Blogging Resources

In this resource sheet, we’ll be placing all of those things in a single document for your convenience. Refer back here whenever you need to find something to streamline your workflow and to enhance your blog.

Blogging Platforms

There are a number of different blogging platforms you can use to upload your content and to manage your posts. Note that these are hosted options – that means they’re limited in terms of their functionality and monetization options. The most popular of these are:

WordPress
www.wordpress.com

This is the biggest blogging platform but it also acts as a CMS – which is how we recommend using it.

BlogSpot
www.blogspot.com

Owned by Google, BlogSpot was the top choice back in the heyday of the ‘blogosphere’, and remains a top choice for many. I`ve even known some people to switch back to Blogger from Wordpress! This is a basic tool for blogging which has a strong community element.

LiveJournal
www.livejournal.com

True to the name, LiveJournal is intended to be more of a ‘journal that you share with friends’ as opposed to a public blog. You can use it however you wish of course though.

Tumblr
www.tumblr.com

Tumblr is a little different and can be considered somewhere in between a true blogging platform and a social network. Most users use this to upload images, music and text which others users can then comment on. Some people have surprising success on here and it has a big cult community.

Hosted CMS Solutions

A CMS is a ‘Contact Management Solution’. This acts almost like a blogging platform but is much more flexible. Moreover, it can be uploaded to your own server, which means you can have any domain name and which means you have much more potential for growth. Top choices are…

WordPress
www.wordpress.org

By FAR the biggest CMS. Installing WordPress on your own server is definitely the route we recommend owing to the large number of plugins and themes and the huge amount of support available.

Drupal
www.drupal.org

Another open source content management system that’s a little fiddlier and a little less powerful.

Joomla
www.joomla.org

And one more for good measure! This one is often used for ‘internal blogs’.

Other Resources for Your CMS

To upload your CMS, you’ll need a hosting account. The one we tend to recommend is bluehost at www.bluehost.com. Another good one is Go-Daddy at www.godaddy.com. For those in the UK, www.123-reg.co.uk is another option.

You will also want to add your own theme. A good place to get WordPress themes that look professional is www.themeforest.net. For a wide selection of fonts, try www.fontsquirrel.com.

Socializing Your Blog

You want to get your blog onto social media and that means you need a presence on all the social networks you can think of. Don’t forget the ‘smaller ones’.

Make sure you at least have an account with:

·        Facebook

·        Twitter

·        Instagram (actually bigger than Twitter!)

·        LinkedIn

·        Google+

·        Pinterest

·        Vine

You can also use these tools for some extra help with your social media efforts:

Reddit
www.reddit.com

Reddit is a great ‘social bookmarking’ site. Each of the sub-reddits provide a place for people interested in a particular topic to meet and this is an excellent way to share your content.

BuzzSumo
www.buzzsumo.com

BuzzSumo is a tool that some people find useful for finding things to share and post.

IFTTT
www.ifttt.com

Finding it a lot of work to manage all your social media accounts? IFTTT.com can link them and thus make your life easier. HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com) is also a very useful one.

Shareaholic
www.shareaholic.com

This is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy for your visitors to share your content. This is the one I tend to use most.

YouTube
www.youtube.com

YouTube is a video sharing site but it can also work as a social media site. You should definitely be on there, both as another inroad to your site and brand and also as a way to add multimedia to your website. You can then use Adobe Premier to do your editing.

Email List

Building a mailing list is very important for your blog, as it allows you to ‘remarket’ to visitors that otherwise might come once and then leave forever.

To make a mailing list, you will need an autoresponder service, which is what will let you manage your contacts as well as add your opt-in form to your website.

The top three choices here are:

GetResponse (www.getresponse.com)

Aweber (www.aweber.com)

MailChimp (www.mailchimp.com)

Outsourcing

Finding the thought of building your own website and logo daunting? Most of the things we’ve discussed can be outsourced to third parties. Using a freelancer site, it’s relatively easy to find people who can do these things for you.

Top outsourcing resources include:

UpWork
www.upwork.com

This has a lot of hourly-rate jobs and a broad range of professionals.

Elance
www.elance.com

Similar to UpWork in terms of size as well as features.

Freelancer
www.freelancer.com

This is the larger freelancing site out there. It’s easier to find cheap work but the quality tends to be a little lower.

Fiverr
www.fiverr.com

Come here to find jobs for $5. Can be useful for creating logos, video openers, e-book covers etc.

Selling

For monetization, selling a product or affiliate product is the best strategy. Try some of these tools:

Optimize Press
www.optimizepress.com

This is useful for creating ‘landing pages’. Through these, you can sell e-books and other things and they tend to be very good at converting.

JVZoo
www.jvzoo.com

The best affiliate network for finding products you can sell for an average of 60%!

ClickBank
www.clickbank.com

A bigger but slightly more fiddly alternative to JVZoo.

Amazon Associates
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com

Become an Amazon affiliate to sell their wide range of products. You’ll get a much smaller commission but the huge selection of things to sell makes up for this and makes it a worthwhile choice.