How To Choose The Best Blogging Platform Easily

Are you struggling with trying to find the best blogging platform to run your online business?

In this training, I’m going to share some key things you need to know so you can pick out the platform that best fits your needs.

Why Blogging?

Blogging is my opinion is the very best way to generate leads online. It is the best way to brand yourself and the fastest way to create authority online. Once you publish a blog post it stays out on the internet pretty much forever. Blog post helps you create leverage in your business as well. If someone ask you a question and you have created a post answering it, you can just point them to that resource. Saving you a ton of time.

I made my first blog back in 2010 when I first got started online. Even though I had created my blog I did not do anything with it. I fell into the “I just need this next course,” trap.

Needless to say, I didn’t generate any leads or make any sales. It just sat there. Here is a pic of what my blog looked like in the beginning, it stayed like this for months with no content.

 

I honestly had no clue at the time as to what I was doing. I just knew I needed a blog. I made a ton of mistakes along the way.

Fast forward to 2014, I started to take blogging a lot more serious. I learned some things along the way that I want to share that hopefully will help you out so you don’t make the same mistakes that I did.

Who Are You Trying To Attract?

Before you even think about creating your blog you need to know who your target audience is going to be. If you notice on my old blog (pictured above) my tagline was horrible. If someone landed on my site they had no clue as to what it was all about.

Now my tagline says, “Helping network marketers unlock the code to online success.” When someone visits my site now, they immediately know it’s all about network marketing.

The content you create comes from your target audience. If you are in let’s say a skin care mlm, you could create content talking about skin care and the benefits of it.

Don’t talk about making money in one post then turn around and talk about the importance of lipstick in another. You will confuse your audience.

Get Inside Their Mind

When you figure out who your target audience is going to be you want to get inside their mind so you can better understand how they think. Here are a couple of ways to help you out.

Go hang out at the events they do. Find out if they have online groups such as Facebook etc and join them.

Figure out what books they read.

When you talk to your prospects write down the questions they throw at you. Those questions make great blog post and videos.

Make sure you pick up this free audio 13 ways to generate leads online to find hot prospects for your business.

Don’t Let These Two Things Hold You Back

The two biggest things that prevents most people back from getting started with blogging is, they think they don’t know enough and they think they are not qualified to teach because they don’t have some big result yet. And they want everything to be perfect. I had to overcome these exact obstacles too.

But what I learned was your credibility does not matter when you are sharing what you are learning and solving your target audiences problems. Also, it will never be the “perfect” time to start blogging. The key is to get started and make adjustments and improvements as you go.

Where To Host Your Blog

You want a self-hosted WordPress site. You don’t want to use anything of the free blogging sites like blogger.com or wordpress.com. Those sites really limit you as to what you can promote and even down to the plugins and themes you can use. More on that in the video below. With a self-hosted site, you control every aspect of your website. The only way you can get shutdown is if you don’t pay your hosting bill.

So now we have gotten that out the way, let’s talk about where to host your blog. There are a few options out here, keep in mind the services that I’m talking about I have used them either currently now or have in the past.

If you are just getting started the best blogging platform for beginners, I would say is GoDaddy. This is what I hosted my site on for years. It’s cheap and fairly reliable. Godaddy’s customer service is pretty good too! You can learn more here.

Just recently I had my site overhauled and I upgraded my hosting to wp-engine. I would not recommend using this service unless you have it in your budget. It does cost a bit more but you get a lot more with your hosting. Wp-engine is a service that is dedicated to just WordPress installs. Their service has been optimize for self-hosted WordPress sites since that is all that runs that runs there.

Everything from my site speed and setting my entire blog to being secured (Important if you sell your own product) It is all handled through the wp-engine service. Like I said they are not cheap but in my opinion, they are well worth the investment, you can learn more about them by going here.

Best Tools For Blogging

Once you your hosting setup and running you will need to get a theme for your blog. I highly recommend avoiding the free themes that are out here. They usually have little to no support and the developers who make don’t keep them updated to stay compatible with self-hosted WordPress sites.

Before I went custom with my blog, I used optimize press for my theme. It is a one time cost but well worth it. There are a ton of other paid themes out here, just pick one you like and go with it. You can always change it later.

The Plugins I Use

Plugins add additional functionality to your blog. Allowing you to create things like opt-in pages and even sales pages on your blog. Here is a list of the plugins I currently use on my blog. Some of them are free and some of them are a one-time cost paid version.

1.The main reason to blog is to generate leads for your business. You absolutely must have is a way to capture your prospects information like their name,email address and phone number. I manage my marketing list using Aweber. You can tie in all your capture pages and sales funnels with this service.

2. I use an optimize press plugin. I can create sales pages and even opt-in forms with this plugin. It is very flexible and can do a lot of different things. What’s also cool is you can hire people out on fiverr.com to do customize work for you since it is such a popular platform. You can find out more details about optimize press here.

3. Seopressor is what I use for all of my on-page SEO work when I’m creating a blog post.  It helps make sure I don’t miss anything when it comes down to making sure my content is optimized. Here are more details on seopressor.

4. Pretty links (Light version) is great for shorting your URL’s. Instead of having that long ugly affiliate link, this plugin allows you to make it pretty. I can create a link that says https://derecocherry.com/(insert whatever I want) and it redirects it to anyplace I want it to go. I highly recommend you install this plugin. To Install pretty link just search for this plugin from your WordPress dashboard and install it from there or you can grab it from here.

     5. Social interaction is a critical piece to the SEO puzzle. That is why I use social warfare for my social share plugins. They do have a free version but the paid version unlocks a bit more functionality and is pretty low cost. I have the paid version running on my site. Below is a picture of social share buttons I am talking about. You can get the details about it from here.

These are just a list of the plugins that I recommend, I have a few more installed but the ones I listed here are my core one’s that I use.

Additional Resource For You

Here is a resource that will show you how to include affiliate products into your business. Making your own product and selling it is a lot more work up front but you control every aspect of it and you make all the profit instead of only a comission. If you are just getting started, affiliate products are the way to go.