Blogging and Marketing Resources for the Average Blogger and Business
Posts tagged Hosting
Quality Web Hosting as the Foundation
Jun 28th
BlueHost Hosting is my Choice!
One of the basics I covered early in my blogging journey was whether to use a free blogging platform like Blogger, or to invest in your own hosted space. There are of course pros and cons to each.
In Free Blogging, or Pay to Play?, I touched on some of the decisions individual bloggers need to make about why they are blogging and what they hope to get out of it. I have been clear from the beginning that a hosted domain for the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit (and future projects) was my strategic decision. Now that I have had some time under my belt with a hosting provider, I feel comfortable sharing my views about BlueHost.
Speaking of transparency, regular readers of the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit know that I try to play it straight with you. When promoting something, I’ve tried to be clear as to when I have skin in the game and when I don’t. This time, I do. If you click through any of my ads shown on my blog – and you sign up – I get a commission. But I’ve held off making any assessments until I have had some time to evaluate. After six months, I now feel confident endorsing their services.
In any support role, if it looks easy, it means a lot of work goes into it. That is truly the case with BlueHost. I have been very pleased with the quiet, behind the scenes support the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit has received. There was only one brief outage and when I used their live chat, the agent already knew about the problem and it was corrected in minutes. No song and dance, no excuses, just fixed.
Part of the reason for chosing BlueHost was of course not because they were the least expensive. There seem to me thousands of providers and many are less expensive. I’m taking the long view. My intention is to grow my blogging to a number of projects, and hope they grow quite large. I like the idea that I now have just one provider that can and will provide the support I need – for any number of projects – with any amount of traffic – for one reasonable monthly fee. Paid annually, this is the easiest, safest, most professional, and eventually, the most cost effective solution I could have.
About the endorsement and commission issue. The only area where BlueHost’s process could be smoother is in the affiliate signup process. After signing up for payouts on other advertising, BlueHost seems to be a bit heavy on the forms to fill out. In fact, my PayPal email address wasn’t accepted initially and had to choose “pay with check” to get the affiliate account established. I’ll work on that and the IRS W-9 form they require later.
Don’t let this small inconvenience sway you. Consider BlueHost. They’ve done a great job for me and I expect to be a long time customer.
Dave
Step By Step Guide to Blogging
Apr 13th
Step by Step Guide to Blogging
In a conversation with a colleague recently, it was suggested that while the information in the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit was valuable to him, he would enjoy seeing more of a step by step approach. He is even newer to blogging than I am and that approach made sense to him. And guess what? It makes sense to me, too. At the risk of sounding too philosophical, blogging (and the success achieved) is more of a journey rather than a destination. Each step builds on the previous, allowing the blogger to learn from the journey, but I hope, also teach along the way. Let’s get started – we have a lot of steps to take.
In this soon-to-be-new Step by Step section, I will begin to post the (sorry for the pun) steps I’ve taken to get here. Again, journey – not destination. My intent will be to continue to document the significant steps that allow me to climb one more stair as depicted in the photo. Hopefully, it will at least make sense chronologically, if not intuitively.
What I envision are examples of selecting a platform, hosting, buiding relationships, traffic, monetization and more. These will continue to be regular post topics as something in the blogsphere catches my attention. However, the Step by Step Guide will allow me to package those streams of consciousness into a more sequential form of thinking.
How would you want this structured? My friend’s opinion is sound, but it is only one. I welcome ideas on how to position the guide, what to include, etc.
The first order of business is to stretch my WordPress skills to develop a new page and sub-page structure that will make sense. One learning opportunity after another.
Dave
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