World Internet Summit Speakers

- TypePad

- Blogger

- Blog Harbor

- WordPress

These are some of the most popular blogging platforms and while I think they all have their advantages there is one clear winner –

WordPress.ORG

Download WordPress (it’s no-cost), install it on your server, buy a proper domain name and then get
blogging.

DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU

Let me tell you a story about Steve. Steve is a niche blogger. He set up lots of little blogs on all kinds of topics (niches) aiming to make a few dollars from each blog by placing Google AdSense advertisements on them. Google pays you when
someone clicks on the ads.

After a few months he did really well and built up his income. None of his blogs had a lot of traffic, but they got enough from search engines that each blog earned between $1 and $10 per day.

In total he earned over $2,000 per month from his blogs – not a bad effort.

One day he turned on his computer and all his blogs had gone. Disappeared. Vanished without a trace…

What happened?

He was using one Blogger.com account to manage his blogs and Blogger.com determined that what he was doing was violating their terms of service.

They thought all his blogs were what are called “splogs” or SPAM blogs.

Splogs are blogs set up to get traffic to other sites. They are usually automatically generated and the owners have no intention of producing a useful website – they just want to get traffic. They are the SPAM of the blogging world.

Steve contacted the support staff at Blogger.com to explain that his sites were not SPAM sites but it was difficult to convince them and he never got his blogs reactivated. Overnight he lost his regular $2,000 per month income in one hit.

OWN YOUR BLOG

If Steve had hosted his blogs on WordPress on his own servers with his own domain names this simply would not have happened. It may cost a bit more upfront to buy the domain names and rent the server space (WordPress itself is free) but the security and control you have makes it worthwhile.

WordPress has many pluses. My particular favorite features include:

- It’s free, very powerful and runs of a mySQL database, so it’s quick.

- It has a very easy installation procedure.

- There are hundreds of free themes you can download and install allowing you to change the look of your blog.

- There are hundreds of plug-ins that provide extra functionality.

All of the above benefits are available because the WordPress system is Open Source Software, which means anyone can look at the code and modify the program. Consequently there are hundreds of programmers working to make WordPress the best blogging system and they do it for free – just for the good of the software.

GET STARTED

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that WordPress is the way to go. Now if you haven’t done so already, here are the three steps you can do right now to get your new WordPress blog installed.

1. Go to http://wordpress.org/download/ and download WordPress.

2. Buy a domain name and hosting package.

There are literally thousands of web hosting providers around, just do a Google search if you want more options.

3. Install your blog. Done!

BACK-UP YOUR BLOG

Before I end this newsletter I’ll leave you with this one last very important note…

If you are going to stay with Blogger.com or TypePad or even if you use WordPress, there is one thing you should add to your weekly to-do list –

Back-ups!

Make sure you have an offline archive of all your content, so for whatever reason, if you lose your blog you can restore all the content. If you own your domains you won’t lose your traffic because you can restore things to exactly how they were.

There’s a great little plug-in that lets you set up automatic WordPress database back-ups, you can download it from here -

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/

Here’s to your blogging success,

Yaro Starak

PS. The plug-in I mentioned above is just one of several I recommend my students install in their WordPress blog during the pre-launch phase when setting up a new blog.

If you want access to all my recommendations and advice for new bloggers to make sure you begin your blogging journey the smart way, consider joining my mentoring course. Here’s the link for more details.

Yaro Starak

Go Daddy

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