Which Blogging Platform To Use?

As a blogger, you will be spoilt for choice in selecting which blogging platform to use. You have a choice of having a hosted or non hosted blogging platform. Hosted blogging platform refers to blogging platforms such as Blogger or Wordpress.com which will host your blog for you. Non hosted blogging platforms refer to blogging platforms that are hosted on your own hosting servers which in other words meant that you need your own domain name and hosting.

There are many blogging platforms around, and the best of them have to be Wordpress currently. Although I may be biased in saying that but having used Wordpress for quite a period of time, I find that no other blogging platforms offer the same power and flexibility that Wordpress offers.

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Setting Up A Wordpress Blog

Wordpress is simply the best blogging platform out there for beginners and experience bloggers alike. For those of you who are looking to set up a wordpress blog on your own domain and hosting, you can get a feel of the Wordpress blogging platform over at Wordpress.com. Basically, what you need is just an email account to sign up for a free hosted wordpress blog to get started.

This simple tutorial is to guide those who are new online to sign up for an account with Wordpress.com and set up their very first free hosted Wordpress blog. Just follow these simple steps and you will be well on your way to your first Wordpress blog.

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Setting Up A Blogger Blog

If you are keen to explore blogging further, it is advisable for you to get a feel of what blogging is about by starting a free hosted blog at one of the free blog hosting sites such as Blogger. As Blogger is one of the most popular free blog hosting sites around, I have set up this simple tutorial for those who need help on their first steps towards blogging success.

As Blogger is owned by Google, you can use your existing Gmail account to log in to Blogger and create your blog. Although you can use your Yahoo! Or Hotmail accounts to register for a Blogger’s account; I find it best to use my Gmail account for accessing my Blogger’s account.

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Traffic Generation For Beginners

Traffic generation refers to the process of generating and driving traffic to your website. A website without any traffic is not going to make you any money and which is no wonder why all webmasters are always trying their hardest to drive traffic to their websites. It is not just any traffic but targeted traffic which is the key to making money or not.

As a newbie, it is important for you to understand that even though traffic is important, if you do not have any idea how to monetize them, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. Therefore, besides knowing how to drive traffic to your site, you also need to learn how to monetize your traffic which will be discussed in another post.

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Link Building For Beginners

Link building is an integral part of any webmaster’s online activities even though it is the one of the most time consuming and tiring tasks for webmasters. Link building refers to the process of acquiring incoming links from other websites to boost your website rankings in the search engines. When your site has a lot of incoming links from quality sites, your website be deemed as trustworthy and will be place higher in the search engines giving you a bigger pie of the organic traffic from search engines.

If you are new to link building, just understand that a link coming from a quality site is deem more useful than a few links coming from inferior sites. For example, a link coming from a PR4 (Page Rank) site will be considered by Google to be better than 10 links coming from 10 PR1 sites. Having quality incoming links will give a quick boost to your SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) placement, especially in Google.

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Content Development For Beginners

Developing content for your website is one of the most time consuming and toughest tasks involved, especially when you are not a prolific writer. However, it can be easy if you have a system in place to develop content. As you can see, the process of developing content can be easily broken down into 5 simple steps and these 5 steps form the basics of developing content for your website.

• Research and gathering information
• Organizing your content
• Writing
• Editing
• Publishing

Research and gathering information for developing content is probably the easiest of the lot, besides publishing. You will probably be able to find everything that has ever been written or published on the internet. Also, you can check out competing websites and take a look at what they have written for a particular topic. From there, you can gather and extract all the important points to include and rewrite in your own style. You can also to go forums in your niche to do research and find materials to write for your website.

After you have done your research and gathering of information, it is time to organize the materials that you have. There are many ways to organize the information. One way is to organize the points in order of importance. Organizing the information that you have is very important to how efficient you can write and the quality of the content that you produce.

After organizing, it is time for you to sit down and write your content. When you are finished with your content, it is not done yet, you have to view and read it a couple of times to make sure at the very minimum you do not have any grammatical or spelling errors. This is part of the editing process which you will fine tune and weed out any errors. When you have done with the editing, you can then publish the content to your website.

Now, for those of you who are not keen on developing content themselves and you have some resources to spare, you can choose to either outsource your content development to others or purchase PLR contents for use on your websites. Just bear in mind that PLR content will probably be found on tens if not hundreds and thousands of similar websites on the internet. Outsourcing is probably the way to go if you have resources; otherwise PLR content is also a good choice for webmasters who hate the idea of developing content themselves.

Choosing A Platform For Your Website

Once you got your domain name and web hosting sorted out, it is time to decide on the platform to build your website on. It is a very important decision to make as it can be a source of frustration and waste of time and effort if you find that the platform you are using falls short in many areas down the road.

Which platform to use depends a lot on the type of website that you are going to set up?

If you are looking to create one page landing sites or multi-pages mini sites, you can use Dreamweaver or FrontPage to design and create HTML web pages for your websites. For blogs, you can go for popular blogging platforms such B2Evolution, Expression Engine, Movable Type, Text Pattern and Wordpress. I highly recommend using Wordpress if you are going to start a blog.

For a content heavy site, you can use either Drupal or Joomla to do so. Drupla and Joomla will be good for creating e-commerce sites, membership sites or content heavy sites which need a good CMS (Content Management System). When I first started out online, I used Joomla to create most of my sites. One thing I like about Joomla is the vast number of free templates and plugins available just like Wordpress.

For forums, you have a choice of forum platforms such as vBulletin, Invision Power Board, phpBB and SMF. The latter two are free whereas vBulletin and Invision Pwer Board are paid platforms. I have had experiences with vBulletin, phpBB and SMF and I can highly recommend using them. As for Invision Power Board, although I do not have any experience using it, is highly recommended by a lot of webmasters. If you are looking to build a forum site, you can give these few forum platforms some serious consideration.

Personally for me, I used Wordpress for all my blogs, Joomla for content heavy sites and vBulletin and SMF for my forums. In recent months, I start to convert existing sites to the Wordpress platform. As Wordpress is becoming more and more powerful and flexible to use for all types of sites, I find it the perfect platform to use on all my sites.

I have compile a list of recommended software platform below that you can use for your sites.

Blogs
• B2Evolution
• Expression Engine
• Movable Type
• Text Pattern
• Wordpress

Content Heavy / Ecommerce / Membership Sites
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Wordpress

Forum
• Invision Power Board
• phpBB
• SMF
• vBulletin