Blogging Athlete

The two main hosted blog types, are Blogger and Wordpress – you’ll find that whenever a discussion about where its best to host your blog, if you’re not hosting it yourself, that these two are rated the highest.
So which of the two services is better?
Ultimately, both services will offer you a strong and solid base to blog from, but there are a couple of distinct differences between Blogger and Wordpress.

Wordpress
Wordpress hosted services are not designed to be used for commercial purposes – nevertheless, most people do.  You get a choice of themes (and without paying, you can’t design your own theme) and a choice of plugins.  You can ‘map’ your domain to the site, for a fee, giving you the appearance of  hosting it yourself.
Wordpress hosted (at http://wordpress.com) is almost identical to hosting it yourself, other than the obvious ‘bonus’ of not actually needing to look after your install.  But its disadvantages include being at the mercy of a third party site, and needing to pay for additional ’services’.  These still cost less than buying hosting and setting the blog up yourself.

Blogger
Blogger is owned by Google, and is designed around ease of use.  You can ‘ftp’ your blog onto your own site, or host at a  domain (yourblogname.blogspot.com) of your choice.  Blogger doesn’t use plugins, but does let you use your own theme, within certain limits.
A huge community has been built around Blogger, but unlike Wordpress.com they allow commercial based blogs as well as non commercial, which means they are more prone to spam.

In conclusion.  If you really can’t host your own blog at your own site, play with both Wordpress and Blogger, because ultimately, the main difference will be between which one your more comfortable with.  And that’s the one you should use.

Blogging Athlete

Article sites are still, stickiness wise, one of the single best ways to drive traffic and build a name as a expert, all at the same time.

So how does this tie to your blog?

Well, for a start, if you’re blogging on the same topic as you’re writing content on, you should have a fairly good niche to promote into – and can use any of your longer, more coherent posts as article content. But if you want it to work really well, there are a couple of steps you MUST follow.

1) Make sure your article is coherent. Blog posts, by their nature are supposed to be less informal than the standard ‘article’ – like you’re having an intimate conversation with a group of friends, instead of a more impersonal discussion with your readers, but at the same time, the best blog posts make TERRIBLE articles. So a blog post that is also going to be used on article submission sites should be both interesting, and slightly more ‘formal’ than standard blog posts.

2) Post it on your blog, and add your resource box at the end – you can make it clear that its a free reprint if you want, or you can simply post it in a category for your reprints. That way, you can offer a feed of your reprints too, and include the link in your resource box. Also include the permalink to the post itself in your post – which means you will need to edit the post after posting the first time.

3) Wait a month – in that month, submit the article to any bookmarking sites, and ensure that you maximize its impact by encouraging your readers to ‘vote’ for it too.

4) Ensure your post is in the search engines by searching for the first line of your article. If its not in the search engines, work on getting it there – read up on site maps and other products designed to get you in the search engines.

5) Submit your content to a maximum of 10 reprint sites. Make sure your resource box doesn’t break any of their rules, and make sure that you leave comments OPEN on these posts (if you close them ordinarily.

Following these five steps won’t guarantee your success in using article marketing, but they will eliminate most of the serious beginner mistakes people make when submitting to article reprint sites.

Blogging Athlete