Marketing Yourself And Your Online Business With Blogs

Marketing yourself and your online business is a full time job. You might as well make it fun, and writing articles and blogging allows you to do that. Most of you know that I have now written more than 630 articles during the past 14 months, but you may not know that I have also been blogging since 2005.

I started out with Blogger, Google’s free service, but quickly realized that it was not good for professional business purposes. Free is not always better, and that is particularly true when it comes to blogging platforms.

I looked next at WordPress, but saw that the free version was no better than Blogger and the hosted version was just too technologically advanced for what I wanted to do. (This blog is done on WordPress, but it was installed by people who do it professionally. It can run into several hundred dollars or more to have a custom WordPress theme with plug-ins installed on your server.)

In the fall of 2005 I found the Blog Squad, Patsi Krakoff and Densie Wakeman. They introduced me to the Typepad blogging platform. Typepad can be set up in less than an hour and the cost is as low as $4.95 US per month, although I recommend the Plus package, which runs $8.95 US per month. It is much less if you pay by the year.

You can learn everything about maintaining your Typepad blog by reading Patsi and Denise’s book, Build A Better Blog. I keep it next to my computer and refer to it regularly when I want to make a change or add another feature to one of my blogs. I also belong to the Blog Squad’s Mentor Program. The price is right and the information is priceless. I must say that the Blog Squad have been instrumental to my success online.