Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
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As always, I've been using and testing numerous tools that are essential, and not so essential but 'nice to haves', to develop business ideas for small business enterprising activities. Most recently, as an aspiring entrepreneur myself I've been utilising much talked about 'wordpress'. Wordpress is an open source content management system (CMS) often used to publish blogs, or business websites. Many of the worlds largest or most well known websites use the MYSQL and PHP back end that is Wordpress, 12% of the top 1,000,000 websites to be accurate.
Wordpress Formats - pros and cons?
Wordpress comes in two formats, wordpress.com and wordpress.org. The first, wordpress.com is free to use and you can customise your domain name (addyourwebsitename.com). It's easy to set up and hosting is free from Wordpress. There are certain disadvantages of this however for a beginner or non-technical curious, this option is fantastic for getting accustomed with blogging or basic web development. Spamming is taken care of as is set-up, upgrades and back-ups. I've recently used this to start a basic help and advice site for CV making - Visit how to Make a CV to track my progress so far (this website is less than a week old and is very much a work in progress). The disadvantages are that wordpress.com cannot be monetised as easily as other providers such as Google's Blogger or wordpress.org. Supposedly when your traffic gets to over 25,000 hits per month you can monetise the site and split the earnings 50/50 with Wordpress, however this isn't very good business in the long term. There is option to negotiate this I'm sure if you have massive traffic volume which would give you better negotiating standing. This factor isn't so important if you're just starting out as all of the content that is published on your website belongs to you and as such you can export the content to another website, along with your domain name at a later date, should your business website be lucrative in traffic volume.
Wordpress.org is a little more technie. It enables you to have full control of the PHP back end and integrate one of the many useful plug-ins that have been designed to improve and increase functionality which is very useful for a small business website. With wordpress.com, there are widgets available to improve functionality, as well as numerous fancy templates, but these are very limited in their use. Spamming and back-ups are not handled by Wordpress.org, you'll also need some more technical knowledge in how to set websites up, as well as having to pay for hosting (which isn't too expensive really anyway, I recommend Godaddy who are an excellent provider of domains and web hosting). I haven't fully tested wordpress.org as I wanted to get familiar with wordpress.com first, although I will be testing out wordpress.org in the near future to expand my learning and employ one of my business ideas. I'll report back my findings and in due course.
Summary
So far I've found Wordpress a very pleasant tool to use. I can see that it's got better applications for business because of how many widgets and plugins you can use. Also from my knowledge there are many more actively profitable users of wordpress than other free CMS providers. It's very popular within the geek community and there are endless tutorials available on how to set up, layout and make the most of your wordpress blog or wordpress CMS websites. The dashboard / admin section of the website is very easy to use indeed although the statistics that are available to your wordpress.com website are not as detailed or useful as google analytics, you can add Google Analytics to wordpress.org so at least there is this facility available within the products counterpart. I'll likely publish another article later on in my research to report more findings as at the moment this is just initial use and research. I can see that using wordpress.com is going to take a lot of the pain out of the publishing your content in a tidy, well presented manner, however the problem with monetising the blog / website concerns me - something that is satisfied by the fact that I know I can export my content at anytime to a more money friendly CMS, free or paid.
I'd recommend anyone learning to give this a go, although I'd also certainly recommend anyone looking to consider the 'best' option for their content purpose to consider other options also.
Hi all. Do you want to start your own business or pursue an idea and have no clue about Social Business? Social Media? Social Marketing? Online tools? I'm certainly no expert in any of these areas, but I mentioned in my last post that I'm keen to start some direction in my research and learning with view to being able to become more aware of social online marketing and to at some point potentially make some money from something I both enjoy, am interested in, have a limited level of understanding in and want to improve my understanding of. I've mentioned blogging as being a potential area for interest and inevitably revenue. People read things with many expectations and within varied contexts and I would hope that some people read my blog for three main reasons - 1) The blog content is interesting to them, 2) The blog content makes them laugh, and/or 3) My blog inspires others to take action on some of their thoughts and ideas (which could in reality be the next 'google', the next 'facebook' or next 'eBay' - these all started off as ideas that people acted on)!
I have ideas that I'm taking action on, but if YOU haven't yet and you'd like to have a starting point for which resources to use to learn and research to enable to you to do this better this post may be of use. As promised in my previous blog article, I've come up with a list of some of the most useful items and online social or business resources that I've either been using actively or plan to use. I'll try to keep each item as short as possible here as I really could go one forever to explain each (I could write a 100-page website on each).
I've chosen godaddy for three reasons really. Firstly, this is widely regarded and reputed to be one of the best domain name and hosting providers available in the world today. They're big, have their fingers in a lot of pies and are in absolutely little or no danger of going bust / out of business. Second, everyone seems to tell me that these guys are the best and easiest to use, including resources/people that I list later on in the blog. They are so widely used that there are lots of instructions and tutorials on how to use their domain name registration and hosting services. Third and finally, godaddy are a facility that directly allow you to literally act on your ideas by registering a suitable website name and hosting your website to start talking to people!
2. Google
I honestly can't speak highly enough about google! From MY experience, all of the products that I use of theirs are highly tuned and of very good application and use. They've also got their fingers in a lot of pies which again means that they'll be hard pushed to fold. Particularly useful products include gmail, which is good for storage, spam filtering and manages your mail well, google analytics, which tracks your website / blog's statistics in terms of visits, visitors and the associated demographics, and another key product is adsense which enables registered users to access marketing activities inward (making cash from placing other peoples adverts) or outwards (actually advertising via google in various formats). If you own a website or blog, you HAVE to be useing Googles products. There are many more that I use and I will discuss these in much more detail soon, but the ones I've mentioned are key.
3. Youtube
I'll let the video do the explaining. . .
I like youtube because it brings TV the masses. In a business context, it's free advertising so long as the content (and traffic) is there. If the content is shit, the content won't be re-blogged, re-linked and become viral, but on the other hand so long as there are items that a viewer want to see or are compelled so see, they'll view (and in turn make you money if you're savvy ;D ). OK, youtube is good for many reasons and it really is down to your perception as to how it can be used best in a business way, social way or any other way for that matter. I like it for two main reasons really, 1) because it's easy for a user to, errr, USE and 2) because it is something that can be monetised easily.
I've been recently taking a listen to what Edzjohnson and JeffBT have got to offer in terms of advise. I've also been doing a great deal of laughing at the now rather critically acclaimed Shane Dawson. Check them all out, hopefully they'll link to me and scratch my back a little.
I like youtube because it brings TV the masses. In a business context, it's free advertising so long as the content (and traffic) is there. If the content is shit, the content won't be re-blogged, re-linked and become viral, but on the other hand so long as there are items that a viewer want to see or are compelled so see, they'll view (and in turn make you money if you're savvy ;D ). OK, youtube is good for many reasons and it really is down to your perception as to how it can be used best in a business way, social way or any other way for that matter. I like it for two main reasons really, 1) because it's easy for a user to, errr, USE and 2) because it is something that can be monetised easily.
I've been recently taking a listen to what Edzjohnson and JeffBT have got to offer in terms of advise. I've also been doing a great deal of laughing at the now rather critically acclaimed Shane Dawson. Check them all out, hopefully they'll link to me and scratch my back a little.
4. Blogger (Google product)
5. SEOMOZ
SEOMOZ is basically a glorified blog in itself, but someone is making ALOT of money from this! What this website provides are tips, advise, guides, tools and expertise on all things SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing), as well as the associated essentials for web marketing.
6. Technorati
7. Wikipedia
8. Facebook
Over 500 million active users. Over $800 Million in revenue (2009). Alexa rank 2. Just 1700+ employees and still growing. I've written about Facebook a lot in my blogs, not nearly enough as I've got the time to, because it facinates me. It also provides me with the tools necessary to keep social in a busy lifestyle and from a business perspective it allows be to take my ideas to the masses quickly. I use it everyday, YOU use it everyday, Will Smith uses it everyday. I can't say I've learn't very much from Facebook, so this isn't the reason why I've added it here. It's just that I can really see the potential in business application in the longer term from Facebook. Their advertising products are still quite young, so are still in the developing phase, but clearly there are a lot of applications (in both senses of the word) for Facebook socially and in business.
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9. Linkedin
10. Wordpress
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