Hosted Wordpress Blog without Hosting

Today I received an email, that normally I probably would have ignored, however, with this month being a blogging experiment I've been a little more open to random emails about blogging stuff. ;)

Once I clicked the link I was taken to Myccblog.com and pretty quickly I started getting excited! This is exciting news for people who really WANT to host a wordpress blog so they can benefit from all the extras available but just can't swing it right now.



You can now have a hosted wordpress blog ~ with 60 themes to choose from, the most important plugins already plugged in for you (including all in one SEO pack, akismet ~ to manage spam ~ automate pinger, sociable ~ so people can add your post to social bookmarking sites ~ and much more.

All of this ~ plus videos to show you how to make it work for FREE!!

Yeah I was a little skeptical at first myself, so I went over and signed up and sure enough. Everything they said would be there was and it was all for free. You can only have one free blog ~ but you can have more than one for a small fee.

It's a great way to get started. You will be able to get your posts ranked in search engines, your affiliate links are welcomed, there are plenty of themes with customizable headers so you can even put your own header in your blog.

It's definitely worth checking out if you want to host a wordpress blog and just can't swing it right now, you will have the freedom and ease, without the fee.



It's also a great idea for people who already have established wordpress blogs and want another way to get solid backlinks to your site. Start a free blog and with My CC blog and make posts quasi related to your main blog and add a link to your main blog using your keywords in anchor text within the post. (making sure it makes sense to the reader) For example, this blog is about a marketing experiment, I might do another blog about driving traffic, and link back to this blog for more information about marketing strategies. See?

There are a lot of ways you can use a free service like this. I would make sure I had a good idea of where I wanted to go before I got my free account since you can only have one free blog. You can of course purchase additional blogs if you find it's working really well for you. However, remember hosting costs are between 6 and 10 dollars a month, so don't spend more than that on any blogging service. You could be hosting your own blog with the ability to host up to 10 more sites for that price. (depending on your hosting company)

Think a minute about what you want to do, then run over and get your own blog. Don't let the thinking part keep you from the action part. Make a decision and then move. :)

Jackie Lee

Can Blog Content turn into Articles?

Okay... so that's a no-brainer of a question. Of course you can turn Blog content into Articles. In fact, if you're clever you'll do just that!

You see.... Search Engine, Internet Marketers, website owners and ezine publishers are constantly hungry for fresh quality content.

Notice the emphasis on quality. While there is a LOT of content all over the Internet a great percentage of it is mindless babble. I feel confident there will never be an over-saturation of QUALITY fresh content!

Which simply means offering information that informs the reader about a certain topic.

If you can do that you can easily get backlinks and traffic to your website. And if you have a blog, creating quality articles for submission to the major article directories is a simple matter of taking your own quality content and packaging it into 350-500 word articles with catchy headlines.

So gather together a few blog posts on a certain topic and create an article. Once you have the article put together you will want to submit it to a few major article directories. There are many article directories and manual submission can quickly become very time consuming.

I tend to prefer using a submission service or two... one of the newest I've recently discovered is set up to distribute your articles to thousands! It's a free directory submission service with a very long reach.

As you're probably aware, a big benefit of writing and submitting articles is receiving traffic from the link you're allowed to include in your 'resource' or 'bio' box. If the readers of your article find value in what you've shared they are likely to click on that link to learn more about you and what you have to offer.

What you may not have thought of is ways to ramp up your traffic from articles in a more high-powered way.

One is by becoming good at writing headlines that tease a readers curiosity and gives them a reason to choose your article over someone else's. Much to my amazement, statistics continue to support the truth that words like, 'secret', 'discover', 'important', 'amazing', 'incredible', 'unbelievable', 'shocking truth', 'how to' -- continue to be part of the catchiest headlines.

It's also very powerful to use your headline to ask a question (which, hopefully, will be answered for the reader by reading your article and continuing on to your website).

"Is it possible to..."
"What you don't know about..."
"When is..."
"Who is..."
"Have you seen..." etc.

Now here's another 'secret' to increasing your traffic from articles...

Instead of giving them the whole article, split the article in 2 and then use your resource box to direct them to your blog or website for "Part 2". Using a tagline like, "Read the rest of this article at www.yourwebsite.com" will force far more click thru's than the usual..."More can be found at..."

There's a bit of an art to split articles at the right point. It's an art you can easily hone with practice and experimentation. You want to split it at a point that will entice readers to read the rest. This doesn't mean you must have an actual 'cliffhanger' (though that is an interesting touch ;-)). You do want to go through the article and find what you believe to be the most interesting or most informative part and retain that portion for your blog or website. One way to approach this is to list the ideas your article shares. Retain the best ideas for your blog and in your resource box you can say something like, "For the Top 3 Incredible Ideas, Please visit www.myblog.com"

Hope this helps you understand the relationship between blogging and articles and how you can drive more traffic to your blog with your blog's content.

Thanks...
I appreciate you...
--Mary K

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EXPECT MIRACLES!

Hosting your own blog ~ do it ASAP

Ok, let's talk about the difference between hosted and free blogging. I've done and still do both. I do them for different reasons though.

I started out with a free blog, because I didn't think I could afford to pay for hosting. I had about 60 posts on my blog when one day I logged in and there was a big red banner across my blog. It said ~ you are violating terms of service and your blog will be erased if you don't comply ~ or something equally scary.


I freaked out ~ and I actually went back and read the TOS. I was using wordpress.com and soon realized they are NOT make money friendly. In fact you are not allowed to have affiliate links or any type of advertising on your blog.

Considering my blog was about making money from home ha ha. Well I made a quick backup of my blog so I had it in case the worst happened. I still was in denial about being able to afford hosting, so I went through my whole blog, took out all the links and cleaned it up so it fits terms of service.

At that point it was really useless for me to be blogging. I finally started looking around to see how much hosting would cost, and I think more importantly tried to quell my fear of "using hosting". It was a whole new learning curve and I had no idea how complicated it was going to be.

I looked into a few of the often recommended hosting companies and called Lunarpages ~ which is the hosting I finally decided on. I talked to the customer service rep who answered the phone immediately and was very willing to answer my crazy first timer questions and was really nice about it.

I have since called back every time I have had to do something new so someone could walk me through it. :) I'm not sure that's what customer service is really for, but they have happily helped me through it all.

I also have taken advantage of their forum. In fact, I have asked questions and had them answered within 5 minutes, and my replies answered immediately after that. Which is VERY helpful.

All in all, for a year of hosting it cost me 98 dollars, and I have had help at each step along the way. I installed my wordpress blogs with one click. (make sure whatever hosting you choose has fantastico) I have installed a forum with one click. I can now upload reports, images and host them. It's very handy.

But anyway, back to blogging.

A hosted blog allows you ultimate freedom. You can choose from a million themes, you can have a custom theme made. You can make SEO built in with a certain plugin. You can monetize in a million different ways. Your content is your own. No one can ever take it away from you. (except a crazy computer if you forget to back up ~ which you can also put on autopilot with a plugin)

The reasons to have a hosted blog are plenty. If you are trying to make money with your blog I definitely recommend having your own blog on your own hosting.

With that said ~ I also use free blogging sites. I use these to basically have a place to backlink to my "real" blogs. I set up blogs around the internet and write quick articles or link to other articles, but I can always have a link in the post and in the blogroll with my keywords in the anchor text. This lets me get great backlinks for my sites, and helps me drive traffic.

I don't really try to make money on these blogs, I'm just driving more traffic and building backlinks for my other sites, and squidoo lenses.

The last thing I will say about this is if you are going to try to make money on a free blog make sure you choose blogger.com. It is the ONLY free blogging service that allows you to make money from your blog (all hail google). You still have to worry about google randomly pulling the plug one day ~ and if you don't believe it happens stop by the warrior forum and put blogger blog disappeared or something similar in the search feature.

Make sure you back up your blog regularly in case this happens and save the first 100 bucks you make and go to Lunarpages hosting and get hosting for a year then upload wordpress. If you can't figure it out, send me a note and I'll walk you through it. :)