OK, you've got your cool domain name figured out, and you've hit "sign up" on Bluehost.com or some other hosting service. I recommend Bluehost for the reasons mentioned earlier - I'm not affiliated with them in any way. Now it's time to set up the host to get your blog up and running as soon as possible.

When you click "sign up", you may want to consider checking the Bluehost privacy option. If you don't want to have your name and address publicly associated with your domain name (anyone can look it up using Whois), you can have Bluehost display their contact info under the whois fields. The domain will still be yours. If someone wants to buy your domain name for a million dollars in the future, they'll contact Bluehost who will in turn forward the request to you.

Now just fill in the contact and billing information, and follow the instructions to set up your hosting account.

Once you're done, you'll want to find the cPanel. I use the "new layout" and set that as the default view. Under Addons/Plugins, find Fantastico (auto-installs). Click that, and on the next page you'll see various possible installs. Under Blogs, find Wordpress and click on it. On the next page, click on New Installation. Again, on the next page, fill in all the information as follows: Leave the directory field empty - Wordpress will be installed in your root (top) directory. Choose a username and password for administration of your blog (write them down!). A good way to make notes of the most important data is to take a screen shot (in Windows, hit CRTL-Print Screen, then go to Word and hit CTRL-C and save the document, in Mac OS X, hit Command-Shift-3 and the screenshot will be saved as a file).

In the e-mail account fields, type your domain admin password (the one you entered when registering for the hosting service).

Now, hit install Wordpress.

That's it - you're ready to blog! Type this into your Browser address bar:

http://xxxxxxxxxx.com/wp-admin/

where xxxxxxxxx is your domain name (for me, this would be innerblogger). Make sure you bookmark this!

You will be taken to the Wordpress Dashboard, which looks like this:

Now, it's time to start creating content. Click on Write, then just think up a title for your first post, and type your entry. You can start by writing Hello, world! to make a test post, or you can start blogging for real right away and write your introductory post. Your first post should contain a concise and attractive introduction to your blog.

Now, just hit Publish and you're done!