While it is quite common for people who are just starting out with the blogging idea to use one of the free services like blogspot or wordpress.com to set up their blog, there are real benefits of hosting your own.
Here are my top ten benefits:
- Professional Appearance – You can have your own separate domain name for your blog or make it part of your own existing website if you have one. If you use a service to host it, you will have a lengthy blog web address which will make it appear less professional and makes it harder for people to find you (your business cards don’t look that good either!). Continue reading
In an earlier post I talked about WordPress plugins and the huge number available, so we’ll continue by discussing what we use on this and other sites we maintain. I mentioned some of the indispensable ones previously so in this post I’ll tell you about the clever ones that we often use to enhance websites and blogs.
It is best to think about what feature you want your site to have (like an animated photo gallery or a chat widget to enable you to speak directly with site visitors to assist them) and then go looking for plugins that fulfil the task. Continue reading
SEO or search engine optimization is a term often bandied about by companies who want to sell you their services. While SEO specialists can improve your ‘organic’ (I’ll explain what this means later) ratings, whether their services are worth the money you are asked to pay is debatable.
The first thing to understand is that SEO takes time. Two to three months before seeing positive results is realistic, so any company that says in their promotional material ‘We guarantee the number one spot in Google in 2 weeks’ or similar is worth steering clear of. Why? – because they are probably using shady techniques that will most likely get your website penalised by Google. That is something you definitely do not want to happen. Continue reading
We want you to be able to start writing straight away – nothing to set up or complicated procedures to learn how to use. If you can use Word, you can blog online. It really is that easy!
Every site we set up provides the user with their own secure login and the ability to write and publish their own posts or articles on their blog.
We’re sometimes asked ’What if I can’t think of something to write about?‘ Our best tip is to write a series of posts when the mood takes you. We’ve all found that once you get started, it soon begins to get easier. You get into a rhythm and then your ideas begin to flow. Continue reading
