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Are you satisfied with your blog platform?

When you decide to start your own blog, there are many considerations to be made. From your purposes and goals to what niche you will be into as well as from blog platform to template designs.

Of course you want your internet presence to be relevant and satisfying. And one of the choices to be made is choosing a blog platform. Here are some questions to consider:

1. Which Blog Platform Should I use?
2. Should I use a free platform like Blogger.com?
3. Should I have my own domain and hosted blog?
4. Should I start with the free Blogging Platform and just Upgrade it later?
5. Which Blog Platform is the best?
   

I think you know already what a blog platform is. If you happened to be lured putting a site without knowing this, it is high time to reconsider the platform of your blog now.

There are two categories of blog platform. These are hosted blog platform and non-hosted blog platform. There is a need to determine whether you would prefer a hosted or non-hosted platform. When choosing your blog platform, you’ll need to consider your goals as will as your niche.

A hosted site is one that is housed on the platform’s server like these famous three: Blogger, Typepad and Wordpress. In simple terms, if your have a Blogger blog, your blog is hosted on the Blogger server.

A non-hosted site is a blog that is housed on your own server and this usually a third party host site, which you have paid to host your site. Wordpress.org is a blogging platform but they do not host your blog. You need to have another to host it.

In this article, I will cite some advantages and disadvantages of each platform.

The Advantages of Hosted Blogging Platform

1. A hosted site makes it extremely easy for you to start a blog.
2. Mostly are free, so you do not need to spend up-front. Some ask for upgrade payments depending on your needs.
3. Updated automatically.
4. A hosted platform is usually user-friendly.
5. You do not need HTML and CSS knowledge to start a site. Of course, if you know some of these technicalities, you could customize your blog design like in Blogger.com, in other words, just like this site. (You may not find this site’s template as one of Blogger.com’s Templates but with good friendship, you may get this template for free (LOL). Just let us know below.)
6. A hosted blog platform has a helpful forum.

The Disadvantages of a Hosted Platform

1. In the blogging community, there is a bias for hosted sites like Blogger blogs. They are deemed less professional. But, don’t be discourage, there are successful sites housed on Blogger.
2. There are platform limitations like archiving and search engine optimization. Archiving is less user-friendly and post addresses are automatically generated by the platform usually from your post title. But with some tweaks, you could improve this in Blogger.
3. You will generally have less control of your HTML or CSS. Blogger allows you to change various parts of your HTML, but not everything. TypePad allows you to buy an option that gives you access to your CSS.
4. In WordPress.com(it's different to wordpress.org), you are not allowed to put advertising programs in your site.
   

The Advantages of Non-Hosted Platform

1. You have control over how your archives are managed.
2. You have control over all of your HTML and CSS.
3. You have control over permalinks.
4. You could manage your SEO.
5. More professional site (a bias in blogosphere).
6. Non-Hosted Platform has a vast community of developers for plugins.
   

The Disadvantages of Non-Hosted Platform

1. Some platforms support only one installation.
2. You need to disburse some cash before you start.
3. You need to do your own styling and coding.Unlike hosted platform, you need to work each static page you want to publish.

I will not prescribe any platform here. It is up to you to decide according to your purpose. Every program has its advantages and disadvantages. Select the best according to your needs as well as your budget.

Recently, some friends and I are in the brainstorming stage of putting some sites at Site Build It!

Again, I ask: Are you satisfied with your blog platform?

This was one of the questions I asked to myself in my quest of chronicling ways to make money online. How about you?

Let us know. You might help others by putting your insights below.

Thank you for your time.

I appreciate very much if you could drop some comments below.

New Visitor? Like what you read? Then subscribe to My Blog Feed or sign up for Free Email Updates. Thanks for Visiting.

Are you decided with your niche? Read this.

If you happened to be a visitor of this site for quite some time now, you probably noticed that the way we are posting here is arranged step by step like a chronicle. As you may find above, in my site’s description, Money & Work @ Home chronicles ways of Earning Money in Just a Click.

For those who are new, you may find these links valuable.

1. Reasons Why You Start Blogging
2. Talent is the Key, Attitude is the Driving Force
3. Mind Setting
4. Brainstorming
5. Life of Strategic Blogging
6. Developing Proactive Mindsets Part 1 & Part 2
7. Choosing Your Niche Part 1 & Part 2

I also discussed an amazing site that creates Starting Points of Site that Sells.

Even if you’ve already chosen a niche and not yet totally convinced by Ken Evoy of Site Build It!, I recommend that you will read Ken Evoy’s free Affiliate Masters Course (see the downloadable files at my site’s side bar) and use his excellent advice in finding and choosing a niche that suits your interests.

It is better that you print it and use every best ideas you will find there. Take your time. It is your business. So, don’t rush it.

At this juncture, we will analyze your niche listings. I supposed you have a list already. If not, try to go back some posts and make your list.

Know Your Potential Competitors

Knowing your competitors gives you an edge of your chosen niche or it may caution you to give a second look at your niches’ list. Here is how to do it.

1. Go to your Yahoo or Google Search bar and type your major keywords.
2. Use one or two keywords or use them in combination.
3. Make a list of the Top 10 sites (Get their respective URL also)

I used the "butterfly farming" as an example niche here and also as keywords.



Know the PageRank of Your Competitors

PageRank is a system used by Google to help determine a web page's relevance or importance. Visible PageRank - a number from 1 to 10 and displayed in the Google toolbar - is updated only every few months. It is a rough approximation of REAL PageRank, which is constantly updated. A site has no PageRank, their pages have.

Open http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com (it’s free). Types the URL of the top site in your list, clink Inlinks, then choose not to include the site. Browse the results. Try again the next URLs.



It is better to know how far your competitors are in your niche. Note the number of Inlinks and who are linking with them. Take note also the number of pages they have. These data will give you an idea how you can topple them if you want to compete in that niche.



Try to visit the sites, note their template designs, menus, tags, descriptions, their site’s functionality, etc.

Know Your Income

If you think you need to look for another niche, then go back to the first step using your next niche in your list. But, if you are decided to stick to your niche, then, we will analyze your keywords average searches and monetization using the https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.



Type your keywords at the input field, and then click ‘Get Keyword Ideas’. You will see there the average global monthly search volume, local monthly search volume and average competition.

Using these data, you will know how big your niche is, the traffic in it as well as the competition. Remember that you need to put quality contents in your site to drive traffic to it.

Your niche should have at least a minimum of 2000 search volume or more. Competition should be high average, average or lesser. Very high average competition is a crowded niche.

Look for the lookup field ‘Choose Columns to Display’ and select ‘Show Estimated Average CPC’. Look for the lookup field ‘Calculate estimates using a different maximum CPC bid’ then put the currency and the amount you want and then click, ‘Recalculate’.



In this, you will know the total Cost Per Click of your ads. This data will give you an estimate of how much you will earn in that niche. Often topics that have expensive keywords are very competitive. You may do better choosing a less competitive niche with cheaper keywords.

Of course there are some topics that Google will not allow you to put ads like tobacco related topics. See the complete list at https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US

If you are convinced of using SiteBuild It to build your site, you'll find the brainstorming tool in it awesome to help you come up with ideas and phrases you wouldn't have thought. Try it!

Research Affiliate Programs for Your Niche

Oooopppps! Don’t dive for your niche. You need to research first if there are products for your chosen niche. Make an effort researching them.


Thank you for your time.

I appreciate very much if you could drop some comments below.

Why some niche blogs are exceptionally successful?

Niche blogs are exclusively focus on a specific section of a general and popular topic. Just like I mentioned in Part 1, cancer could be a general topic and a popular one. Child Leukemia could be a niche as subtopic and be used for a niche blog.

After mentioning why some wanna-be-marketers failed in their quests of making money online, we will also focused to some characteristics of successful niche blogs. If you’ve researched now of some keywords for your chosen niche, I expect that you come across some top blogs on that niche/s.

Do you wonder what made them outstanding?

Here are some.

1. Specific Content Value

Successful niche blogs have specific content scope, which allows in-depth discussion and analysis. Within a small scope, niche bloggers could take the topics into a deeper level.

2. Focused Content

Big niche blogs have tightly knitted contents. Almost all their blog posts are strongly related to the niche. Occasionally, there are some materials that have no direct relationship with the niche but these are posts answering some visitors’ problems that the niche bloggers wanted to give some solutions.

3. Uniqueness

Niche blogs offer unique contents. Their blog platforms and templates are outstanding, too.

4. Audience Friendly

Top niche blogs actually targeted small segments of netizens when they were starting up. I said small because many of them were the prime mover on that niche. And, they take care of their visitors, too. In the long run, niche blogs developed their audience.

5. Monetization-Friendly Platform

Successful niche blogs are well planned from blog platforms to designs. Basically, they have unique blog templates that are customizable and flexible to accommodate monetization programs.

If you have already chosen your niche, do you think it has these 5 characteristics?

Thank you for your time.

I appreciate very much if you could drop some comments below. You may follow also succeeding posts by subscribing here.

Why most wanna-be-marketers failed?

Before plunging deeper to making money online from the comfort of your home with your lovely family, choose your niche. If you reached this far with this site, you are now mentally prepared with proactive mindsets working at home and exceptionally developed win-win attitudes to earn money online.

I've researched that the problems of new bloggers are putting sites at once without good planning and choosing a perfect niche and going live with few contents (like this site ha ha ha!).

In my quest of making money online, choosing a niche is one of the most difficult tasks I experienced.

During some business plannings that I conducted, I always started with a question. Today, I will present to you one: why most wanna-be-marketers fail?

It is easy to choose a perfect niche if we know why some people failed. Knowing these facts, you are able to get into the right niche and your journey to success is lively!

How can we tell if a certain niche is right or wrong?

Let us take a look.

1. It is not so interesting.

Some wanna-be-marketers fell to the lure of noble causes, too broad concepts. Preserving some kinds of butterflies could be a noble cause, but how many people share your passion? Probably there are hundreds but it is limited. (Tell me if I’m wrong.) Collecting butterflies and use them for arts could be good but you are inviting curses into your site. You are killing butterflies. Then, how do you know if a certain niche is interesting? Research it! How? (I will make a post for that later.)

Or maybe, you, as the site owner and content maker, have limited interest to the niche. How can you urge people to come to you if you, yourself, is not interested? Your visitors will feel your enthusiasm.

Not interesting niche is not profitable. Try it and your site will be like a memorial park. (LOL)

2. It's everybody’s haven.

Some wanna-be-marketers fell to the ‘in’ thing bandwagon. If there are too many people interested on that niche, then there is ‘too much competition’ on it. Competition is good but too much competition will kill you if you are just starting up. If you think you could topple one of the top ten competitors, then go for it. If you think you have an edge against some of them, do it. Guts will not give you money. However, humility pays some.

You have to attack a part of the niche that is not too competitive. Target some part of the demographics. For example, mostly are into cancer. Then, target part of the niche, i.e., leukemia.

3. It is not profitable.

Some marketers who failed in their business chose niche that is not so profitable. There are some niches that look perfect but they have limited products. There are only few advertisers who are into them. Some niches are generating too many interests into them but CPM and CPC are so low. If you could afford to be in these niches then try them but I dare you not to do it.

Do you know something about anything? A hobby? A Passion? Any Interests? Experience? Okay, fine, but how to research if a niche is profitable?

Site Built It! helps me a lot. I frequently visit them.

Thank you for your time.

I appreciate very much if you could drop some comments below. If you like this site, you could follow all succeeding posts by subscribing here.