If you set up a blog on these platforms, you have a quick way of “testing” the waters whether you have the patience, acumen, and creativity to blog. Now I am not stating that you have to be professional publisher to start and keep up a blog.

Make note, though, that when you set up blogs on these free platforms, you run the risk of having no control of it because the blog host can delete your blog for any reason they see fit. Although I can’t state a specific instance of how your blog on these platsforms can get deleted, the most common one is if you violate the “terms of service” of the way you use the blog. Some free blog platforms do not allow you to sell products or services from the blog. Other platforms do not allow you to slander or libel other bloggers, people or organizations.

I can’t stress enough the value of being able to “test drive” the blogging process if you do set up blogs there. I would suggest that you blog, for a while on the free platform when starting out, just to get experience if you want to learn on your own. Then, when you get fairly comfortable, you can set up a “paid for” blog and take it seriously into the future.

What is a “paid for” blog system? Simply, it is a way where you buy your own domain name, “rent” webhosting, and download the blog software to the webhost. Domain names nornally cost about $10 and monthly webhosting costs as low as $5 per month. But the benefits are huge. You can sell products or services, and you can just about do anything you want on your own blogging platform that is legal and moral.

Since you control both the domain name and webhosting, there is little chance of being “shut down” from outside sources.

On the other hand, a blog has a very user friendly administration area where they can add their own content. Yes, the learning curve is still there to add content, but it only takes maybe days, at most to learn.

You can find so many resources on the internet, whether through video or articles that you can find out for yourself that can teach you how to manage a blog.

For the long run, blogs are your best bet because, not only can the owner of the site manage it, but they can also grow the blog, with gaining more knowledge of how to creatively add features to it. Some of my clients who knew nothing of how to manage a blog, learned how to insert a post, moderate a comment, and add a picture in less than a week. From there, they will learn how to insert videos, add their own widgets and change the layout of the blog.

In planning your blog layout, you should have a clean and easy to navigate design. It should not be “cluttered” because you could lose your visitor interest if there is too much going on. What would you do if came to a blog that had a “gazillion” buttons, lots of banner ads, too many pictures and videos? When faced with making too many decisions on any website, you leave.

A very effective blog layout that has proven to be the most successful is a two column format, one post area and one sidebar, with a simple but compelling header design. There should be, on the average, 6 navigation buttons below the header graphic and always think of inserting an “opt-in” box either on the upper right or upper left sidebar. The most effective column to have the posting area is on the left side.

Just up until a year and a half ago, the most popular layout was a three column design, but it was found that it became too “busy” and the blog owner lost visits because of it.

The blog should be a thing of beauty in simplicity. People who visit blogs know where they want to go within your blog. They check out your new content and then go over the familiar areas that you set up, such as your videos, your white paper reports and other content you have available for your visitors.

Enjoy the video.

Wordress began in 2003 when matt mullenweg and his development team decided to make an open source coded blog platform. By keeping it “open source,” it means that no one has to buy the code to make blogs….it’s free! Since it’s humble beginnings, in 2003, WordPress blogging software has been downloaded millions of times and now powers hundreds of thousands of personal blogs to multinational corporations around the world. The team of developers are dedicated to keeping up on the updates to make the blog platform even better.

Blogs were originally meant to be personal online diaries, but now they have the capability to full out content management systems. This is the reason large corporations are now using this as their foundation of their websites. There is a movement to go from outdated HTML websites to the blogging platform.

The one main reason why users are attracted to WordPress blogging platform is how easy it is to use. Gone are the days when you had to hire a very high paid webmaster to set up, design and manage a business website.

Once up and running, a WordPress blog can be maintained by a “non-techie” within a matter of hours. I have proof of this because I have personally trained my clients for one full day and from then on, they were writing and inserting their own blog posts and moderating comments like a pro.

WordPress blogging platform is also at home with experienced webmasters and developers too. Because this is an open source code, techno “geeks” can get inside the PHP and CSS code of this platform and tweak it to their heart’s content.

It seems that WordPress will “rule” as the blog platform of choice for years to come.

For more information, go to click here

As mentioned previously, the more new content you put in your blog, the better. To refresh the basic principals of blogging, you need to post regularly or the blog will slow down in the search engine “interest.” When starting a blog, you become a publisher and the responsibilty with it is regular content for visitors to consume daily. You see, search engines are built to provide new and changing content to all web surfers in order to keep the search engine popularity for itself.

SOLUTION: The best way to keep on track with regular posting to your blog is to put up a white board or keep a notebook near your computer that is dedicated to your posting schedule. If you can post at minimum, twice a week, you are golden. If you can post every other day, that’s better. But if you are really serious about how you want your blog positioned with both the search engines and your web visitors, you need to post once a day, at least Monday through Friday.

If you can spend the weekends writing 4 or 5 posts in advance and “time release” them during the course of the week, you can satisfy what everybody wants….consistent content in your blog. Most blog software has this time release feature built in. I exclusively use WordPress blog software and it works like a charm.

Getting back to your whiteboard and notebook….make sure you list out your days of posting and check off each day when it is posted. You will soon be proud of yourself when looking over all the posts you made in a short time.

In my next blog post, we will go over the topics to talk about in your posts and how to avoid the ”mental block” of what to talk about.

First, the most effective basic design consists of a header at the top, blog post area on the left, one sidebar to the right and footer at the bottom. It used to be 3 or 4 column blogs with the post area in the middle, and a very “thick” header was the rage only several years ago. And the more contrasting colors the better. That was the past, and looking back, it was horrendous! 3 or 4 columns made the blog too “bulky” where there was too much going on design wise.

Sure, this “bloated” format was the most used format not to long ago. But smart bloggers were testing different formats out and combining some “intelligence” information from Google in the form of the heat map and found that the two column with thinner header and footer was the most effective blog layout there. Google’s heat map had something to do with studying how website visitors look at a web page….where their eyes focus on the page.

For now, you will see this simple website layout used by the most famous bloggers. Of course, we are going to exclude the big corporate blog sites that have a “magazine” style. These sites have up to 5 columns and many images and text buttons to go in so many different directions. Some examples of these sites are www.businessweek.com or www.cnn.com or the Wall Street Journal’s site, www.wsj.com.

If you are just starting out, make a 2 column blog layout and you are on your way to designing the perfect blog.

Would you believe that, if you don’t have any web presence today, your business will get less to no customers from the internet? Why is that of any significance? Because most people who look for a business go online first! They don’t use “old school” (Yellow Pages Directory) methods anymore when looking up which business they should go for.

Even if you put up a one page website that is an advertisement, it would be a good choice. But the obvious thing to do now, without fail for any business that has a physical location, is to put up a website or blog. Of course, we prefer you put up a blog because of the ease of use for the blog owner and also because of the search engine optimization advantages it has.

For those of you who want to try your hand at “doing it yourself” with putting up a website, here are several free “website making” services:

1. www.weebly.com
2. www.wix.com
3. www.homestead.com
4. www.yola.com
5. www.wetpaint.com

So what are you waiting for? There is no excuse not to have your business online with all the free resources above!

Many webhost companies come with an administrative interface called “cpanel.” For more information on cpanel, click here. Within this interface, there is an option called “Fantastico.” This is a very cool option as there is about 50 different scripts you can upload to your hosted website. One of options within Fantastico is the installation script of WordPress. As previously mentioned, it takes only 30 seconds to install and your are in the blogging business!

Note that the above will include purchasing your own domain name and purchasing a monthly webhost program. If you are tight on cash, you can set up a blog on the free version of WordPress. If you go to www.wordpress.com, you certainly can set up a new blog in 30 seconds there. The main difference between the free set up and the hosted set up is in the control you have.

With the free version of WordPress, you can make posts, insert pictures, videos, etc. Practically everything except in selling/advertising products or services. You also have limited storage and bandwidth of your blog per month. Those of you who have a business and set up a blog with the free WordPress program would be limited only to post information. Free blog platforms are excellent for personal use.

With the “paid” version of WordPress, you have unlimited possibilities with how you use your blog, which is what I recommend for all of you who have businesses.