Earlier I gave you 5 reasons to try blogging. Obviously the first step would be to ‘have a blog’ to write on, right?
Here’s a big ol’ Call to Action: [maxbutton id=”2″]
Warning: Click that button and it’ll lead to a page that describes what I do and why. At the bottom is yet another button that’ll lead you to a form to fill out and get a pretty in-depth proposal. That proposal comes with a dollar sign. The least amount of money I’ll actually build a site for is $750. That’s a pretty site with minimal features great SEO and comes with an hour of one on one training. I’ve built a few sites for that amount but most sites require much more than a basic amount of effort.
If you don’t, and you aren’t sure if blogging is really what you want, here’s how to give it whirl and do so for FREE!
Wait? What? Did I just capture your attention?
First let me tell you a story.
I had an incredible phone conversation with someone the other day who… well it went kind of like this…
Her: “I think a website should cost a max of a few hundred dollars.”
Me: “Why are you calling me?”
Her: “My present site was built with GoDaddy’s site builder.”
Me: “Ok, (I’ll bite) so…?”
Her: “I’ve had it for a few years and never gotten a lead from it.”
Me: “By the way, how did you find me?”
Her: “I found you in Google“
Of course, I suggested she NOT look at hiring me. No surprise there, eh?
But here’s the rest of the story. For a few hundred dollars (or less) you can:
- Go to one of these free drag and drop templates and create something that looks fine to you. The problem is that it’s built in flash and ooops! That still doesn’t play well with iphones. Wix doesn’t tell you that.
- Go to one of these almost free drag and drop sites and create something that looks fine to you. If you get lucky you’ll end up with a site that looks good, isn’t built on flash, and shows up on an iphone. Yay for you! What that site doesn’t do is make sure you are found in Google. They look pretty but typically have lousy SEO. You are also being held hostage there. Do you own your domain name or do they? Can you change hosts? What happens to your content if you move? There’s a reason they advertise on TV and have a low entry $.
- You can find a teenager who built a fabulously entertaining shrine in MySpace to everything Backstreet Boys. Seriously. These young adults know more about html and css than you ever will. The drawback is that, like their bedrooms, they are messy. They’ll build something, hopefully mobile responsive html5 compliant but will they be there a month from now? What happens when you want to make changes? Can another person come in and clean up their mess? I’ve had to come in to try and fix a few of these and they cost more time to fix than if they had done them right in the first place.
So if you just skipped down from the word FREE to here here’s the meat and potatoes.
If you are not sure you want to blog, but don’t want to invest the big bucks here’s how to start for FREE.
It’s called WordPress.com
Go there and you can start a new site for free. No catches. Choose a template (for FREE) and start blogging (for FREE).
You’ll have a site that has decent SEO, good coding, and works. You’ll get a site like https://areweconnected.wordpress.com/ – but if you pay more you can change the domain to something you already own.
Here’s why.
With WordPress.com you’ll find either that you like blogging or not. If you do, you’ll want to take it to the next level. You’ll want to have a fancy theme, fancy plugins, maybe bring in some cool things like a third party IDX search. You can’t do that with WordPress.com, but… all of your posts, pages, images, documents can be easily transferred to the new site we build for you.
If you find that blogging isn’t for you – you are out what? Just a little bit of time, right?
Moral of the story: If you are going to do FREE, do FREE right.
Of course you don’t have to blog for me to build you a proper site. Some of the sites I build with the plan that they’ll never write a blog post. 🙂
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and now,a perfect "BDR Weapon"). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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