Hi everyone, in my first post of the Micro Niche Site Challenge I shared with you how you can find your niche. Now we’re creating a website with WordPress, to publish our content online.

This post is not only applicable if you want to create a niche site but also when you’re launching a blog, a personal website, or a new website for your enterprise.

I want to show you, how you can choose a webhosting plan, install and configure your WordPress website, and publish your first post.

Why Am I Creating A Website With WordPress?

Let me first talk about, why almost all bloggers and internet businesses rely on WordPress as system for their websites.

WordPress is a Content-Management-System (short: CMS). It’s designed to let you easily publish content online and to be highly customizable.

By March 2012, 72.4 million websites around the globe use WordPress. That is approximately 50% of all websites worldwide!

This statistic proves, that creating a website with WordPress must be pretty easy – and so must be the maintenance.

The official WordPress plugin directory contains more than 19,000 free plugins to extend the functionality of your WordPress website.

Hundreds of thousands of different themes, designed by professionals, will make your site unique. Almost all of the are customizable to fit your expectations and together with some plugins you are able to create your very own website that isn’t comparable to any other website in the internet.

Since WordPress is widely spread and is based upon a huge community of developers.

You definitely should care about the developers, because those people introduce new functions to WordPress, fix bugs, increase the security, and enhance the overall functionality.

Creating a website with WordPress is the best choice you can make.

Webhosting Basics

In order to make a website accessible in the internet, you’ll need a service provider called ‚webhost‘.

Those guys have huge building full with servers all around the world. Without going into technical details, servers are computers providing storage and accessibility for websites. You will install WordPress on a server owned by a webhost and the webhost takes care of making it accessible in the internet within seconds after installing WordPress.

Webhosts protect their servers against hackers, power blackouts, and guarantee the accessibility of your website in the internet.

Most webhosts include buying domain names in their hosting packages, so that you can manage your domains and your websites in one account.

Don’t worry, it sounds more technical than it really is and I will guide you through this process one step at a time.

Choosing a Webhost

It all starts with choosing a webhost for your websites.

In my opinion, there are basically two great webhosts to choose from: Bluehost and Hostgator.

Both combine webhosting and domain name services. Creating a website with WordPress is very easy, both webhosts offer very simple routines for this purpose.

Those two are both great choices when it comes to customer support, technical service, and pricing. If you decide that you’re going with Hostgator, you can save 25% with this coupon: hostgatorjk25.

Here is a sample installation video, that shows you the simple installation routine Hostgator offers for WordPress.

Configuring WordPress

Creating a website with WordPress also includes the installation of a custom theme and custom plugins. Those make your site unique and are pretty easy to do.

I’ll touch on the two most important configuration steps: installing a new theme and installing new plugins.

Installing A New Theme

For my niche site, I will use the standard theme TwentyTwelve, that comes preinstalled with WordPress.

If you have purchased a different theme and want to install this, this screenshot shows you, how to do it.

In the section Appearance you can see a menu-item called Themes. Clicking to that opens a page with two tabs.

In the first tab called Manage Themes you’ll see every theme that is currently installed. Here you can switch between themes through clicking on Activate.

In the second tab called Install Themes you can search the official theme repository by entering a search term into the search field.

When you have purchased a custom theme, you have recieved a .zip archive, which you can upload when you click on Upload. Clicking on the Browse button on the upload page will open a directory browser, which you can navigate to the .zip file containing your theme.

Installing The Adsense Plugin

Remember that we’re creating a website with WordPress to generate passive income online. This website will be monetized through Google Adsense, so we need to embed their Adsense codes in our website.

I’m going to use a plugin called Ad Injection. It is free and it displays Google Ads in several different positions and even supports ad rotation. We’ll see later on what this means.

On the plugins page, you can search for specific plugins. We’re going to enter the name of the plugin Ad Injection into the search field and we will be presented with the following results.

We see, that we can easily install the plugin by clicking on Install now. After clicking on Install now a popup window appears which we have to confirm.

WordPress will then automatically download the plugin and install it. When it’s finished, WordPress automatically opens a site where we can directly activaty the plugin.

How To Use Google Adsense With WordPress

In this Micro Niche Site Challenge I’m creating a website with WordPress because it is incredibly easy to use Google Adsense with WordPress.

Before you can add Adsense to your blog, you need to be registered for Google Adsense. Please make sure, that you have at least 5-7 pages or posts on your website when applying for Google Adsense! Otherwise you’ll most likely be rejected.

Once you are approved, I suggest that you head over to the Google Adsense Academy to learn how to handle Google Adsense. If you have a question, please leave a comment or shoot me an email.

When you are successfully approved and have create your first Adsense block, you can start configuring the Ad Injection plugin.

Ad Injection has four different ad places. Don’t worry, the configuration screens looks more complicated than it is. If you go read through it slowly and follow along step-by-step, you won’t have any difficulties configuring it. If you’re experiencing problems, please leave a comment.

Top ads are displayed at the top of the post, normally before the first paragraph. You can configure the paragraph before the ads are displayed. Excluding single pages, the home page, or archives is also possible.

Random Ads are displayed within the post. You can specify how many ads to display in one single post. I’m displaying only random ads on my blog, because I don’t want to annoy people with ads directly at the beginning of a post. In the section Other ad placement settings you should check every exclude random ads from … setting, since those settings would break your design and display ads within lists, tables, or forms. You can decide on where to start and stop displaying random ads (e.g. after the second paragraph) and how many ads to display based on the text length (you don’t want to have three ads in a 150 words post).

Bottom Ads are displayed at the bottom of a post. You can configure the minimum length a post or page should have to display these ads and also at which paragraph to display the ads. I’m not using them, since I have an opt-in form at the end of each post.

Footer Ads are hooked to the footer of the WordPress theme you are using. I won’t recommend using them, since every theme handles the footer differently.

Ad Rotation gives you the great opportunity to test different ads on their click-through-rate.

Each placement for ads (top, random, bottom, footer) allows you to save 10 different ad codes. That means, each of the ad is displayed to 10% of your visitors. You can generate different ad blocks at different sizes and then insert their codes into the boxes shown on the screenshot. Don’t use the same code, it would display the same ad

I’m normally using not more than 3 different ad codes at a time.

The advantage of using ad rotation is, that you can see what ad size works best. I suggest that you save three different sizes of ads and then monitor, which ad generates the most revenue. Ad Injection automatically displays them on an equal percentage, you don’t need to configure anything.

After you know which ad size works best, you can easily replace the other ad sizes with the code to maximize your revenue.

Action Steps For You

Especially when we’re creating a website with WordPress as a micro niche website, we need to keep track of the SEO optimization. I’m going to share this in the next week, when we’re talking about content creation.

What I want you to do know is:

1. Get a webhosting account if you don’t have one and buy a .com domain that exactly matches your keyword.
2. Install WordPress.
3. Install the Ad Injection plugin.

Since you most likely have no content to use as foundation for your Adsense application, don’t do this now. We’ll come back to it after we’ve created the first content on the niche site.

If you like this post of have a question, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you!

To your success,

Jan