Several years ago, the creation of a blog (web log), was a rather novel concept that quickly became extremely popular. Implementing a blog before the days of easy to use content management systems (CMS) made blogging a technical challenge for most people who weren’t web developers.
Fast forward a few years and now blogging is one of the most popular ways for online marketers to make money. The problem you have is the technology you decide to use when you build a blog/web site.
There are several technologies or blogging frameworks you can use to make a blog. The most popular option for people who don’t want to spend any money is WordPress.
WordPress has 2 options. Paid and free. The downside of the free version is that your web site is severely limited in features as well as the limitation of the size of your blog. At the time of this writing, it costs about $9 each month (payable annually) to WordPress in order to host get better features from them.
The better option is to build a web site or blog on your own shared host. The only challenge is to find the best and most afforadable web site host. This is kind of hit and miss these days with so many hosts outsourcing to Aisan countries. The communication problem is only one of your concerns.
Learn to Build Your Own Blog
So down to the nitty gritty, how do you do it? Well, this tutorial from webtechtutor shows you how to make a blog from scratch using their super detail oriented system. It’s a perfect tutorial for beginners as this video series literally goes through the process in detail.
So, even though you may have to purchase your own domain name at $10 a year for a .com and hosting can set you back a mere $25 a year, which is a bargain, considering you can load up the site with multiple domains, add your own domain name and utilize unlimited space on a shared web site host.
A Web Site or Blog, which is it?
There seems to be some confusion about a blog or web site and why one is different to another. Well, there is a really simple answer. A blog is a type of web site, but it is still a web site.
If you’re a service business like a plumber or carpenter for example, you can still have a blog integrated into your web site. Blog posts often are most successful when the writer/author of the site is consistent. Unlike this blog site, which I don’t get to keep up on as often as I would like, even a small site like this can be extremely profitable in many ways.
Web site designers often turn to WordPress because of its simplicity and built in functionality that is available. The WordPress blog has a 5 minute installation promise, and most of the time it really is less than that. It is one of the most used (60 million sites and counting) blogging framework available.
The downside is that the sites often load slowly and can be extremely bloated unless you’re on top of things and most importantly choose your plugins carefully.