So you've at long last determined that creating a blog is a crucial portion of your marketing plan. As discussed already there are lots of reasons why this is a fantastic idea, the most essential being that it will enlarge your rankings in the search engine a lot faster and more easily. The end result being a steady stream of free traffic and leads to your website and into your business.
Now you have made the decision, what comes next? There are a number of various blogging platforms that you can select to publish your blog by way of and they are free. This is another added bonus to blogging. But before you begin there are a couple of must haves when it comes to writing and publishing your blog.
Branded Domain and Hosting
It must be hosted on your own domain name. This is the greatest way for you to brand yourself. Choose a powerful domain that suits your business or you! Having your own blog domain name is so much more professional and will make you stand out from the crowd. Think about what your marketing purpose is and tie your name somehow into this. Think about the keywords you are targeting and incorporate this into your name. (a bit harder if it's going to be your own name). That way Google will be attracted to it. My first blog Enjoy Wealth and Happiness is a keyword rich domain name whereas this one is more about branding myself and it's going to go nicely with another blog of ours coming soon that will be similarly named.
There are free hosting blogs out there like blogger.com, but you really want to host it yourself. Hosting your blog yourself gives you total control over your blog and what you publish on it. You'll by no means have to be concerned about being shut down or changes happening with the free blogging service and so messing things up for you. I like to use hostgator to host my blog accounts. It's known to be one of the top ones out there, it's monthly fees are cheap and they have unlimited domain hosting. So for the one low monthly fee I at present host 3 of my personal websites through them. Their support is incredible which is especially reassuring if you are like me and can be quite html challenged at times.
WordPress
It must be a Word Press Blog. You cannot beat a Word Press blog. They are the most popular and they have countless features and plug-ins that can be effortlessly installed which will aid your blog to run more efficiently and be noticed by the search engines more easily. There are loads of themes you can choose from and with a quick push of a button you can have a professional looking site up in minutes. What I love about Word Press is that you can even use their platform to add static pages as well so to have it more looking like a website. A professionally designed website could cost you thousands of dollars. Use word press and it's free, performs all the functions, looks great and Google will love it!
If you are serious about using a blog to produce a lot of free traffic then you really must follow these small amount of clear-cut rules. start by doing these. Don't think you will begin by doing the completely free method and then changing over afterward. I went down that path(only through ignorance and so disoriented a lot of my readers and search engine ranking when I changed my site over to wordpress and my own hosted domain. You don't want all that time and energy to be for nothing and have to start all over again. Learn from my mistakes and do it right from the beginning.
Hosting your blog on your own branded domain name and using word press is the best way for you to get further ahead in the search engines and to be branded as a marketing leader.
Caroline is an expert at blogging to
generate leads for your online business. Her
lead marketing system
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