Content Magician, Freelance web content writers

Archive for the ‘Blogging Platforms’ Category

Most of the time, when people ask me, ‘What kind of blog should I get? Should I pay for one or would a normal one do?’I answer them very simply:-

1.  It depends on your budget. Do you have a few spare cents to spend on a blog platform? No doubt, it’s not expensive to pay for your own domain name, find a hosting and then have one of those free or really cheap blogging softwares installed….but it’s a commitment here that we’re talking about. So, on whether you want to get your own blog or make use of a free blog from…say, from blogger.com or wordpress.com….it depends.
2. How techny are you? When you have your own blog and you’re into this whole blogging thing and you’re really serious about it….you need to know how to….or know someone who knows how to ‘fix problems’ whenever there are glitches. Trust me, not knowing how to ‘fix these problems’ can affect your mood for the whole week while you wait for it to be ‘fixed’. 
3. How serious are you about blogging seriously? I mean it, seriously speaking, how serious are you about blogging seriously? I am also talking about commitment here…except that it’s not in a monetary form. We’re talking about blogging regularly and gaining some fan readers who would come back to read what you have to write about regularly. In order for that to happen, your blogging would have to be consistent so that your readers know when and what to expect from you when they hop into your website
4. Is it a business or a personal blog? If it’s a business blog, I would STRONGLY encourage you to pass on the free blog thing….you need something more professional. Listen, if you’re a business and you have a blog domain name like iwouldkilltobuildyourwebsiteforyou.abcfreeblog.com….it doesn’t look very good. On the other hand, if you have a domain name like blog. killerwebsiteblog.com….now that is something else. For personal blogs, I wouldn’t bother investing in my own blog except for this one, www.contentmagician.com but it’s only because this blog is a conglomeration of BOTH business and person. My personal blog can be found here and sometimes, it’s being a freelance writer as well but not always….so, I chose to go with the free blog blogger was offering. 
5. What kind of stuff are you going to blog about or post in your blog? This makes a difference because with a free blog software like wordpress.com, there are many (TOO MANY) limitations and you don’t have full control of your blog content. When they kick you out, that is it. You no longer own any of the web or blog content that you’ve posted in there…THEY own it. Trust me, I know this because I got kicked out by Wordpress and it’s painful that I can’t do a single thing about it now eventhough it was my fault that they kicked me out. But yeah, if you’re going to post a lot of personal stuff, audio, media, videos, images or other materials that you OWN and have CREATED and have LEGAL RIGHTS to, go for your own blog. 

by Cathy Perkins 

<ed- We found this article to be extremely useful to Wordpress users. Many people, like us, use wordpress as their blogging platform. Yes, ContentMagician is run on wordpress and so far so good….>

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To Follow, or Not to Follow? That’s the question. What does that even mean? What am I even talking about, follow and no follow? That’s something that Google dreamed up in their wisdom, in 2005 as a matter of fact. It seems like ages ago, but it’s not that long ago. Google thought that people were getting too much comment spam on their blogs, which was probably true.

If you’ve looked at your Akismet queue, or if you’ve looked at your comments queue when Akismet was down a few weeks ago, you saw a lot of comment spam. It’s here, and it’s here to stay and it will probably only get worse as it has over the past few years. People are getting smarter about this comment spam, they now will do it individually and will say things like, “Oh, nice post, come and look at my site,” and of course their site is embedded behind their name. So there’s some comment spam. It adds no value to your site, but it gives them a link back.

What does nofollow mean? It means that while the search engines will still follow links in your websites (with a few exceptions); they give no weight to those links. Now let’s think about what that means. If someone is kind enough to come and comment on your blog, and they put their URL in the comment section as they’re urged to do, its right there, then Google will count that as zero. (more…)