This article is part of a case study series. It is the second installment of “Building A Profitable Niche Blog With Minimal Effort“

As I mentioned yesterday, I am going to be doing a case study on how I set up a blog with the intention of creating a small, but very low maintenance, income stream. I have done this many times, and they all add up

With each new blog I create, I learn more and more techniques; I am constantly refining the process. The blog for this case study is the first blog I have created since starting DerekBeau.com, so I have already learned a lot of new tricks that will be added to my process.

I just finished setting up the blog, taking notes throughout the entire process. In this post, I am going to give you a play-by-play of exactly what I did and what I plan to do in the coming days. Enjoy!

Step 1: Chose and Registered the Domain Name

Like I mentioned in the previous post, all I had for this blog were the 100 articles that were delivered to me by one of my freelance writers. Obviously, the first task I needed to accomplish was registering a domain name.

When initially ordering this content, I had spent a few minutes trying to come up with a good domain name, but never settled on one. This time, with the pressure of having to write this post, I was able to make a quick decision. I went with PrsnlFinance.com.

I like this domain name because it is short, easy to remember (just take the vowels out of personal), and it is unique while containing the major theme keyword. The disadvantage of this domain is that while it can be easily pronounced as “personal finance dot com,” it must also be verbally mentioned that there are no vowels in “personal,” possibly adding confusion.

In any case, I really like the domain and was pleasently suprised to see that it hadn’t already been taken.

Step 2: Downloaded and Installed WordPress

I use WordPress a lot these days because it is just so darn easy and expandable. You really can’t beat the features and community backing that is has with any other [blog] content management system available on the market. You can use whatever CMS you want, but WP is a clear favorite among publishers.

There isn’t much work involved with installing WordPress; they take pride in their “5-Minute Installation.” However, if you do need help with the installation, check out the official documentation.

Step 3: Changed Some Default Options

With WP installed, the next thing I did was create a psuedoname, or personality, to use as the “author” on the blog. Whenever I need to come up with a name, I always use this really cool random name generator at Kleimo.com. I generated a list of 20 male names and chose one that seemed to fit: Mark Kimsey.

The next thing I did was to update my profile to include this name, to display “Mark” on posts, and to change my password to something I can remember Here are the other settings/options that I changed:

• General – Gave the blog a title and a tag line and added the “www” prefix to both URL fields. I almost never use the “non-www” version of my domain names, so I might as well set WP straight.
• Writing – Added Pingoat (http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2) as a second update service. I used to use a huge list of ping services, but I found that it just slows everything down and doesn’t add much benefit. Feel free to add any others that you feel are necessary.
• Discussion – Unchecked “comment author must have a previously approved comment.” I want comments but I don’t want maintenance. I would rather have a few spam comments get approved and later deleted than have legitimate comments go unapproved for weeks or months.
• Permalinks – Before setting this option, I created a blank file named “.htaccess” in the main directory of the blog and chmodded to 777 (making it writable). Next, I set the permalinks option to custom as “/%postname%/”

Also, now that I have a .htaccess file, and WordPress has done its thing in there, I like to make sure that the server redirects all “non-www” requests on the domain to the “www” version. This helps to reduce the chances that search engines see the same content at “example.com” and “www.example.com,” and transfers all link weight to one version. I have been using this trick for years, but instead of posting it here, I’ll just send you to Carl Ocab’s canonical tutorial.

Step 4: Installed Some Handy WordPress Plugins

The next task that I chose to tackle was installing/activating plugins. This list isn’t exhaustive of all my favorite WP plugins, but it does include every one that I installed on PrsnlFinance.com as well as how I configured each of them:

• Askimet – This plugin comes pre-installed, but your absolutely must activate it if you don’t want to be drowned in spam. All you need to do is get a WordPress API key (if you don’t already have one) and input it into the configuration form.
• All In One SEO Pack – I’ve never used this plugin with this blogging method before, but I can only assume that it will help bring more search engine traffic. It certainly can’t hurt. After activating, I inputted a custom title for the blog, gave it a home page description and keywords, and checked the option to auto-generate descriptions for posts.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – This will help search engines crawl your site and access all of your pages. The setting I used were “sitemap” for page slug, show just posts, and hide future dated posts (very important because I will be queuing many articles at a time). After setting the options, I created a new WordPress page titled “Sitemap” and pasted the DDSG token (<!– ddsitemapgen –>) into it.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith – To set this up, I simply registered the PrsnlFinance.com feed with FeedBurner and then updated the options with the new URL.
• Google Sitemap Generator – This will let Google know when you have updated your pages and which pages they should index. I left all the options at their default settings, then uploaded two writable (chmod 777), blank files: “sitemap.xml” and “sitemap.xml.gz”. I then added the sitemap to my Google Webmaster Tools account and clicked “rebuild sitemap” to actually create the files and ping Google.
• Related Posts – I added this plugin for two reasons. It automatically provides deep links to other blog posts (SEO benefits) and it helps to encourage visitors to read more. The only settings I changed were to show 5 related posts and to surround each of them with “<li></li>”. I also clicked the “run script” link at the bottom of this plugin’s settings page to create the necessary MySQL table.
• WordPress Duplicate Content Cure – Before finding this plugin, I had been having a lot of problems with Google’s supplemental index. This helps to reduce (but doesn’t eliminate) those problems. You still need to get some links to your website or your pages will all become supplemental. There are no options that need to be set for this plugin.

Those are all the plugins that I installed on the blog. You might notice that there are no monetization related plugins on the list. The reason, as I mentioned in a previous post, is that I am not planning on monetizing the site just yet. I need to build links, traffic, and popularity first.

Step 5: Reworked The Blogroll

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want any of those “default WP install spammers” getting their links in my blog roll. The first thing I did here was delete all of them without thinking twice. Next, I simply searched on google for “personal finance blog” (modify for your own niche) to find related sites that I could possibly network with. I then added a handful of them to my blogroll.

The benefit of this is that they will see your site show up in their traffic stats (click through to their site to make sure of it) and might come check it out. Additionally, you can send them emails telling them that you like their blog, have linked to it, and were wondering if they would be so kind to link back to your blog as well

I didn’t worry too much about which blogs I was linking to because I can easily modify the list whenever I need to.

Step 6: Chose And Installed A WordPress Theme

It might seem kind of strange that I waited so long to install a custom theme on the blog, but I wanted to get all of the behind the scenes settings completed first. The only thing left to do after installing the theme is to go “live” by making the first couple posts and then tweak the theme as I see fit (a process that goes on for a while).

I decided to go with a theme that I saw posted on BloggingTips yesterday, Simplicity 1.0 by SoloStream. I like this theme because it has a newspaper feel to it that seems appropriate for a finance website, and because it has been planned with monetization in mind. There is plenty of room to include text links and direct banners when I start selling then in the future.

After downloading and installing the theme, I quickly set up the sidebar widgets to include basic features such as an RSS button, categories, archives, blogroll, recent comments, and recent posts. I will be rearranging, adding, and removing widgets from these two sidebars as the blog develops over time.

Lastly, edited the theme to include stat tracking code from Google Analytics and StatCounter. I like Analytics because it gives extremely detailed stats, but I also use StatCounter because it updates in real time.

Step 7: Loaded A Handful Of Posts And Published Two

It didn’t really matter when I went public with the blog, I just needed to start adding the content. I decided to start the day off with an introduction/welcome post (also copied to the about page), followed shortly after by one of my actual content posts. In addition to the two posts that I have published, I also added 10 timestamped posts that will be published ever other day, so 20 days of continuous content is already queued up. I will expand the queue later.

Sometimes the articles I receive from freelancers are structured in some kind of order, complete with an outline. In that case, I will usually post them in the order that the writer intended. With this batch of articles, however, they are grouped into a few different categories. Therefore, I simply chose posts at random to be added to the blog.

Plans For The Next Edition

This entire post is fairly basic for anyone that has ever created a self hosted WordPress blog before. It might seem like I did a lot of work, but in reality, it didn’t take more than an hour of my time. I tried to be as descriptive as possible in writing it out so that you can see exactly what I am doing with this website.

In the next few days, WordPress will continue to automatically post more articles to the blog and I will begin working on promotion. My initial plans are to get some backlinks that will help with indexing and PageRank. After I become bored with link building, I will work on some other promotion methods and hopefully some residual links will follow.

Once the blog gets off the ground, there won’t be much more to do but wait it out until it ages a little bit, at which time I will begin to monetize it.

Additional Resources

If you missed the first post in the case study, you can find it at Building A Profitable Niche Blog With Minimal Effort.

Also, if you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to the full RSS feed so that you don’t miss out on any of the updates.

Index of This Case Study

Here is an indexed list of all the posts in this particular case study. It will be updated as more posts are added to the series.

1. Case Study: Building A Profitable Niche Blog With Minimal Effort
2. Initial Steps For Building A Low Maintenance Niche Blog
3. Promotion Goals For A Low Maintenance Niche Blog