Here’s an interesting story from Yaro Starak – The Blog Traffic King.

It’s one the first questions new bloggers ask – which blog system should I use?

TypePad [www.typepad.com], Blogger [www.blogger.com] and WordPress [www.wordpress.org] are the most popular and while I think they all have their advantages there is one clear winner – WordPress.

Download WordPress (it’s no-cost), install it on your server, buy a proper domain name and then get
blogging.

MSN Spaces is another blogging system you may have heard of that a lot of teenagers use because it is linked with the MSN Messenger chat service. If you are serious about blogging I would definitely stay clear of it. If you just want to blog about your cat/girlfriend/how much you hate your job then it’s fine, but if you are blogging for any professional purposes get something professional.

DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU

I’ll tell you a story about Steve. Steve is a niche blogger. He set up lots of little blogs on all kinds of topics (niches) aiming to make a few dollars from each blog by placing Google AdSense advertisements on them. Google pays you when
someone clicks on the ads.

After a few months he did really well and built up his income. None of his blogs had a lot of traffic, but they got enough from search engines that each blog earned between $1 and $10 per day.
In total he earned over $2000 per month from his blogs – not a bad effort.

One day he turned on his computer and all his blogs had gone. Disappeared. Vanished without a trace…

What happened you ask?

He was using one Blogger.com account to manage his blogs and Blogger.com determined that what he was doing was violating their terms of service.

They thought all his blogs were what are called “splogs” – SPAM blogs.

Splogs are blogs set up to get traffic to other sites. They are usually automatically generated and the owners have no intention of producing a useful website – they just want to get traffic.
Essentially they are the SPAM of the blogging
world.

Steve contacted the support staff at Blogger.com to explain that his sites were not SPAM sites but it was difficult to convince them and he never got his blogs reactivated. Overnight he lost his regular $2000 per month income in one hit.

OWN YOUR BLOG

If Steve had hosted his blogs on WordPress on his own servers with his own domains this simply would not have happened. It may cost a bit more upfront to buy the domain names and rent the server space (WordPress itself is free) but the security and control makes it worthwhile.

Besides the ownership benefit WordPress has many other pluses. My particular favorite features
include:

- It’s free, very powerful and runs of a mySQL database so it’s quick.

- It has a very easy installation procedure.

- There are hundreds of free themes you can download and install allowing you to change the look of your blog.

- There are hundreds of plug-ins that provide extra functionality.

All of the above benefits are available because the WordPress system is Open Source Software, which means anyone can look at the code and modify the program. Consequently there are hundreds of programmers working to make WordPress the best blogging system and they do it for free – just for the good of the software.

GET STARTED

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that WordPress is the way to go. Now if you haven’t done so already, here are the three steps you can do right now to get your new WordPress blog installed.

1. Go to http://wordpress.org/download/ and download WordPress.

2. Buy a domain name and hosting package. At the moment I use and recommend Yahoo! Small Business – http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ – but there are literally thousands of web hosting providers
around.

3. Install your blog. Done!

If installing a blog is beyond you then Yahoo also has a hosting service that comes with WordPress installed for you –

http://sbs.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/problogs.php

BACK-UP YOUR BLOG

I’ll leave you with this one last very important note…

If you are going to stay with Blogger.com or TypePad or even if you use WordPress there is one thing you should add to your weekly to-do list, back-ups.

Make sure you have an offline archive of all your content so if for whatever reason you lose your blog you can restore all the content. If you own your domains you won’t lose your traffic either because you can restore things to exactly how they
were.