Writing for Your Wealth

This is the last entry in my How to Build Passive Income with Article Sites Series, and I had originally thought to wrap up with a short post on adding new content and keeping your sites fresh. You can probably figure out how to do that, and since several people have asked about the techy how-do-I-get-up-and-running stuff, I better cover that a bit here.

I have to confess that the technical side excites me about as much as shoveling snow with a garden spade. (Yes, I did that recently. Hey, I just bought my first house a few months ago. I can’t be expected to have all the right tools already…)

In many cases, you’ll probably find as good (okay, better) explanations for a lot of this on other sites, but I’ll do my best here!

How to Get Your Article Site up and Running

You’ve researched your keywords, chosen your domain name, written your articles, and now… what? How to you get this stuff up on the web efficiently and economically? Well, you can teach yourself a bit of HTML and learn to use an HTML editor, or you can cheat and use Wordpress to create an article site.

Wordpress vs. HTML

When I got started with my sites, I didn’t know about Wordpress (I’m not sure it was around on any noticeable scale yet), so I taught myself enough HTML and CSS to make simple (read: ugly) page templates using my 5-year old version of Microsoft Frontpage. I’d paste in my articles, create internal navigation links, and then upload everything to my web host.

This wasn’t all that hard, but the problem was that changes were tedious to make, and site-wide changes? I’d have to go in and edit every page myself.

Today, it’s a lot easier to make article sites if you just use Wordpress as your platform.

Sure, Wordpress is designed to be a blog, but if you choose a simple template (content left, menu bar right, no fancy schmancy widgets), write only twenty posts and have links to all of them on the menu bar… poof: it’s an article site.

Since our article sites are small and narrowly focused, we probably don’t need categories and archives, but if you do end up expanding down the line, it’s easy to make site-wide changes on the fly with Wordpress.

How to get Wordpress up and Running

Basically you need to register a domain name, buy web hosting, and install Wordpress.

Godaddy.com or Namecheap.com are some places you can register your domain. This should cost $10 a year max. If you’re looking to save a couple bucks, Google for coupon codes before checking out.

For web hosting, there are zillions of options (close anyway) and some of them even have one-click Wordpress install options. PowWeb is one of those, and they have some pretty inexpensive starter packages.

If you are planning to create lots of these article sites, though, you may want to sign up for a host that offers reseller plans.

Reseller accounts allow you to have multiple domains and many unrelated sub-accounts on one hosting package. I’ve got a reseller account at Site5. For $20 a month, you can pick up the basic account, which provides more than enough space and bandwidth for scads of article sites.

In your welcome email, you should get the name servers for your hosting space. The name server is what tells a person’s browser where your site files are located, so all they have to do is type in blahyourdomainblah.com and all the pages loaded onto your web host are accessible.

You’ll need to punch the name server settings in at your domain registrar (i.e. GoDaddy), and within a day, you’ll be ready to install Wordpess on your hosting space and start putting your articles online.

You can find Wordpress templates, or “themes,” that are simple and made to work with Adsese (search for free Adsense Wordpress themes).

If this is all new to you, you can find more guidance and everything you never knew you always wanted to know about installing Wordpress on their home site.

Do I Really Have to Do All That Myself?

Glad you asked. If this all sounds like Klingon (only less decipherable), it’s probably easier to hire someone to do it for you.

If you visit the Digitalpoint Forums, there’s a section where people offer their services, and this is an easy job for a code jockey, so you can find someone willing to do it for $20 or so. These folks won’t likely be local, so be prepared to pay with Paypal.

If you’d feel better working with someone locally, then check out Craigslist (but expect to pay a bit more).

With all that said, if you do intend to set up numerous article sites, it may be worth learning to do this yourself.

All right, it should all be as clear as primordial ooze now!