www.1001TopWords.com |
Comparing Free Blogging Software
With the increased interest in Blogging (web Logging), many web hosting providers now provide an assortment of free usage, open source blogging software packages. Among the most popular of these blogging tools are B2evolution, WordPress and Nucleus. Each of these programs offer similar basic features, so the question arises as to which one is easiest to use and would be appropriate for the requirements of your particular website. The answer lies in the true purpose of your blog website. If your primary goal is to share your opinions and ideas with the general public, you would want to utilize a different blogging tool than a user who was creating product blogs as a commercial sales effort. A blog for search engine promotion would have entirely different requirements. All of these uses are viable reasons to create a blog, however each requires different features to be successful. WordPress Blogging Software It is hard to beat WordPress for general personal blogging. WordPress is an open source, state-of-the-art personal publishing platform with a focus on presentation and usability. Everything related to creating and updating your blog is available through an intuitive graphical interface. With WordPress there is no need to compile your work. You simply write your column. You then select the features you want and your blog is instantly created and published to your website. If you are on vacation, you can schedule your uploads for some date in the future or even email your column to the server! The system allows multiple users with multiple blogs divided into categories and sub-categories. This allows multiple family members or friends to create their own blogs along with yours. Easy customization and the availability of many "plug-ins" that provide more functionality (add new features as you learn) makes this software a very good choice for most individuals. B2evolution B2evolution is another advanced web log tool that features an integrated XHTML validator. It supports recursive subcategories, cross posting and has a really cool integrated "skinning" system. The "skinning" system allows you to create multiple blogs in separate categories with different appearances for each blog. You simply "change the skin" for the blog to create a totally new look and feel. The "skinning" feature, combined with the built in multi-user administration management tool, makes the system robust enough for more commercial endeavors, such as product promotion blogs. If you have much to publish with multiple themes, this is the software you are looking for. Nucleus Blogging Software Though Nucleus is an extremely robust blogging tool in its own right, it also contains some powerful features that can provide benefits in promotion of your blog. Nucleus offers the ability to optimize its URLS, creating simple page addresses that do not have and "&" or "=" characters. This makes the pages search engine (and user) friendly. Another great feature is the ability to show the contents of multiple weblogs on one page. This could allow awebsite owner to manipulate the optimum text / keyword balance on pages for better search engine rankings. Nucleus also provides RSS and Atom feeds that can be extremely helpful when promoting a website. If part of your blog's function is to work as a search engine marketing and promotion tool, Nucleus is an exceptional software package. Each of these blogging software packages offer the basic tools that you would need to create a successful blog and all three are PHP - MySQL open source (free to use) packages. You should try to select the software that helps you achieve the long term goal that you have in mind for your website based on the unique extra features offered by each. Don Beavers lives in Bryan/College Station, Texas and is an enterprise level PHP-MySQL programmer at both the Shopping Elf Shopping Guide and the Datavor Web Directory.
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Why I Use Bloglines as My Default RSS Reader Choosing a decent RSS reader to browse and read your favourite RSS feeds was not a straight forward task. I tried and tested many different windows desktop readers but I ended up uninstalling them for one reason or another. Then I found Bloglines and I am pleased to say I have not yet been disappointed with it. RSS Feeds Have Revolutionized the Internet RSS feeds have revolutionized the Internet for one very good reason: they have provided and end to Spam. With RSS feeds, you can say good-bye to mass emails and distributions that do not meet your news needs and clog up your mailbox and hard drive. Blog Construction Blogs like all forms of writing are an art form that takes knowledge and practice to do well. What Consumers Need To Know About RSS Feeds Feeds are simple, really. What's even more exciting is that they are extremely easy to use, and even better, they are completely safe from Viruses, being Spammed or receiving Junk Mail. How? Basically because there is no transfer of information to your computer. How Can RSS Feeds Help Your Online Business? So who should I use RSS Feeds? How can it help with my online business? 3 Overlooked Ways to Get Hundreds of Links and Prospects to Your Blog Did you know that there are free ways that you can get links back to your blog overnight? That after a few days they can number in the hundreds? No matter what you market on the internet at some point you'll face the issue of increasing the number of visitors to your site. What most people don't know is that there are literally hundreds of ways to get free traffic. Here we'll focus on three overlooked ways to get additional traffic to your site using a blog.The third most overlooked way to bring traffic to your site with a blog is to read and comment on other blogs. Now, maybe you've done this before but stopped, because you'rebecoming concerned about being considered a link-spammer. Inthat case, leave a link to your site after your comments, instead of in the comment form that hot links it. In the near future, blogmasters will be able to use special code to prevent spam in their comments section, so this will become less of a concern.Besides, getting clicks from people who read comments, or visits from search engine spiders through your comments, isn't necessarily your direct objective, though it's definitely a plus.What you want to do via commenting is to enter the blog community that corresponds to your target market. Get to know who the players are and make agreements with them to cycle traffic between you. Or lurk to find out where your target market typically hangs out when they're online ? you'd be surprised at how many inexpensive and targeted advertising sources you can find through this method. (If you're looking to get linked, there's another way that we'll go over next.)This tip alone has earned me a few dozen links from prominent blogs in the past four days alone. These links are worth ten times a reciprocal link because they send targeted traffic from established sources, and come from experts with records of proven results. You can be sure these kinds of people will check you out before they linked to you, since they may be judged by the quality of the information they share. The second method to more blog traffic is the most confusing for newer people, and this is probably the reason its benefits remain overlooked.In the simplest of terms, Trackback is kind of a remote commenting system that incorporates linking. It allows the reader to follow a topic around the web to see other bloggers remark on the same subject. It enables the publisher to remotely cite references to the issue on which they've written.Once you've made yourself familiar with the blogging community you have entered, you can often pick up the pulse of conversations within your site's theme. Then, when you see issues that you want to expound on, you can send the other site a notification to let them know you cited them on your blog. That link will appear on their site, and often draws visitors to you.Bloggers who use Trackback often enjoy greater control overthis function in their blogs than they do over linking, as they have the option to reject your reference - so there is a lesser incidence of fraudulent linking. That also gives your link a greater chance of being displayed. So why don't more people use Trackback? One reason is that what is arguably the most popular free blog system, Blogger, doesn't have Trackback. However, Haloscan.com can remedy this with their free service ? it's a cut and paste away. Many new bloggers don't get what it is and how it differs from commenting. And of course, the dynamics of it are a little more complex than I've stated. But learn to use Trackback properly, and you won't need to beg for links to your site ever again.It's harder to estimate an exact number of visitors that come as a result of trackback links. But if you posted five days out of seven, and was able to get a trackback link to your site three times a week, by the end of the year you'd have almost 150 topical links back to your site, which are more valued by search engines than a typical link trade with an unrelated site.The most overlooked source of traffic for a blog is through article submission. To start with, turn your longer posts into articles and submitting them to ezines or directories. Look especially for directories that ask for the direct link to the article on your own site, and input the permanent link to the post on your blog. Make sure that your Auto-Discovery tag is in place and it can mean hundreds more prospects, links and subscribers.It's a shame this is the one of the least used traffic methods for most sites, let alone for blogs. In four days, this method generated just over 1000 visitors. 157 newsletter leads, 98 new feed subscribers, and 206 links to my site. You may not get these same results right away, but using these simple strategies can still get you more exposure than you have now.These aren't normally the highest quality links, as they rarely make sure of anchor text. However, bloggers are citing me using Trackback, sometimes in lieu of linking to the site where they originally found the article.To see this in action, do a search on "Can A Ping Really Help Your Blog Get Top Search Engine Rankings", the title of an article I submitted earlier this week.That article was published within a week of this one- the results speak for themselves. Many of these sites aren't the ones where my articles are normally published. There are, of course, plenty of other ways you can leverage the content in your blog or RSS feed to increase the traffic to your site. The methods outlined here may be a bit outside the norm, but, as you'll soon find, that's part of the reason they are so effective. Blogs are an Art Form that Takes Practice to do Well Writing?Blogs?Blogs are on-line journals where people express themselves through writing. Writing?Writing is the process where one puts down words of a language on a format that others can read. This process has not been around very long, to use one of my writing teacher's favorite sayings, "Writing has only existed for one day in the one year that humanity has existed." Speaking and thinking come much easier than writing. These processes just flow out naturally like a river of consciousness; sometimes we hardly have to think about doing them. Anyone and everyone can write words down on paper but that doesn't mean it's 'good writing', myself included. Like most things in life, our society already takes writing for granted which is proving to expose more of our ignorance. Writing is a new form of expression, and if we want to do it in a way that the masses can connect with our ideas, we have to think much more simply and clearly about this art. Snob-Bloggers: You Just Might Be A Snob If You Publish A Blog You Might Be A Snob-Blogger If? Blogs: Why, Where and How So you have heard about the blogs or you are sure you are now going through one of the blog. You might have seen blogs in the search results and would not have noticed it. Yes blogs are now making news but still a large number of people consider them as online diaries or a political mouthpiece. What about the business blogs that is lately surfacing on the web sphere? Top companies like GM's Fastlane blog is there to prove the point that blog works. The problem is that regular media is not accepting it as one of the most promising medium, which could be as powerful as the newspapers, or tv channels in the future. Thanks to RSS, blog contents could be read via email as and when it is published. Its A Blog, Not A Sales Letter The recent spurt of interest in blogging has begun to ignite the hope that people can make a full-time income from blogging. RSS & How to Use It (part 1) Have you ever read an article, intended to explain RSS in simple terms that, begins well, but soon descends into confusing jargon or information overload? Blogs: Todays Internet Diary and Marketing Tool The popular blogger.com owned by Google, Inc. has been around the internet for a while. Blogging for Business Business blogs are primarily used to improve a company's communication both internally and externally. Business blogs are a type of communication channel that could be used effectively in product launches, team interaction internally within the company or interaction between clients and company. With the level of interactivity blogs provide, clients feel more confident in the company. Not to mention the amount of traffic it brings to the main site. RSS Directory Submission: The Key to Blog Promotion According to Technorati, there are over 15 million blogs as of July 2005. And during July, an average of 80,000 new blogs were created each day. If you own a blog, how are you going to promote it in order to stay ahead of the competition? Blogging Dollars in 7 Hours or Less Need to make money fast, but you don't want to spend a single cent to establish an online business? Fret not, dear friend. You could actually start earning from the web with zero capital, zero obligations and zero risks! All these can be accomplished within 24 hours! Read on and I'll show you how. What is a Blog? In Plain English Please If you are fairly new to the Internet, you have probably heard the word "Blog" flying around. But what is a blog? How does it work? And how can I use it on my website? These are all good questions, which I hope to answer for you. Get the Internet on Your Own Terms RSS for the Rest of Us How to Make Money with Your Blog -- What Is A Blog What Are RSS Feeds? RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication." It's a format thatweb sites and blogs can use to send updated headlines to you viaservices like My Yahoo!. My Yahoo! gathers the content youselect from a variety of sources and displays it for you in oneconvenient location. Syndication means you don't have to visiteach site individually to see what's new -- you simply scanheadlines or brief article summaries and click to read the fulltext. That's the "really simple" part. And it's "really simple"for publishers to make their content accessible this way too. Bloggin for a Reason For some it's just a fun thing to do, while some others feel they will soon be left out; they soon join the crowd. Everyone who uses the internet knows someone who has a blog. Now what do you find in a blog that you dont find anywhere else? Nothing? If you are a friend of the blogger you visit his blog probably because you want a sneak peek into whatz happenning in his life right? don't deny that? been there done that! oh, and if you are a blogger yourself you visit other blogs thinking that the other guy reciprocates. |
© Athifea Distribution LLC - 2015 |