Wordpress

Are you already blogging or getting ready to start a blog? You may be interested in knowing that all blogging platforms are not created equal. If you intend to build an online business that will represent you well on the internet, here are some things that you will need to keep in mind.

The first thing is that a free blog will not serve you well in the long run. If you start a blog with a free service you do not own it. If you are just writing a personal diary or family blog, it may not make as much difference to you.
if you are running an online business, it means everything. A free service may remove your blog at any time if they do not like what you are doing. You do not want to take the chance of working hard for months or years, only to have it all disappear with no recourse available.
 
This means that you do not want to use blogger, also known as blogspot, or the free version of wordpress. These blogs are considered to be throw away sites, and you do not want to spend time on something that can be deleted by someone else.
 
When are ready to get serious about blogging, go to Typepad or to hosted WordPress. I often recommend Typepad for people who are just getting started online because it is very simple to set up and get going. All you need to do to get started is to purchase a domain name and sign up with Typepad. The small monthly fee you pay is your hosting fee. Typepad also has very good customer service and an online knowledge base to answer all of your questions.
 
Hosted WordPress also requires you to purchase a domain name for your blog. Then you will need to get an account to host your site. I recommend a hosting service with c-panel hosting, so that you will be able to take full advantage of everything the internet has to offer. there are too many details to go into here, but believe me when I say that c-panel hosting is the way to go.
 
Then you will need to choose a theme for your WordPress blog. There are thousands of free themes available, as well as many that you can purchase. You can search for these online very easily. I prefer a theme that is two columns, with my sidebar on the right, and also one that is widget ready. This means that you can easily add the plug-ins that WordPress is known for, like the ones for video, search engine optimization, and audio capability.
 
No matter if you decide to go with a hosted WordPress blog, or the simplicity of a Typepad blog, either way you will own your blog and be able to create a site that will enable you to build your online business.
http://www.blog-link-generator.com
http://www.rss-announcers.com

Manish Kum Bansal
http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/blogging-hosted-wordpress-also-requires-you-to-purchase-a-domain-name-for-your-blog-723552.html

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There’s a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging platforms. The average newbie now has “too many” options to choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I’m always asked the question “Is Wordpress better than Blogger?”. The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need.

You also need to understand that there are different versions of Wordpress, the earliest now termed as “Wordpress” at Wordpress.org, and the hosted version similar to Blogger now termed “Wordpress.com” which is of course available Wordpress.com. Only the latter comes with free hosting on a sub-domain account. We’ll discuss this in Part 2.

For Part 1 of this article, we look only at the self-hosted version of Wordpress. Here’s the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can extremely furstrating. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating.

With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform.

The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS. Unlike complicated predecessors like PHPPostNuke, B2, Mambo or even Joomla, wordpress is user friendly. Plus, the availability of source codes in this open-source system coupled with a strong community makes it possible to use Wordpress as an article management system, classifieds system, direct-selling site and even a paid membership site.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go Wordpress, you don’t go back.

Gobala Krishnan
http://www.articlesbase.com/publishing-articles/blogging-wars-wordpress-vs-blogger-part-1-65060.html

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The “Wordpress” developer team has successfully launched their latest version of Wordpress, called “Wordpress Ella”. Numerically, the version number is called version 2.1

To the uninitiated, news like this seems like a normal announcement from software developers and are often passed on by. However, from the eyes of a trained mind and savvy businessman, the news of “Wordpress Ella” contain many benefits that online business owners can immediately tap into and profit from.

“Wordpress Ella” comes with the following enhancements which are a great resource for online business owners.

1. First on the list of enhancements from Wordpress Ella is an ‘autosave’ function that ensures you will never lose a post again. This is an invaluable tool especially at times when you have spent a lot of time in front of your computer screen, brainstorming on what to write to promote your business.

Imagine the horror or frustration especially in instances where the battery of your notebook died and you forgot to save. Or perhaps there was a blackout or you accidentally closed the browser window without saving your work.

“Wordpress Ella” autosave function is a real time saver and is an abosolute must for any online businesses.

2. Next in line on “Wordpress Ella” is the “Import” and “Export” functions. Let’s talk about the import function first.

The latest release of “Wordpress Ella” has an import function that allows you to import your blog created from other popular blogging platforms such as ‘Movable Type’, ‘Typepad’, ‘Livejournal’, ‘Blogger’ and so on, into Wordpress itself.

This way, you don’t have to lose any important data such as your blog posts and comments. This flexibility is another reason why Wordpress itself is so successful and continues to gain a huge following and user base.

Why would anyone want to transfer their blog from another platform to Wordpress? Well, one reason is because with most of these other blogging platforms, the user has to pay a monthly fee. Wordpress, as almost everyone knows is free, and you can easily install with a few clicks using Fantastico from within your hosting account’s Cpanel.

Another reason to migrate or transfer the entire blog to Wordpress could be due to the limitation of some blogging platforms. Blogger, for example does not support the use of categories, which are critical when it comes to optimizing the blog to rank high for specific keywords related to the business.

Now, let’s discuss about the “Export” function.

“Export” as the name implies, will export all the Wordpress posts and comments into a file (called XML). This file can then be imported into other wordpress blogs. It’s like a cross transferring of data between similar or related “Wordpress Blogs”.

This is useful when one is starting a new blog and perhaps need to populate the blog with useful content instead of just displaying news feed. For example, if you have a blog on muscle building, and you started a new blog on weight loss, you can import the content (which are the posts and comments) from the muscle blog into the weight loss blog.

This way, when you drive traffic to your new weight loss blog, you can at least provide the reader with some useful content while you build up the content around weight loss. Naturally there is some correlation between these two topics. After all, if you want to build muscle, naturally you need to burn off the excess fats and turn them into muscles!

3. Another enhancement of “Wordpress Ella” is the new search engine privacy. What this means is that you can indicate whether you’d like your blog to be indexed or ping by search engines, especially Google, Yahoo or MSN, which are the three top search engines online.

Most experienced marketers know about the pinging power of blogs. Everytime when a post is published, Wordpress will ping or notify specific blog directories about updates to your blog, causing them to index or visit your blog, brining you that additional and much needed targeted traffic.

As crazy as it sounds, considering that most business owners would like to get their site listed in the search engines, there are also times when you might want to hide or mask your blog from the radar screen of search engines. This is true especially in cases where it’s only meant for paid customers only. For example, you might be providing some sensitive information meant for paid customers and you don’t want anyone doing a search on the search engines to stumble upon your blog and have access to the information.

4. Another powerful upgrade that “Wordpress Ella” brings is the ability to specify a static page as the front page for your site or blog.

Most savvy marketers employ the use of a mini site or a one page only sales letter when marketing their products or services. Normally such one page sites will also contain an opt-in box, where visitors and readers are enticed to provide their email address in exchange for a free gift, software, e-course etc.

When they do so, they will normally be enrolled in an autoresponder course that automatically does the follow-up with the said subscriber which either results in a sale or no sale.

With a blog, however, the main page or the front page will always a display of the latest chronological posts. You can create pages for a blog, however, in the past it was not that easy for the layman to do so.

With “Wordpress Ella”, all you need to do if you want a static front page is to select this option in the Wordpress control panel. It can’t get any easier than this.

These are just some of the enhancements that you can immediately benefit from “Wordpress Ella”.

This article assumes you already have some basic knowledge about the marketing power of blogs in terms
of its syndication power, targeted traffic and search engine optimization capability for keywords.

Brandon Hong
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/profitng-and-benefiting-from-wordpress-ella-103768.html

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I’m talking about the Wordpress software and NOT the free web-based wordpress service. Thanks, everybody!

That is hard to provide you with the exact specific numerical figure that you may be looking for.

But one thing that is quite clear is that most professional bloggers (hey, I used most, not all) tend to use Wordpresss software as opposed to other platforms.

A good place to visit for more details is Technorati top 100 blogs and you can be able to work up the list and discover what software they use to run their blogs.

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