steps, the first is sorting out your website to default to your blog. For the second part I'll be telling you about RSS feeds.

1) Go into cPanel, scroll down to subdomains.
2) Type blog in the first box.
3) Then in the second box labelled 'document root' type in the directory where your blog is stored, For example mine is at www.new-webmaster.co.uk/blog/ so i would type blog. Because that's the location of the blog after the domain. If it is the same as mine it will automatically set the second box up for you.
4) Click Create
Now your blog is accessible through blog.yourdomain.com as well as yourdomain.com/blogslocation/ so I can access mine at blog.new-webmaster.co.uk AND new-webmaster.co.uk/blog/. This is good because some people have difficulty understanding or remembering URLs like yourdomain dot co dot uk forward slash blog forward slash; but they'll find blog dot yourdomain dot co dot uk a lot easier to understand and remember.
5) Now go back to cPanel and click on the button labelled Redirects
6) Fill in the following details:
Type: Permanent
http://(www.)?YOURDOMAIN.CO.UK /
Redirects to blog.yourdomain.co.uk
7) Click add
The reason for this is that now whenever you go to yourdomain.co.uk it will redirect straight to your blog. That means that you can give your URL out as just yourdomain.co.uk and people will still be able to find you, no problems.

Now we'll talk a little about RSS feeds, and how they can make you better known.
What is an RSS feed?
RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

How do i set-up an RSS feed?
Luckily b2evo, sets all of your blogs up with RSS in two formats, from the beginning of their existence and will manage them for you. Scroll down your blog, and look along the right hand side for a module called 'XML feeds' and the links are their for your RSS feeds in both RSS and Atom, and will either show you an RSS feed of your blog posts or of the comments left to your posts.

What's the point?
Everytime you send a new post everyone who's subscribed to your RSS feed will immediately be informed of the update, this is great, it's self managed, self automated marketing. Encourage all your users to subscribe to your RSS feeds, and you should get a big bunch of regular visitors.

Step 5: Getting Your Blog Noticed

Search Google for Free Search engine submission and you'll get over 830,000 results. So look through this list and find a search engine submission wizard which will get you on lots of different search engines. You will probably find that you'll have to submit yourself to Windows live search and Yahoo manually, and that the Yahoo site submission requires a Yahoo account of some kind. Because you'll probably have to submit to Yahoo and Windows Live yourself, I'll add the links to their submission pages at the end of this step.

Windows Live Submission
Yahoo Submission You'll notice you can submit your site feed on this site as well.

Step 6: Make Money From Your Blog!

The very easiest way to make money from any site including your own blog is to put a little advertising on it. b2evolution makes this pretty easy. You don't need to know any code either, so it's simple to understand as well.

1) Sign up with an advertisement company, Google's Adsense program has got rave reviews from a lot of my mates and it pays quite well too, from what I've heard.
2) Crawl around the advertising companies website and get the HTML code for the banners. HTML is the most common language used on websites, it's pretty logical, and for the purposes of this step, you don't need to look into it all. Just copy it to your clipboard (Windows users: Ctrl+C) for later.
3) Login to your administration panel on b2evo.
4) Follow the instructions on the pictures.

Step 7: Set-up Multiple Contributors.

The simplest way to get your blog to grow uber-rapidly is to set-up multiple contributors to it. By doing this you can have lots of people adding to your blog at once meaning you will have new content more often and in bigger numbers. This is really very simple and will benefit your blog massively.

Step 8: You're Done!

That's pretty much it, everything you need to learn to get your opinion out there, and maybe even make a little money. This ible will be updated with extra steps later, when I think of more to right, but this lot should get you on-line and writing within 24 hours if you like.

If you start a blog following this Instructable, then feel free to PM me a link and I will put it in a list on this step, so you can start drumming up some publicity. Use the subject header "My blog" and include a link and three keywords to define your blog and its content.