PluginID’s The Blogging Blueprint- A Practical Application Guide. Part 1: Getting the Blog Ball Rolling

17th January, 2010 at 19:02 | Posted in Blogging, Online Business Developer, Technology | 5 Comments
Tags: Creating a Blog Business, Ebook Benefits, Online Business Developer, PluginID

From Whoa to Go is moving up in the world.

I’m finally making the steps to go from hosted by wordpress site to running independently and as previously mentioned I’ll be using Glen Allsopp’s Blogging Blueprint ebook to get the blog ball rolling. Rather than go through the book piece by piece like I did with Exile Lifestyle’s Personal Branding ebook I’m only going to pull the relevant information. I recommend you download the entire free guide if you want to know what I know but don’t need, particular interest is how Glen got where he is now and why I trust him.

We begin in Part 2′s but skip the first two chapters that cover the reasons you may want a blog and deciding on a blog niche. These are answers I already have:

• I blog because I like to write, teach and learn simultaneously.
• My niche is multi-faceted: location independence, technical education for the layman’s like me and online business development.

Chapter 3: Deciding on a Domain

Choosing a Domain

A domain name is basically the ‘home’ for your site. For example, my blog on Personal Development is known as  PluginID and can be found at pluginid.com. There are many different extensions that you have available to you when choosing a domain. Some of the most popular and well known include:
• .com
• .net
• .org     … etc.

For ease I am choosing to go with .com, especially as I plan to keep myself universal.

Brandable vs Optimised

In my opinion, it is much better to have a brandable domain rather than one which is overly descriptive in regards to what your site is about. For example, my personal development blog is called PluginID and is formed around the slogan “Plug into your Identity.” PluginID doesn’t mean much on its own, but people remember it and my evidence of this is that a lot of people ‘Google’ Pluginid to find my site.

I would much prefer to have a name like PluginID which I can establish a brand around, rather than something like personal-development-blog.com which clearly shows the content the site covers but is not a brand or something people can identify with.

And here lies a crossroad. I could use fromwhoatogo.com or caronmargarete.com.

A lot of personal branding blogs talk up using your own name because you’re the face of the business but I tend to disagree. I want people to remember the business and associate me with it as a secondary factor. And well, let’s face it I have one of those beautiful names, so fantastic in fact that no one knows how to say it properly, let alone spell it.

For the record, it’s not a fancy version of Karen Margaret. My first name is like turning a car on: Car-On, my middle name is Mar-Gar-Reet … Pain in the bum I know but I do love the way it sounds. Those who say my name right get massive brownie points but if you’d like to apply the KISS method, as I do often, feel free to call me Caz.

Consider too that when I begin operating as an Online Business Developer I want to call the business From Whoa to Go because that’s exactly what it will be for my clients.

Buying Your Domain

I purchase all of my domain names through Namecheap (not an affiliate link). A .com will set you back less than $10 and what I love about Namecheap is that they offer free WhoisGuard. This basically means that people can’t search the Whois database and find out your full name and address which they would be able to do otherwise.

I’ve chosen to trust Glen’s years of website development experience and use Namecheap too. As an added bonus they also have a promotion right now for free Positive SSL, a fancy pants term that provides security and data integrity for communications over the Internet.

Registering your domain through this website is an easy and logical step by step process. They guide you along like a puppy on a leash and although the site looks cluttered, the text is too small and initially it can seem overwhelming it is simple to use. Once the payment was processed I was sent a confirmation email and then encouraged to activate my SSL certificate.

This is where things got a little tricky for me because it required me to select a server type and enter the CSR.

They provided a link to information about how to generate a CSR  but it was written in tech-jargon. Finally I found on the NameCheap FAQ link an answer: How to Order and Activate SSL Certificates? in which they explain:

At this step, the certificate is purchased (ordered) but not yet issued (essentially this purchase is like a coupon to get a certificate). The next step is to go to “Your SSL Certificates” page and click on “Activate now” link to the right of the ordered SSL certificate.

By clicking on the link you will get to a page where you will be asked for all the information to generate the certificate. The main thing that is needed to generate the certificate is the CSR (Certificate Signing Request).

CSR is a big cryptic string that is obtained from the webhost’s side. To generate a CSR you need either to contact your hosting services provider and ask them to generate it for you, or the CSR generation option can be available in the hosting control panel (like cPanel).

So that’s it. I cannot go further because I don’t have a host yet.