I wanted to start a simple blog. A guy I talked to on the phone got me to go to join.me where I could see what he was doing on his computer. It looked real simple. So I went to Godaddy. They have a special right now. Wordpress hosting for $1 a month and a free domain if you pay for year, so for $12 I got it set up. Now it seems that Wordpress is quite a bit more daunting than it appeared and there is a much longer learning curve than I thought. I try to put in a clickable link but the link button is greyed out. I type the link in text but its not clickable. I put in banners that some of them work and some don't. Some appear to work until you click on the banner and it says "Oops! Page not found." When I try to put in some text below the banner or below an image it isn't there when you go to the site. There are tutorials and there are videos on youtube. None of them make it easy to find answers to specific questions. I don't want to try to become a Wordpress guru or a web designer. I just want to be able to make a simple blog that I can post an article to and then the older article will be archived. I want to get all the links to be clickable. Anybody know how to make this easy?
I got nuttin I will say this, I've never understood the desire by some to have a blog. I really don't understand the point. To each their own though.
Why would KyleK ever want a blog? I'll tell you. A blog is just the name given to a certain kind of website. Wordpress is just a tool that is supposed to make it easier for the novice as well as the pro to construct a professional looking website. You no doubt have a degree of expertise in certain areas that would be of interest to other people. Take growing vegetables. You are probably real good at it and there are millions of people who would search for information about how they could do a better job of growing vegetables. If you had a blog/website about growing veggies and posted an informative article to it daily or twice a week or even weekly depending upon how much time you wanted to devote to it in time lots of people would find your blog thought the search engines. If you inform and entertain them with interesting articles many of them would become regular visitors to your blog. Those people all buy things. Seeds, books about gardening, garden tools, even high ticket items like tillers and small tractors. There are lots and lots of companies that would pay you for every sale or even lead that came from your affiliate links. Your commission on some seeds or a book might only be a few dollars but on a $4000 or $5000 lawn tractor your commission could run into the hundreds of dollars. My blog is about work at home businesses and opportunites. If anybody signs up for any of the ones I have affiliate links to I get paid. There are things that people can try that range from no cost up to $200. I am trying to build my site patterned after the site of a guy I know. He only gets 150 to 200 hits a day from the search engines but the site still pulls in $600 to $800 per week even in this slow summer period. While search engine traffic is the most valuable because they are people searching specifically for what you have to offer. But by putting a link for people to sign up for your email newsletter you can build an opt in list of potential buyers. Such a list is also very valuable and the whole thing can be set up on an autoresponder to send out your newsletter whenever you schedule it. The whole operation can basically be put on autopilot except for having to write and post interesting and informative articles. Right now is a great time to start a blog because Godaddy is offering Wordpress site hosting for only $1 per month and if you pay for a year they give you a domain name for free. They also install Wordpress on you site for no extra charge. You can be set up for $12. Its just that I am finding that becoming versatile with Wordpress there is a bigger learning curve than I had expected but I will just have to take the time to learn it. For somebody with an IT person it would be a snap. Didn't you say that you used to be in the catering business? Another great subject for a blog. There are lots of people interested in getting into that.
It would be pointless to have a blog just to post details of somebody's mundane life. They can do that on Twitter. Do you ever listen to sports talk radio or watch the ESPN talk shows like Colin Cowherd or Mike and Mike? Or watch or listen to political commentary? All of those guys are saying how you can see the video on their blog or referring to their blog in some way. I never look at them but I'm sure millions of people do. Without even looking I can guarantee that there are ads for whatever the blogger is hyping, links to buy their book, subscribe to their newsletter, ect. Even local guys like Matt Moscona is constantly mentioning how you can see more of the story on his blog. On a message board you can only control your own content. Anybody can post comments either positive or negative about whatever you say. And there is no way to monetize a message board unless you are its owner. Most message boards have rules against posting commercial links.
LSU is recomending Wordpress for LSU departmental websites. We have dabbled with it on an experimental new site and have also found that it is not very intuitive and does takes some learning. We don't have a dedicated website guy and most of us have other things to do so it is going slow for us. But I suspect if you take the time to sit down and go through the tutorials, you can get proficient enough for a blogsite fairly quickly. Of course it has a lot of features for more sophisticated sites that is a waste of time for you, so don't get bogged down in that. But at least you don't have to learn any code. It's all point and click and drag and drop.
There are a lot of tutorial videos on youtube. A lot of times the wordpress interface in a video dosen't look the same as the one I have. Maybe a different version or something. I have made a lot of progress but it still doesn't look nearly as good as I want it to.
