DISCLAIMER: I’m not a blogging expert. It’s taken me over three years to “get it right” using WordPress, so I disclaim that I don’t have all the answers. The learning curve continues – guess I’m at the “Blogging 201″ level. I try to learn by my mistakes, so I’ll share my blogging mistakes with you. As my Mom used to tell me:

“Don’t do as I do. Do as I say do.”

What is a blog?

A blog was originally short notation for a “Web log”, or a personal journal. However, a blog is also a content management system to update a personal or corporate website with new entries that appear in sequence as they are written.

It once cost multiple thousands of dollars to create a content management system, which is essentially a database of articles that are managed through a Web interface. Think of it as a dynamic publishing system that doesn’t require authors to have heavy HTML or coding experience. Planning and integrating a blog into one’s site can still cost a small sum of money, but costs are now much lower. If you’re a beginner, you have two choices:

1. Hire someone to design and implement a blog on your website.
2. Sign up for an account on a shared service that offers users to blog for free.

Thus the question…

Paid vs. Free Blog Hosting?

Determine Your Goals, First!

Determine your blogging goals before you decide which platform is right for you.

• Who? Who are you representing? What is your online identity?
• What? What subject, service, product and/or passion do you plan to blog about?
• When? How often do you plan to post blog posts?
• Where? From your computer? Do you want to be able to update your blog from your cell?
• Why? What’s your purpose and your message?

Multiple answers to each question may require multiple blogs – multiple websites. Don’t mix too many passions on one site, unless it’s an ego site about your exciting life.

You should do fine with a free-hosted blog if you simply want to blog to share opinions and journal about their life, travels and experiences. Those who want to build a business, build an identity and/or make money online should invest in paid hosting with their own domain. Here’s why…

Free Hosting

There are a number of free blog hosting options I’m not going to list. Here are the top 2, in my opinion, for setting up a blog without buying a domain or paying monthly hosting fees:

WordPress.com – Same blogging platform as many people use with paid hosting but with limitations.

Blogger.com – Also known as Blogspot, which was purchased by Google and now knows as Blogger.

PROS: Free! Easy! You don’t have to know HTML.

Text from Blogger’s home page says it all:

Create a blog in 3 easy steps:

1. Create an account
2. Name your blog
3. Choose a template

It’s almost magic.

CONS: You don’t have your own domain to brand yourself. Your website address (URL) will be “youraccountname.blogspot.com” or “youraccountname.wordpress.com” rather than “yourdomainname.com.”

You can’t extend the functionality of your blog with plugins.

Leaving comments on a Blogger blog causes “comment dropout” – just made up the term, but it’s like shopping cart dropout. The process takes the user off your site when they leave a comment, and some shy away from this extra step.

If you have been blogging and building “strength” on a Blogger domain, you’ll be starting from scratch for SEO with your new domain. However, you can now import your Blogger posts into WordPress.

MISTAKE: NOT UNDERSTANDING: I started on Blogspot (aka Blogger) right before getting married three years ago. Oh, what a great way to share pre-wedding bliss, bike rides and time with friends. Well…I had little control over the layout – not saying I’m a control freak. But if you’re used to coding, you won’t like Blogger. I didn’t understand enough about blogging to pursue other avenues, so I lost time and energy with my Blogspot adventure.

Paid Hosting for WordPress

WordPress is THE platform of choice for those who want to blog about a product or service and/or want to build a long-term identity online.

Download it from Wordpress dot org (not dot com), or find a hosting provider who will set it up for you.

PROS: Enhance your blog with themes (nice designs and layouts) and plugins (tools that “plug in” to enhance functionality).

Put ads on your site and make money with advertising. (I’m at the 101 stage with making money!)

Use your own domain, yourdomainname.com, to create your identity.

Use WordPress as a content management system to update your website without heavy HTML knowledge.

CONS: WordPress’ “visual” editor mode is not perfect; you should understand some HTML.

You can easily make hosting mistakes by not choosing the right hosting provider.

There is a learning curve. It’s not magic.

MISTAKES: BAD HOSING: I used two hosting companies who said they provided WordPress hosting, yet their services were poor… oh so poor that I won’t even link to them. One had only outdated versions of WordPress and didn’t provide support or access to upgrade. The other would not allow direct access to the WordPress database and wouldn’t let me make modifications. They didn’t know how to download my database, so I lost many months of work. (Out of frustration, I just took the sites down.)

DIFFICULT THEME MANAGEMENT: I am currently using the Shifter theme for this site. It doesn’t allow direct access to theme files, which makes customization very difficult. I paid $199 for it and have felt limited due to the heavy learning curve. It has great potential, however, so stand by…

NO EDITORIAL CALENDAR: When I setup Pixel Position as a blog, I didn’t plan an editorial calendar or schedule time to blog on a regular basis. That changes today!

1. Blogger and WordPress.com free hosting is quick and easy and works well for “weekend” bloggers.
2. WordPress is a robust blogging platform used by many companies as a content management system for their websites.
3. You’ll need to buy a domain.
4. Find reliable paid hosting to “host” your website blog. I recommend HostGator after many mistakes later. (I share a dedicated server with HostGator and have been super impressed with their support.)

HOSTING TIPS: I don’t recommend Windows-based hosting for blogging. You want access to a file called .htaccess, which enables you to setup rules to “redirects” URLs to prevent duplicate content issues. (Don’t think about that part right now.) Windows redirects are tricky. Just make sure your hosting provider offers an Apache server – the best way to go.

You get what you pay for, and you should be expect to pay $7-$15 per month for entry-level hosting plans.

Resources

WordPress For Dummies Book
I would have been a “smartie” to buy this book early on, if it was even in print then.

Choosing a Blog Platform
This is a great article by ProBlogger. It was written in early 2006, but the principles shared remain current. This guy has a plethora of valuable information. You could spend days learning about blogging on his site.

Blogging 101: Which Software do I Choose?
Read this recent article that explains, in more detail, various options for blogging, but they don’t review WordPress.org.

Feel free to comment below with your experiences with free vs. paid blogging platforms.

WordPress Auto Upgrade Plugin Screenshot

WordPress Auto Upgrade (WPAU) is a plugin that REALLY works! First, WPAU sounds like the name of a Hawaiian fish. But it didn’t take any work to savor and enjoy this delicate morsel! WPAU will become my entree of choice for all future WordPress upgrades.

I was hesitant, even though @DazzlinDonna suggested it. I trust Donna’s experience, so I took it for a spin. But, I like a little code, FTPing files, seeing exactly where everything goes. Forget that stuff! WordPress upgrades? Bring them on!

WordPress Auto Upgrade is like driving with automatic transmission. WPAU is a WordPress “Wizard.” You simply need to read the screens, and click Next Task ->.

WPAU even diagnoses and tunes up WordPress. It told me I had not completed the cleanup process during the last upgrade. (That’s what I get for being my own garage mechanic.)

WordPress Auto Upgrade Wizard

You have a choice to upgrade “automatically,” but I wanted to walk through the steps.

Here’s a brief summary. (You need to first upload the WordPress Auto Upgrade plugin.)

1. The Wizard does a preliminary check of your WordPress setup, then lets you know it’s ready to roll.
2. Next Task -> Backs up your files! Woo Hoo!
3. Next Task -> Puts the site into maintenance mode
4. Next Task -> De-activates all the plugins
5. Next Task -> Upgrades all the installation files
6. Next Task -> Shows you the options to upload latest files
7. Uploads latest version of WP.
   (This version doesn’t get files from local machine. NOTE to self: Don’t bother downloading and unzipping WP files and FTPing them to server.)
8. Next Task -> Reactivates all plugins
9. Next Task -> Congratulations your wordpress upgrade is complete.

Downside? WordPress Auto Update has a few grammatical and capitalization errors. Just put your English Teacher’s red pen away. You can always follow WordPress’ handy 5-minute install steps, manually. But why?

Why Upgrade to WordPress 2.6?

Read the WordPress Blog, and/or watch the video to see that it offers bloggers new features that make WordPress more powerful.

• Skip in time to earlier post revisions* and restore.
• Drag and drop links to bookmarks bar.
• Grab text, pull quote out and easily embed video.
• Add captions to images, right below picture! (See above.)
• Test how a new theme will look on your blog before commiting to it.
• Gears – store WordPress images, scripts, CSS on your computer locally which significantly speeds up time if you’re on a slow connection.

Go, WordPress!

*Revisions

You can now track changes to your post and restore to a previous version. This was huge. I had an issue when toggling into HTML view and lost my first 4 paragraphs. Ugh! Then autosave disabled Cntl+Z for undo. OUCH! I scrolled down to the bottom, viewed the revision 3 minutes earlier. Deep breath and sigh of relief.

Next task on the list is to figure out how to shift Gears to turbo-speed blogging mentioned above. But wait, it’s Google; I’ll pull into the pit on that one and wait it out.

Plugins?

You’d better check your plugins, too! I feel sorry for those who develop and support WordPress plugins. Imagine the work each time a new version is launched! Joost de Valk, Mr. WordPress Plugin Extraordinaire, has been busy. Check out his updated plugins for WordPress. There’s a new one, too, I’ll have to checkout.

Have fun! Blogging with WordPress is almost automated! However, you still need to sit behind the wheel and drive and steer your blog in the direction you want to go.

Static websites are a monologue. Enter into a dialogue by setting up a blog. Blogs also provide a great way for that conversation to be “SEO-friendly.” Be nice to the search engines, and they will like you and interact with your site.

WordPress Plugins

Plugins are helper applications you add on to WordPress to extend this blogging platform’s functionality. Most are free and written by the community to improve our blogging conversations.

Before publishing this blog, I installed the following Plugins for WordPress:

1. Askimet plug-in to ward off comment SPAM;
2. All-in-One SEO Pack to manage TITLES, META tags, etc.
   • View this All-in-One SEO plugin tutorial to understand a little about the settings.
3. Google Analytics for WordPress
   • (We’ll share more about Google Analytics later. Think of it as a way to measure incoming and outgoing dialogues in your blog.

Shown is a screenshot showing these are “Active” for Pixel Position.

SEO with All-In-One Plugin

The TITLE tag of each blog page is one of the key SEO factors for optimizing for search engines.

TITLE: The text in the TITLE tag is text that displays in the upper blue bar of your browser, in the upper left of the browser window. This text also displays in a visitor’s bookmark of your site.

Your TITLE should reflect the content of that page. Search engines look here first to see what your blog post is “talking” about.

The All-in-One Plugin mentioned above gives you control over each page TITLE. By default, WordPress populates your TITLE tag with the “Title,” or heading, of each post You might want to be more clever with a post’s Title that shows on the page and write an optimized, keyword-rich TITLE for the search engines.

Shown is a partial screenshot of All-in-One’s options, including “Rewrite Titles.”

TIP: Your URL structure, or how your pages are named, is a setting you should review before hitting the “Publish” button. You want targeted keywords in each permanent link, aka “Permalink,” for each post. View this resource that explains about WordPress Custom Permalink Structure.

Setup Blog Plugins

Measure twice. Cut once!

Plan your blog setup before going live. A little planning to determine the basic plugins and setup for SEO will reap huge rewards down the road. Decide which plugins are a must for SEO before you launch:

Below are some plugin resources.

• WordPress Plugins Directory
• 7 Must Have Killer WP Plugins
• Best SEO Plugin Winners – 2007