Have you ever wanted to start your own blog or manage your own website but did not do it because you did not know how?

How would you like a step by step plan to setup your own site?

Here is a rather lengthy hubpage detailing the exact steps you will need to enter into your new world of owning and operating your world wide internet real estate. Real estate on the web can make you money, improve your writing and social skills or can just pander to your interests.

Grab a coffee, open your mind to new information, sit back and relax so we can begin our journey.

In the good old days a website was basically built using html and other coding that made a relatively functional website. Those websites when established were sold for rather high prices because they looked good and made a bit of money.

The website of choice in today's time is undoubtedly the Wordpress blog. A blog built on the Wordpress theme is easy to maintain, very easy to manage, extremely easy to update and easy to sell (if you wanted to).

If you used a html website, each time you wanted to add a page or make changes, you needed to go to your on desktop editor such as FrontPage and physically make the changes and build a new page. Then you would have to upload that page using ftp software to your server so the page forms part of your original site.

Now, how does this sound? Open your browser and type in a password and you access on the screen your whole site. Adding content is simply a matter of writing in what you want and press publish. That's it. No ftp, no html coding, nothing hard and a joy to do. (Its very addictive once you get going).

Now based upon the ease of access we will do what everyone else is doing and we will base our site on a Wordpress blog.

You can get a free Wordpress blog, but that will not make you anything at all, so here is how we have our very own self-hosted Wordpress website.

I could go on forever here, but basically, the website name you choose should contain the keyword of your site. If you write about article marketing then those words should appear in your site name, such as www.articlemarketingsecrets.com.

Once you have decided your name go to PowWeb.com where you can open an account for just $3.88 per month and this includes a FREE domain name.

You will soon see this is the best start up account on the net as domain names are normally around $5.00 to $15.00 each for a basic name and hosting can be up to $4.00 to $10.00 per month.

During the sign up process, if your preferred name is not available, then you can choose a similar name.

What will happen is if I sign up for an account, I already have, I am asked what domain name I want. I choose the domain name and then my hosting account is set up associated to my domain name.

All I have to do now is get the domain working and here is how...

In your control panel when you sign in to your hosting account, you will see a table of icons that allows you to easily access your site. You will see the icon Install Central.

Install Central will automatically install a Wordpress blog for you. You tell Install Central that for your domain name you want a Wordpress blog installed and the software will go away and set it all up for you.

When the software finishes, it will provide you with your log in details and the log in url. Go to your url and sign in. You will come to the dashboard of your new blog.

Here is a few screenshots for you. The first is your new web hosting site and the second is a view of your Wordpress dashboard.

On the left side of your dashboard is the section titled Posts. This is where you Add New posts to what is now your Wordpress Self Hosted blog.

Open "Add New" and you will be met by a familiar word processor where you add your content, images, video etc. This part is all very self explanatory.

So whenever you want to add content to your blog then just add a new post with your unique content and press the publish button.

That in a nut shell is how easy it is to start your new website, now known as your blog. You add content and gradually build up your on line presence or as I prefer to call it, stake a claim in your web real estate.

Now let's tweak our blog shall we, make it look nice..

The new Wordpress software now enables the user to change the theme of the blog by simply uploading right from your dashboard.

Your theme is how the blog page looks. A search on any search engine for free Wordpress themes will bring back many results of webpages that will allow you to download a theme for free.

You download the desired theme and in your dashboard you load the theme from your computer, similar to adding a photo on hubpages. Once the theme is uploaded you can then change to that theme. If you do not like it, then just look for another theme until you find one you like.

My site new hair styles for women has had many themes and I like the present one. It does take time to find the right theme that fits your site.

In your dashboard you can play around with the settings. They are all very self explanatory and you cannot make a mistake.

Now you have your new Wordpress blog, start searching online for other sites that promote such blogs and learn as much as you can about them. You will find some very useful information.

Speaking of widgets, lets now look at adding Adsense to your site.

A widget is just a small package of code that Wordpress uses to perform a function. In this case the widget I am talking about is the All In One Adsense And Yahoo plugin.

You find the plugin here at http://www.linewbie.com/wordpress-plugins/all-in-one-adsense-and-ypn

Just the same as installing a theme you do the same as with a plug in. Upload the plugin through your dashboard and go to its settings.

In the plugin setting page you add your publisher id number. You can add a channel to keep track of your earnings. You can tell the plugin what size advertisements you want, how many advertisements you want to each post and exactly where you want those advertisements to go.

If you went to my new hairstyles site, you will see my adsense is top left of the content. No other ads appear in the content section, just there at the top. You could if you wanted to, tell the plugin you want your adsense top left, top right, middle, centre of content on the left, right, middle or the bottom after the post left, right or centre.

That's right, the plugin will place the ads anywhere you choose on a post page.

If you want adsense in the columns, thats the left or right or both column, just add a "text" box under appearance - widgets - and install the code directly from your adsense setup account.

That is how you start a website. Decide on a name, register your domain, set up your hosting account, install Wordpress, add content, change the theme and add widgets for Adsense and a whole variety of other things.

Now all you have to do is get visitors to your site. You might be interested in my hubpage titled Get Your Site A Worldwide Search Engine Listing for some ideas on this.

Now how easy was that. Very straight forward. The hardest thing is paying by credit card for your hosting setup but, remember, your blog can and will make you money.

The idea of having a blog is to make it so it pays for itself and maybe, make you some money as well.

Self hosted Wordpress blogs are the only way to go nowadays, they are well sought after for re-sale because they are so easy to control.

I hope this helps you and in closing I raise my glass and toast - To Your Success!!