By Barry J McDonald

When you’ve started a business online there’s a tendency to keep it on line but should you keep to this?

You’ve probably noticed that there’s a trend that’s growing in popularity online and that’s taking your content offline, more and more online gurus are offering content offline either in the form of a physical newsletter or CD.

But is this right for you and should you go this way?

Here are a few things you may want to consider…

1. No More Spam Filters - By using the mailman to deliver your content you won’t have to compete with spam filters and your mailing list not receiving your newsletter.

2.  No dealing with e-mail addresses - If you consider the length of time a person stays at the same home address compared to e-mail address which can change from day to day (you gain the advantage of being able to keep in contact with them for longer).

3.  Perceived Value - Most people perceive a physical item as more valuable than an online newsletter and there’s a better chance that they’ll read it all.

4.  Uniqueness - By posting your content physically you help your business stand out from the rest of your competition.  For example if you were a reader which would give more attention to 10 newsletters in an inbox or 1 newsletter in the mail?

5.  More committed readers - Because of the extra cost of mailing and printing etc, you may/will need to charge for postage etc. But if you have readers who are committed to paying for monthly content from you then they’re probably a more  motivated buyer and you stand a greater conversion rate on any offers that you make to them.

6.  More Content - If you do go down the line of offering an offline newsletter you will need to come up with more content every month to keep your customers happy plus you’ll need to present unique content that your reader can’t get anywhere else.  Which may mean more writing for your or hiring some ghostwriters to keep level of content up.

Finally,

Why stop at an offline newsletter, why not go all the way and publish a magazine to your niche. There used to be a time that you needed a massive budget to this but the rules are a little different now. Discover now how you could make thousands by publishing your own magazine at www.ItWasSoEasy.com/magazine.htm

WordPress has never been easier to install than the latest version. In this article, I will describe how to install WordPress 2.5.

INSTALL WORDPRESS IN FIVE EASY STEPS

(1) Download WordPress

The first installation step is to Download WordPress from http://wordpress.org/download/. I created a directory on my PC called wordpress in which to collect the files and images I will use for my WordPress installation and customization. Once the download competed, I saved the .zip file.

(2) Unzip WordPress

After saving the file, I opened it with the zip/unzip program I use, and selected all of the files. Since I will be testing and modifying Wordpress locally to begin with, I extracted the files to the root directory of the Apache server I use for my PC test bed.

If I were going to install WordPress for real on a live web site, I would have used an FTP client to upload the .zip file to the desired directory at my hosting service and unziped the file there. Firefox has a terrific and free FTP client, FireFTP, that can be used for the upload.

(3) Create the Database

At this point, the WordPress database needs to be created. WordPress requires a database to store the site content and other information. I use MySQL for my database server both on my PC test bed and on my live sites. I use phpMyAdmin as an interface to MySQL.

Creating the database is really simple using phpMyAdmin. I simply start phpMyAdmin, enter the database name, and hit the Create button. WordPress will create the tables it needs in the database.

(4) Create wp config.php

WordPress needs to know how to access the database once it has been created. That s what the wp config.php file is for. WordPress includes a file called wp config sample.php. This file needs to be modified with the database access information and renamed to wp config.php.

Open the config file with any text editor. The critical entries are DBNAME, DBUSER, DBPASSWORD, and DBHOST.

As an enhanced security measure, I obtained a unique SECRET_KEY and pasted this into the file. I then saved the edited file as wp config.php. The text below shows the code I changed:

// ** MySQL settings ** //

define( DB_NAME , wordpress ); // The name of the database

define( DB_USER , rtivel ); // Your MySQL username

define( DB_PASSWORD , MyPassword ); // …and password

define( DB_HOST , localhost ); // 99 chance you won t need to change this value

// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase. You won t have to remember it later,

// so make it long and complicated. You can visit http://api.wordpress.org/secret key/1.0/

// to get a secret key generated for you, or just make something up.

define( SECRET_KEY , diq`~@|CH6)l@u>x;hA>1ew1maZ/)ToE!y }}ZYAI!=V^L()eooB!0V+k8LJa!Eh ); // Change this to a unique phrase.

(5) Run the WordPress Installer

After completing the edit of the wp config.php file, I started the installation script by entering this URL to my Apache server into my browser:

localhost/wordpress/wp admin/install.php

For a live site, the URL might be something like this:

yourdomain.com/wordpress/wp admin/install.php

The first installation screen asks for the blog name and contact email address.

The next screen announces a successful installation and provides a username and password for the administrator. Be sure to save this password!

The installation is now complete. I can now log into Wordpress and begin managing the blog, customizing the theme, or adding content.

Or, I can click the link at the top of the log in screen and go to the blog s home page.

If you don t manually create a wp config.php file, WordPress will prompt for the information it needs and try to complete the installation.

That s it! WordPress should now be installed.

Yours for a more successful blog,

Royce Tivel

Author Resource:-> For an extended version of this article, complete with numerious images showing, step-by-step, the procedures described in the article, please visit http://www.selectdigitals.com. The extended version also contains information about how to theme WordPress.

Article From www.ItWasSoEasy.com/