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Wordpress
Wordpress
Blogging Wars – WordPress Vs Blogger Part 1
Feb 10th
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 at WordPress.com.
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. There are tons of different hosting plans to choose from, so get one that fits your needs.
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 be a pain in the ass. 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 is a micro-niche specialist that coaches Internet marketers to cash in on profitable markets using WordPress and affiliate marketing tactics. Get started now by getting a copy of his best-selling Super Affiliate Blogger guide.
How to Make Money Online With WordPress and Other Blogging Sites
Feb 9th
WordPress is probably the number one free blogging platform in today’s society. Thus thousands of bloggers around the world use WordPress to power their blogs (including me). But how can WordPress, a FREE blogging platform, earn you some significant income? Here is a step-by-step guide showing how to make money with WordPress.
1.) Select a Niche
The absolute MOST IMPORTANT element of a website/blog is the niche. Choose a specific and unique niche you feel comfortable writing about. For example, if you’re really good at web design, write about a specific part of web design such as coding. Make sure that your niche isn’t vague, because then search engines like Google and Yahoo! will NEVER find your website/blog.
Once you’ve chosen your niche, brainstorm some articles you can write. This will help in the long run; trust me, you don’t want to start a blog and half a year down the road you have a sever brain fart and can’t write any more articles. Make sure your niche is specific but broad enough so you can write at least 2,000 articles on it!
2.) Create Your WordPress Blog
You need to create a WordPress blog. WordPress is a free blogging platform, but you will need a website first, and the website needs to be hosted one of two ways: Free Hosting or Paid Hosting.
Free Hosting
If you’re looking for a free hosting service to host WordPress, the best solution for you would probably be WordPress.com hosting. I recommend this option because it is 100% free and from WordPress itself! The WordPress platform automatically comes with the free web hosting service from WordPress.com (as the name suggests) and you won’t have to worry about all the complications of web hosting (name servers, updates, mysql databases, etc.)! Plus, setup is a breeze and you get to choose your own domain (has to be a subdomain of WordPress.com though). Trust me, free WordPress hosting doesn’t getting any better than WordPress.com!
Another option would be finding free web hosting services and installing WordPress manually. This is not recommended because it takes a lot of hassle finding a 100% free web hosting service with a good up-time and support for WordPress. I would definitely recommend WordPress.com hosting over free web hosting.
The last and worst (in my point of view) option for free WordPress hosting is self-hosting your website. This is the MOST complicated process as you have to port forward according to your router, install a self-hosting service such as WAMP, and get a free domain from No-Ip.org (subdomain of course). The worst part about it is that your website will have absolutely NO bandwith due to the fact that you yourself are hosting your website. I’m not even going to go in-depth with this; you can Google how to self-host WordPress because I will not waste my time explaining my least recommended method of free web hosting.
Paid Hosting
Paid Hosting allows you to have complete control over your WordPress blog (you can write whatever you want; with WordPress.com hosting you have to abide by their terms of service). Bloggers often use this to their advantage, as creating beautiful-looking templates and site design is a breeze with paid hosting. First, you’ll need to find a good web hosting service. I recommend HostGator because (in my humble opinion) they are cheap yet offer the best support and compatibility for WordPress. With HostGator, simply sign up (you get a free domain with any plan) and in your control panel you can 1-click install WordPress! Once you’ve installed WordPress, you’ll be good to go!
3.) Get a Theme, Configure WordPress Widgets, and Start Writing Stuff!
Once you’ve set up WordPress, I recommend selecting a theme. WordPress has a large variety of themes, and you can decide on which one suits your blog the best. The second step after installing WordPress is installing widgets. Widgets are special components of your WordPress blog that each have a specific function.
In my opinion, SEO, Backup, Cache, and anti-Spam are the widgets you absolutely need. Other fancy widgets are up to your discretion. After installing the widgets (you can decide which ones you need and which ones you don’t), get ready to write! Remember step one? Hopefully you can already spit out a couple of blog posts from your brainstorming!
4.) Receive Traffic
As a webmaster, I really can’t emphasize the importance of traffic. You may have the BEST article on the planet, but if your blog’s only loyal visitor is your mom, the world won’t be able to see your beautiful writing. That’s why traffic is essential to your blog’s survival.
To start out, I immediately recommend you submit your site only to the top search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing). As a little precaution, I urge you to not focus on submitting your site to too many search engines, because most of the time search engines should find your website automatically.
Generating some beginning traffic is pretty easy, given that you have friends and family. Use FaceBook, Twitter, and whatever other methods to let everyone know about your website. Assuming that you know more than 50 people in the world, this should be pretty easy and you should begin to have some steady traffic. Not much, but steady.
Now it’s time to go public. One of the most effective ways to get traffic is to submit your website to the top directories such as DMoz (Google). However, since you’re just starting out, I don’t recommend this because DMoz literally accepts less than 1% of all submissions, and your site will probably be the 99% that gets denied. Submit your website to lesser known but trusted directories that guarantee indexing.
Once you’ve submitted your website to at least 10 directories, let’s move on to some more ways to earn traffic. Traffic-exchange sites are good as longs as they are MANUAL. NEVER join an auto-surf exchange site, as the traffic has no value since everything is automated.
Yet another free and effective method to get traffic is through free classified ads. Just Google “free classifieds” and you’ll find a load of websites that allow you to post advertisements for free. This is effective as it is not time-consuming, and thousands of top-ranked sites will be displaying your ads for absolutely no fee!
5.) Monetize Your WordPress Blog
So far, you should have a blog that:
has a unique niche
has at least 10+ articles/posts
is hosted by a trusted web hosting service
has the WordPress blogging platform (duh!)
has decent traffic (500+ visitors a day)
can be found on search engines such as Google
Now it’s time to reap your rewards for your painstakingly hard work! It’s time to make some money $$$!
The most effective and easiest way to earn a steady income is through advertising. There are many paths you can take. The most famous advertising service is probably Google AdSense. However, they pay ONLY by check, and that may be inconvenient if you wish to be paid by other means such as PayPal. That’s why there are loads of AdSense alternatives!
Clicksor
Clicksor is probably the main competition to AdSense. You can be paid in a variety of different ways, which makes Clicksor much more convenient than AdSense. Clicksor offers pretty much every type of advertising you’ll ever need for your blog; it’s an all-in-one solution for monetizing your blog.
One major problem with Clicksor and other all-in-one advertising solutions is that the advertising is HORRIBLE for blogs. In fact, some blogs lose traffic due to advertisements filling up more than 60% of your blog and annoying the hell out of the visitors. You can either take the risk of losing some traffic and making your website ugly, OR you can use an alternative monetizing method: In-Text advertising.
InfoLinks
InfoLinks is hands-down THE BEST in-text advertising. In-text advertising is effective because of its limited disturbance in your blog; it chooses random key words in your blog and highlights them, allowing visitors to click them, in turn generating income for the webmaster (in this case YOU). How can in-text advertising services afford to offer this type of advertising? Advertisers pay sites like InfoLinks to promote their products/services. InfoLinks hands that responsibility to webmasters like you and me, and we get paid in return for helping InfoLinks earn money. I hope I haven’t confused you. In the simplest terms, you get paid for showing links on your blog!
Now, how do we integrate such a great service into our blog? InfoLinks has generously created a WordPress widget that you can simply install into your site.
Follow the simple 1-minute integration guide and you should have in-text advertisements integrated into your blog in no time!
InfoLinks has a relatively high payout per click (PPC); on average, each click is $0.10. Let’s say you have 500 visitors per day, and 10% (50 people) each click one in-text advertisement per day. That gives you $5.00 a day, which translates to over $1,500 a year doing absolutely nothing! And that is only a mere 10% of your daily visitors! You could be earning some serious income with InfoLinks.
Regarding payment methods, InfoLinks pays by either PayPal or Check. Pretty convenient for me.
Other Monetizing Methods
There are hundreds of ways to monetize your blog, and InfoLinks is just one of them. Another 100% free method is affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, affiliate marketing works like this: major companies such as Microsoft pay you when you help them make a sale. Every time you refer a friend to Microsoft’s website and they make a purchase (i.e. Windows 7), you earn a certain percentage of the total sales (usually this is around 10-15%) from Microsoft. Considering the amount of traffic you already have, this can be a huge money maker. Try this method out, as it is 100% free too!
Many money-making solutions now offer WordPress widgets too, and you can monetize your blog to whatever extent you please. Just keep in mind that you don’t want more than 20% of your blog to be advertisements =P
6.) Have Fun Earning Some Free Money with your WordPress Blog!
Once you have accomplished all or most of the above, you have succeeded in creating a monetized WordPress blog earning you around $2000-3000 a year. Remember that more writing = more visitors = more traffic = more ad-clicking machines = more $$$$$$$$!
A very important note is that a monetized blog should not be your main source of income. However, making $2000+ a year is extremely good considering the fact that your visitors do all the work!
CONCLUSION
I hope that you’ve enjoyed this article and can apply some of my methods to start earning some significant money online with your WordPress blog!
Ben Fu is the author of Big Bux Blog, a blog devoted to helping people of all ages make some extra money online. You can view more of his articles at: http://www.bigbuxblog.com/
WordPress – Choosing Which to Use
Feb 7th
WordPress is an easy to use blogging software, and has quickly become one of the most widely used blogging formats out there. You have a choice whether to set up your blog through WordPress.com or WordPress.org. Below is a guide to choosing the right WordPress software for your small business needs.
WordPress.com pros
WordPress.com offers a fast and easy way to set up your blog. It is a free multi-user source to sign up and publish your blog immediately. You are given a selected number of themes from which to choose.
WordPress.com is backed up and managed by WordPress, thus you don’t have to worry about backing up your posts. Your blog is hosted on hundreds of servers, so you never have to worry about it going down. You also don’t need to worry about spam, setup, upgrades, or security because it is all taken care of for you.
WordPress.com cons
You are not able to upload your own themes and pug-ins. In addition, WordPress.com will not allow you to post Google AdSense ads or affiliate links. However, WordPress may on occasion show Google text ads on your site.
WordPress.com does offer a VIP program that allows you to run custom themes, custom PHP code, and plug-ins. This is offered to blogs with high traffic and that are high profile.
WordPress.org pros
WordPress.org allows you to install any of the plug-ins and themes available. You have complete control over the way your site looks and will not be viewed as another run of the mill site. Also, WordPress plug-ins expands the functionality of your site.
WordPress.org cons
You need a hosting provider that allows you to use MySQL databases and FTP access. Typically a host provider will cost you less than $7 a month. You can find these services at GoDaddy.com or Bluehost.com.
WordPress.org requires a significant amount of technical knowledge to set up and run. You are also responsibly for backing up your content, handling spam issues, and issues with down sites due to high traffic. Essentially, it places full responsibility on your as the blogger.
Choosing between the two
Your best bet is to start at WordPress.com to learn the Dashboard and how WordPress works. The start up is free and you can then decide if you want to blog or host your own website. Once you understand how WordPress works, you can export your content to your self-hosted WordPress site.
If you want your blog to appear more professional, WordPress.com offers you upgrades for a low cost that allow you to host a domain through them. So, instead of your website appearing as abc.WordPress.com, it will appear as abc.com.
Though WordPress.org has limitation on support, they offer a great forum filled with useful information to help you keep your site running smoothly. You also have options for plug-ins that allow emailing newsletters and other information to your client base.
WordPress.com pros
WordPress.com offers a fast and easy way to set up your blog. It is a free multi-user source to sign up and publish your blog immediately. You are given a selected number of themes from which to choose.
WordPress.com is backed up and managed by WordPress, thus you don’t have to worry about backing up your posts. Your blog is hosted on hundreds of servers, so you never have to worry about it going down. You also don’t need to worry about spam, setup, upgrades, or security because it is all taken care of for you.
WordPress.com cons
You are not able to upload your own themes and pug-ins. In addition, WordPress.com will not allow you to post Google AdSense ads or affiliate links. However, WordPress may on occasion show Google text ads on your site.
WordPress.com does offer a VIP program that allows you to run custom themes, custom PHP code, and plug-ins. This is offered to blogs with high traffic and that are high profile.
WordPress.org pros
WordPress.org allows you to install any of the plug-ins and themes available. You have complete control over the way your site looks and will not be viewed as another run of the mill site. Also, WordPress plug-ins expands the functionality of your site.
WordPress.org cons
You need a hosting provider that allows you to use MySQL databases and FTP access. Typically a host provider will cost you less than $7 a month. You can find these services at GoDaddy.com or Bluehost.com.
WordPress.org requires a significant amount of technical knowledge to set up and run. You are also responsibly for backing up your content, handling spam issues, and issues with down sites due to high traffic. Essentially, it places full responsibility on your as the blogger.
Choosing between the two
Your best bet is to start at WordPress.com to learn the Dashboard and how WordPress works. The start up is free and you can then decide if you want to blog or host your own website. Once you understand how WordPress works, you can export your content to your self-hosted WordPress site.
If you want your blog to appear more professional, WordPress.com offers you upgrades for a low cost that allow you to host a domain through them. So, instead of your website appearing as abc.WordPress.com, it will appear as abc.com.
Though WordPress.org has limitation on support, they offer a great forum filled with useful information to help you keep your site running smoothly. You also have options for plug-ins that allow emailing newsletters and other information to your client base.
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