By: Beau Graves
There are many different resources out there for blogging, and there are also many different blogging platforms out there. We are going to discuss the basics of blogging, and some of things out there to look for when you are selecting a blog to use.
A blog is used for many different things, it can be used to communicate with friends and family, it can be used for social purposes, it can be used for business dealings. There are so many things that a blog can be helpful in as well. Building up traffic to your website, is the biggest thing that a blog can do for you. Most people do not understand the importance of blogging and its ability to grow traffic, when you get people who enjoy what you talk about, and enjoy your stories, that will create fans of you, who will come back constantly to see what new things you have. That is when it becomes very important to use it for business purposes, you need to make sure that you have the proper links back to your website, and that you are emphasizing you business.
Not everybody will have a website to link back to, some make their money off of their blog. There are bloggers out there that blog daily and that is all that they do, they are called professional blogger. One really good example of this is http://www.problogger.net/ he actually blogs about blogging, and has created on of the largest, blogging resources on the web. Darren blogs about different subjects that can be helpful, to both the beginner blogger, and the advanced blogger.
I would just like to go over some of the blog platforms that are available to you. First let’s talk about the ones that are hosted for you. I would have to say that one of the most popular blogs that are out there would have to be Blogger, or BlogSpot that it is referred to quite often. Blogger is owned by Google, so if you have a Google account it is very easy to get a blogger account. Blogger is a great tool, and can be pretty customizable for a free hosted blog. It also offers the ability to put adsense on it, so you can also add that on there to make a few extra bucks. That is a pretty unique tool that most people do not offer to you, Google owns adsense, so that is why they offer it, but in most cases blog companies would not want you to make money off of their free hosted blog that they offer you.
WordPress is the next Blog that I would like to talk about. In WordPress you can get both a free hosted blog, and you can also download the files so that you can upload them to your own host, and use it. The free version of WordPress is great because you can blog on their and not have to worry about the hosting it, but the downfall is that you cannot put ads on it, and it is not as customizable as we would like it to be. If you download the files and get your own host, it can be the most versatile platform available. There are many things that you can do with it from different themes to plugins, to widgets etc.
There are many others out there that you are able to use, like Myspace, Drupal, moveable type, Geeklog etc. I personally feel that WordPress, or blogger are the best options, and can be the most versatile. It definitely comes down to what you are used to and what you have used, some may like others that I have not used, but either way, you need to get a blog and start because it can be a very important tool for you and your business.
No comments yet.