PLAYING IN TRAFFIC

FREE HOSTED WORDPRESS BLOGS

As I’ve written before, Blogs are a great and necessary part of your online marketing arsenal for many reasons that I won’t get into here. 

While blogs like Word Press and Blogger, among others, are totally free to set up and use, the Word Press blogs which I’m more familiar with (you’re reading one now) have two very important distinctions.

 The free Word Press blogs at Word Press.com are very robust with tons of features and templates to choose from but what they won’t let you do is add Google Adword ads and some other third-party functionality to the blogs themselves.  The reason?  It’s because Word Press is hosting these blogs on their own servers and they don’t want rogue blogs dragging down the entire network with all kinds of ads being served, certain scripts using resources, etc.  And that’s only fair, considering the free blog is unbelievably full featured in almost every other way.  Read their own detailed explanation about the differences between the software and the service HERE.

But if you want unlimited design possibilites, including serving ads or anything else for that matter, you’ll have to buy a Word Press blog and install it on your own server. 

In addition to the complete design freedom, you also get 100% of the traffic benefit to your own domain name since an installed Word Press blog living on your own hosting account will have the URL such as www.yoursite.com/blog vs. www.yoursite.wordpress.com.  You can work around this by domain mapping which, while isn’t extremely difficult, is a bit of a pain in the ass.

HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO

Now, while installing and domain mapping and uploading the blog isn’t really a big deal for the techno savvy, you may want to know that Networking Solutions offers four (4) FREE Word Press blogs PRE-INSTALLED with every hosting account.  Granted, you’ll have to pay a monthly hosting fee, but for around $10 a month you get all the usual things associated with a shared hosting account such as 50 email boxes, MYSQL database access, FTP access, etc, etc, it’s worth it just for the blogs alone!

I love the ease of just checking a box after I login that says “activate blog” and Viola!  The BLOG — IT’S ALIVE!!

They make it so easy that you can opt to not even have a website at all and just make the blog your default home page, which I did here with my NaturalPetsWorld site.

The point is:  if you’re not blogging, you should be.  And if you’re looking for the EASIEST way to do it, with all the bells and whistles and no compromises — get yourself a Network Solutions hosting account with the blogs already installed.

Sweet!