Installing Your Theme and Plugins
Last time we covered setting up your settings and finding a theme. I hope you have all found a theme you like and is relevant to your blog topic. I had a tough time finding just what I wanted for the bike blog, but I found something that will work for now. I may keep an eye out for the theme I had in mind, but couldn’t find when I actually went looking for it. ** note to self… self when you see a theme you like download it right then, at the very least ~ bookmark the page for later. 
Now I have a theme all zipped up sitting in my wordpress/themes folder on my desktop. Recently wordpress has made some changes that will make uploading this theme SUPER easy!!
Let’s log in to our sites and find the “appearance” category in the sidebar, click the title so it opens up all the options for us to see.
Click on the add new themes link. This will open up a world of possibilities for you ~ however, you don’t have to use many of them. However, if at some point you want to get fancy you can learn how to use all the extras that are now provided. I want to add at this point ~ a theme is important to the first impression of your blog, but messing with your theme and how it looks is NOT a money making activity. You can have an ugly as hell site and STILL make tons and tons of money. Do NOT spend a ton of time tweaking your theme and the look of your site. really. I mean it.
The piece we need is at the very top. This is a relatively new feature to wordpress, you can search for themes here, you can also upload your theme here as well.
To upload our selected theme (upload simply means adding it to our options to choose from our blog) we want to click on the upload link.
We’ve saved our theme in the zip format it was in when we downloaded it. Now we simply use the browse button to look on our desktop (or wherever you saved it) for our wordpress/themes folder (or whatever you called it) and pick the theme we want wordpress to upload for us.
Here’s a quick video where I actually upload my theme for the mountain bike site.
That’s all there is to installing your theme. You have it really easy ~ wordpress has made it super simple to upload your theme, no more FTP at this stage ~ don’t worry ~ you’ll get to learn it later.
Let’s talk about plugins.
Plugins are little programs that allow your blog to do things for you automatically. These plugins are free and will give you greater functionality on your blog. There is a plugin for just about anything and everything you can think of. We’re not going to go crazy with the plugins though ~ for this type of site we only need a few. Here’s the plugins I run on a niche blog type site like this one.
1. all in one seo This plugin gives you opportunities to seriously optimize, not only your whole site, but each post on your site for your keywords. Very easy to use, but necessary.
2. simple link cloaker This plugin will allow you to cloak your affiliate links so they look like regular site links. This is a very simple plugin but it serves our purposes VERY well.
3. Google sitemap This plugin will automatically generate a sitemap for your site and notify the major search engines. The dowload link is part way down the page. Make sure you download the recommended one for wordpress 2.1 or better.
4. tweet meme This plugin will put a button on your posts that allow people to share your posts on twitter very easily. This is a nice way to let others help you drive traffic to your site. If you look at the top of this post ~ it says retweet (hopefully there’s a number there because someone has retweeted this post lol) that’s the tweetmeme plugin in action.
5. all in one adsense/yahoo This plugin makes it very easy to customize and include adsense ads or ads from yahoo’s ad network on your site. We will be downloading this one now ~ but we’re NOT activating it yet. You don’t want to put adsense ads on your site until later. really. yes, I’m serious.
6. Yet another related posts This plugin automatically lists related posts at the end of your post to keep people moving through your site.
The process for plugins is the same as for themes. Go to your wordpress folder and inside create a “plugin” folder. Then go to each site, hit the download button for the plugin and choose the plugin folder to save it in.
Once you’ve got them all saved you can upload them to your site. All you’re going to have to do is go to the plugin category in your dashboard area.
Click on plugins to open up your options. And then click add new to get started. From here you can choose to upload your plugins by clicking the “upload” link, just like at the theme area.
Now you want to use the browse button and find your plugin folder. Upload one plugin at a time. So find the plugin click open, and then click install now in the dashboard. It will open and get the plugin ready to activate. You can go ahead and activate all but the adsense one, but go ahead and upload it. If you activate it now you will have a big blank square show up in your posts ~ which looks crazy and doesn’t do you any good. So just leave it unactivated until we’re ready to use it.
When you install the SEO plugin you will get a big red stripe at the top of your dashboard that it needs to be configured ~ we’re gonna do that on Monday. For now just get them all installed and activated (except the adsense one). We’ll do all the configuring next time.
You’ll notice there are a couple plugins already in dashboard when you get there. akismet and hello dolly. Hello dolly we are not going to use, but we are going to use akismet. This is one of the BEST plugins to manage spam.
To make it work however, you’re going to have to enter a code. It’s called an API key. It’s free and you can get it from wordpress.com (yes, wordpress.com) To get it you will have to have an account at wordpress.com ~ if you don’t have an account there make one, if you do you already have an API key and we’ll get it next time to activate your akistmet plugin.
Tasks for the weekend:
1. install and activate your theme
2. install and activate your plugins (except the adsense one)
3. sign up for an account at wordpress.com so we can get your API key on monday.
If you have any questions about the process, or plugins feel free to ask them in the comments section. Please remember that plugins and blog set up is a really personal thing ~ it can be done a million different ways, and everyone has their own favorite plugins and way to set up a blog/site. I’m not saying you can ONLY use these plugins. I’m just saying this is my way. You can certainly, over time, create your own way, and figure out what you like best, for now this is a great place to start.
Need some help getting started? Wherever you are I can probably help. Whether it's Squidoo, niche blogs, or an authority blog, one on one help is available!!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Other Posts That Might Help:
Jackie,
Do you know of any themes in particular that look more like a website instead of a blogger type? My search through the wordpress themes didn’t really show anything like that.
Thanks for the informative post!
Carey
Hi Carey,
Can you be more specific about what a “website” looks like to you? I may be able to make some suggestions ~ or give me a link to a website you’d like your site to look like.
Follow me @momtohanna on Twitter!
LOL..I guess they all look like a website. Something that looks a little cleaner to my eyes is what I’m looking for….like the White Opal Wordpress them. I’m not real good at explaining what I’m talking about so if I confused you, just yawn and I’ll go away eventually. ha
Carey
Hi Jackie,
Much of my background is in adult learning and training. You have
an excellent understanding of how the human brain “grasps” concepts.
I suspect it is a talent you were born with. You do a great job of filling
up even the smallest “gaps” in the learning process.
In order to effectively accomplish that, 2 factors must be present:
* You must have an excellent working understanding of the concept itself.
* You must be an excellent student yourself.
MANY so-called “gurus”, even the ones that make millions, can’t do what
you do. “pot pie girl” has a similar talent.
Keep up the good work, and thanks!
Mike Hutchins
Mike ~ thanks for the kind words. It also comes from years and years of people asking questions ~ so as I write I can hear the questions I will be asked and just add them in while I’m writing.
Follow me @momtohanna on Twitter!
Thanks again Jackie for a very informative post. You’ve really built up a following of trusting people who I’m sure, like me, will follow you forever and help make you successful like you are helping us.
Michele
Follow me @Lovebostons on Twitter!
Dunno if I’m old or afraid of change or what, but I still FTP (or perhaps it took me so long to learn it in the first place, I’m gonna run it into the ground, LOL)
I did ONE auto click plugin install a couple days ago just to test, and nearly jumped up and down like a 5yo.
FYI – you may want to try the Platinum SEO plugin – everything AIO has and then some, the best of which in my opinion is the auto redirect feature…very handy if your a compulsive permalink changer. lol
I thought the new upload thing was awesome ~ and I’ve had a few that it wouldn’t/couldn’t unzip so I still had to ftp.
I think I’m an old dog/new tricks when it comes to plugins ~ I haven’t even heard of that one. I will take a look ~ but why on earth would you need to change your permalinks once they are set? I’ve never changed my permalinks once they are set.
See… it’s very interesting ~ everyone does it a little differently, uses different tools, and yet people succeed. Just proves my point that as long as you are doing SOMETHING you can succeed. The only people that don’t eventually succeed are the people standing on the sidelines trying to “figure it all out before they get started” and the people who decide “this IM thing just doesn’t work” and quit.
Follow me @momtohanna on Twitter!
Interesting, you’re the first I think I’ve come across that has never changed a permalink.
You’ve never thought after the fact that you can do even better SEO wise on it?
Thanks for the STC plugin!
oh you mean changing the title of a post after you’ve already published it? yeah, I’ve done that, but not very often ~ since when I’m doing niche sites I use keywords I’ve already researched for titles so there’s nothing to really rethink. If I spend a ton of time rethinking stuff I’ve already done I don’t get a bunch of new stuff done. Once I’ve done something I call it done and move on to the next thing.
Follow me @momtohanna on Twitter!
OK here’s where we get weird, lol.
Title and Permalink – 2 separate entities if you wish. The title is what it is, then you can change the “permalink slug” to say, remove unnecessary words, like “and”, “the”, etc., simply keeping keywords.
True enough though, a real niche blog with only one topic wouldn’t need many of those types of changes at all.
Hi Jackie,
, that to me is too big for a niche blog, would something like potty training seat and chairs be more along the line of what you would try and tackle or would that be to specific to do a whole niche blog on?
This comment is not really related to this post but I was not sure if you went back to old posts to review and answer questions.
I am following this process carefully and I have got some time right now to dive in and get my first niche blog going. My problems stems from the niche idea and deciding what is too big or too small. Take potty training for example, gee can you tell where my life is at right now
Sorry for the wrong posting but my grey matter is starting to ooze out my ears!
Thanks
Chad
hey Chad ~
Feel confident to ask questions on any post, I get email notification for every comment made on the blog so I can respond.
Potty training strategies might be interesting, as there are many different ideas on how to potty train your kid ~ you could talk about each strategy and then offer the products needed to do that strategy. (charts, potties, stickers, potty dolls, party supplies ~ yeah I was there not too long ago. ) So yeah that might be a decent niche ~ what you will have to look at is whether and what people are searching for in relation to this niche. Keyword research ~ see if there keywords out there people are looking for and just how competitive they are to see if it’s going to be worth the time/effort.
Follow me @momtohanna on Twitter!
Thanks Jackie,
I really never really thought about different strategies angle but I wonder if that is too large for a niche blog and many of the products you would use for each strategy would be the same.
I have done some digging around potty seats and chairs and have come up with a list of around 3o or so keywords that are getting 300 and above in exact searches and all have PR total of less than 30 but I am thinking that is way too specific to do a whole niche blog on or am I way off?
This gets so confusing to me because if I do a blog on potty strategies then my keywords should be around that not the products used right?
Good lord I might start pulling out what little hair I have left soon!
Jackie
I guess this a technical question. I have this problem. My computer and I use Windows Explorer to open Zip files, but this software is currently malfunctioning and we’re trying to work out how to fix it which is proving to be difficult. If I upload my theme (which is a rock kitty theme) and click ‘open’ and WordPress needs Windows Explorer, presumably it won’t open and probably cause all sorts of strife. Do you know if W/E is necessary for WordPress?
If I do have to wait until I resolve my W/E problem before unloading my theme, can I go ahead with things like installing plugins? Or does this have to wait too?
Hope you can help me with this one as I don’t want to get left behind, and then have to try and catch up!
Regards
RUSSELL
Follow me @kimbarra on Twitter!
either one would be viable ~ it’s just a matter of which direction you want to go. If you go with chairs/seats then yes you can just sell those things, do a post on each of the kw you found, then talk about that product in the post ~ link to the product. That will be a an easy sell ~ since people will be looking for that specific product. I didn’t realize there were that many kw available. I do NOT think that’s too niche for a whole site ~ have you seen how many frickin’ potty chairs are out there????? Someone’s gotta give parents the low down.
If you did the strategies ~ it would probably be people looking more for information than to buy ~ although if they found a strategy that sounded like it would work they would probably not be too hard to convert.
I don’t think potty seats/chairs is too niche ~ if the numbers are there ~ then go for it. I can tell you we had 3 potty chairs here because we couldn’t find one she would use lol.
So parents will buy potty chairs!! If you give them information about the chairs it would probably be a great service to them. I wish I had known more about the musical chair before we bought it ~ I ended up hating it… those are things parents appreciate.
You don’t have to have a 90 or 100 post niche site ~ it can be any size. So maybe this one’s only 20 or 30 pages. Cool ~ get it done, promote it and then move on to the next one.
Follow me @momtohanna on Twitter!
Hi Russell,
I don’t know how wp unzips the files and uploads them. Try it and find out if it works or not. If it doesn’t work it will just say ~ hey we couldn’t unzip this ~ and then we’ll work on another way to get them unzipped and uploaded.
Follow me @momtohanna on Twitter!
Thanks Jackie
I went ahead and tried and now have my theme safely up and open on WordPress. My three word headline is also my three word keyword and that’s safely in place.
Just one more question … can I use any of the post copy (and pics) from the original rock kitty site in any of my Articles, or US FreeAds, or is it her copyright?
Once again, thanks for your help.
RUSSELL
Follow me @kimbarra on Twitter!
Congrats on getting your theme uploaded. That’s terrific!
No you can’t just use content from that site.
We’ll be getting to content shortly. Did you upload your plugins yet? That’s the next step, and then tomorrow we’re going to get our plugins settings right and then we’ll be ready for content.
Follow me @momtohanna on Twitter!
Hi Jackie,
As always, great tutorials. Having an issue with getting the API key though. First off, I am a little confused. You mentioned that we should get a WP account if we don’t already have one, but wouldn’t you need that anyway to upload a WP theme to the WP dashboard? and also activate everything with your host (in my case Host Gator). I have done all that, but WP keeps sending me around in circles when I ask for the API it tells me to login to WP, but I am already logged in.
Sorry, am I missing something here?
Thanks
Follow me @beignspanishnow on Twitter!
You have to have an account at wordpress.com That is a completely different thing that the wordpress you’ve just installed.
Your API key comes from wordpress.com. What you installed on your hostgator site was wordpress.org. Which is different.
Follow me @momtohanna on Twitter!
Yeah I knew that.. silly me, I have roboform and because the .org and .com login pages look identical, I didn’t notice I was logging in on the .org site to find the API key, no wonder I was running around in circles.
Thanks your clarification still helped as it made me dig a little deeper. LOL
Follow me @beignspanishnow on Twitter!
Hi Jackie
Yes, I’ve uploaded the plug ins except for ‘all in one SEO’ which just won’t work.
I get this message:
nstalling Plugin from uploaded file: all-in-one-seo.zip
Unpacking the package.
Incompatible archive PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature
Can you help me on this?
I’ve yet to do akismet which I’m about to do. (hopefully successfully).
Sorry to interrupt your holiday season. Have a great Christmas!
RUSSELL
Follow me @kimbarra on Twitter!
Russell,
I’m getting ready to go out of town, and probably what you’ll have to do is ftp it into your site. That’s a whole post by itself.
I’ll work on that when I get back. Until then enjoy your holiday.
Follow me @momtohanna on Twitter!
If people have time to work and are waiting on the next step for niche sites you can always continue to build new product lenses. Just because holiday shopping is almost over doesn’t mean people quit buying stuff.
You’re checking global search volume which is an average of the last 12 months. You can still make the same lenses, just talk about getting a good deal ~ instead of great christmas gifts. That will give you something to do until I can get the next tutorial written.
Follow me @momtohanna on Twitter!
Merry Christmas Jackie to you and your family.
Have a safe and happy holiday,
Carole
Thanks Carole,
Same to you and yours.!! We got snowed in in Tulsa, but finally made it home late Christmas day. Christmas morning is not quite the same at 5 at night
but it was fun nonetheless. 
Follow me @momtohanna on Twitter!
Jackie,
I couldn’t resist so I did a sneek peek on my site. I know perfection isn’t a necessity but mine, I think needs a little help…and it’s only a title so far. At this rate the content will be a doozy. LOL. Anyway, here’s the site Dansko Nursing Shoes. Any suggestions? Do you think a new theme is necessary? thanks.
Jolene
Follow me @jochris26 on Twitter!