The Profitmart Experiment

Hopefully you have heard about Wordpress. At the very least you have heard about blogging. But how many of you are doing it? I have toyed around with various blogging platforms in the past but doing this blog on Wordpress for the past 27 days has been an enlightening experience.

I’m going to go over some of the great things about Wordpress and then I will look at how you can use this with Profitmart.

Why Wordpress Rocks 

Wordpress is much more than just a blogging platform. When used creatively it is a search engine friendly content management machine that can be a critical component of your internet success.

With Wordpress you can change the entire look of your site in an instant. You can pick from hundreds of different themes and customize them with your own graphics. Your existing content will be instantly reformatted when you switch themes without you having to redo anything. 

You can monitize your site with RSS feeds, adsense, clickbank, ebay and DealDotCom for starters. The list is endless. There are plugins to make it easy for people to add your blog to digg, deli.cio.us and other social bookmarking sites.

When you regularly update your content you will become the type of site that search engines love. Try searching for “profitmart” in google and you’ll see that this blog is in a solid fourth place in the search listings (through blog toplist). It also shows up on the second page of listings.

You can sort your content into categories, edit it at any time (even after posting it), allow people to comment and insert html for things that aren’t directly supported. The built in text editor is excellent though it still lacks a few features like decent table editing. It is possible to replace it but I haven’t done that yet.

You have two options for hosting your Wordpress blog. You can either have it hosted on the wordpress.com site or you can use your own hosting service. It’s certainly faster and easier to let them host it but there are some drawbacks. You won’t be able to install your own plugins on the Wordpress host site. This is very frustrating because a lot of the great functionality of Wordpress comes through the huge selection of plugins you can easily install. For example, the DealDotCom ad you see in this blog is a Wordpress plugin. I never have to update the html. It is a live feed that will always be current. 

In short, Wordpress rocks as a content management system and a great way to build up your virtual real estate on the net.

Wordpress on Profitmart

Profitmart provides a turnkey interface for your website. They also provide generic hosting that you can use for other purposes. Your cPanel interface allows you to install all kinds of great scripts through the Fantastico utility. Wordpress is one of the things you can install through this interface which makes adding a blog a breeze.

Through Fantastico you can install Wordpress into a folder on your site. Then you can access it by sending people to that folder (ie: http://myprofitmartsite.com/blog). If you do this as directed it will not affect your main Profitmart site in any way.

Let’s take a look at the setup process

*** DISCLAIMER *** Do this at your own risk. If you follow the steps as I have laid them out this should work perfectly but if you mess up you could overwrite some key files. I would recommend backing up your site first through ftp.

Ok - that gets me off the hook. Here’s how to do it. It’s really very easy. There’s only one place in the process that you could screw it up so if you pay attention you should be fine.

1. Go to your cPanel login. You should have gotten this link on the page of many links when you signed up with Profitmart.
2. Scroll down to the bottom and click on “Fantastico De Luxe”
3. Enter a name in the directory box! This is the single most important part. If you don’t enter a name here it will install Wordpress in the root directory. This might overwrite some of your main Profitmart files. Just enter a name here and you will be fine. I recommend “blog” if you want to access the blog through http://myprofitmartsite.com/blog.
4. Fill out the rest of the info.
   1. admin username = the name you will use to log into the blog
   2. password = the password you will use to log into the blog
   3. nickname = the name that shows up on your posts
   4. email = your primary email
   5. site name = this will be the title of the blog. you can also change it later.
   6. description = the subtitle of the blog. you can also change it later
   7. email username = your email
   8. email password = I recommend using the same one as above
   9. leave the rest of the stuff alone
5. Click the “Install Wordpress” button. 
6. You will get a confirmation screen. It should say the domain and the subdirectory that you specified earlier (ie: “blog”).
7. Click “Finish Installation”
8. You will get a screen that tells you what your login to the admin page is. It will be something like http://myprofitmartsite.com/blog/wp-admin/. Even if you lose this you can still login by just going to the blog.
9. Enter your email address in the little box where it says “email the details of this installation to:” (just in case).
10. Go to the blog. (ie: http://workathomejobs4me.com/blog)
11. Click on the “write” tab and write your first post.
12. Send me an email so I can look at your blog and congratulate you!

This is the tip of the iceberg. You will now be able to do incredible things. Explore and have fun. Check out wordpress.com and wordpress.org for help when you need it.

Here’s an example of someone who is doing this already http://thesourceishere.com/blog/ (go Seth!)

Send me a link to YOUR Profitmart blog and I will happily append it to this post.

mike
www.profitmuse.com
:8^)

Here are other examples of Profitmart hosted Wordpress blogs:

http://myblog.alantig.com - Alan the Internet Guy

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under profitmart, tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.