Build Your Author Platform. Carole Jelen
Читать онлайн.| Название | Build Your Author Platform |
|---|---|
| Автор произведения | Carole Jelen |
| Жанр | Личностный рост |
| Серия | |
| Издательство | Личностный рост |
| Год выпуска | 0 |
| isbn | 9781939529299 |
Because Google owns Blogger, you can easily get yourself a Blogger account with your existing Google account. Blogger integration with other Google properties like YouTube and Google+ also offers several advantages:
Linking to YouTube videos in your posts is a snap! In the post editor, you can search for relevant videos or link to your YouTube channel.
You can automatically create a Google+ page for your blog that will share your posts with that audience, offering another way to interact with your readers.
Perhaps most importantly, you can use Google AdSense and include affiliate links to earn money with your blog.
The downside to Blogger is mostly about control. Unlike WordPress and Movable Type/TypePad, you can’t run Blogger as the blog page of your own site. You can link your existing domain to your Blogger site, but you should only do this if your site is just a blog. If, for example, you want to directly sell ebooks or other content, you can’t do that on Blogger, though you can post affiliate links from other e-commerce sites.
If you like having lots of choices for how your blog will look, you’ll find Blogger theme options quite limited, especially compared to WordPress.com. If you’re one of those folks who complains about too many choices, however, choosing from the seven basic choices (with different color schemes) could be quite pleasant.
Whereas Blogger is for folks who just want to blog, TypePad from SAY Media is a specialized site host and content management system. It has been around a long time, and though it hasn’t gotten the same media attention as its rivals in recent years, it’s still among the top 500 trafficked websites.
TypePad’s big brother, Movable Type (MT), was one of the first industrial-strength blogging platforms, starting right around the same time as Blogger. A few months after Google bought the company that created Blogger, the MT developers (called Six Apart) ended the practice of distributing MT for free. The hosted version started in 2003 and has always been a paid, commercial product. When noncommercial bloggers who still had to install MT and connect it to a database (no easy task in those days) had to start paying a fee to run MT, many fled to the upstart WordPress. Eventually, Movable Type 4 was released as open source software. Today you can install Movable Type on a server for free; TypePad costs around US$100 annually.
We don’t have to tell you about the power of Blogger’s connection with Google. What may surprise you is the reach of WordPress—more than three-quarters of all blogs on the web run on WordPress (either self-hosted or at WordPress.com)! WordPress is among the top 25 sites in terms of traffic.
You can use WordPress either on your own web space (using a hosting company as described in Chapter 1) or on WordPress.com. Sometimes you’ll hear WordPress veterans talk about “self-hosted WordPress sites” or “WordPress-dot-org sites” to refer to WordPress running on a server. Self-hosted WordPress is typically updated with new features twice a year, with occasional smaller updates that are usually focused on plugging security holes. Depending on your hosting company, you may be responsible for keeping your site updated. The bigger hosts (and WordPress.com) handle this for you.
If you’re serious about blogging, and really do want to try out blogging on a hosted system before creating your own website, we highly recommend starting out at WordPress.com.
Consider these advantages:
Large and strong community of users and developers.
Excellent technical support.
More than 100 free theme choices (and more than a handful of premium themes). When you choose a self-hosted location, hundreds of free and premium themes become available.
An easy way to determine how your audience is building through detailed statistics.
Freshly Pressed on the WordPress.com home page highlights dozens of posts every day, giving you the chance to shine.
Simple export of your dot-com site to a self-hosted WordPress site (even porting your audience to the new site for a small fee). WordPress can usually import posts from another blog system, too.
WordPress.com users often get to see and work with new features before they are released to self-hosted users.
Regardless of what vendor you choose, you will have to think about these things:
What to name your blog.
What address (uniform resource locator, or URL) to use to help people find your blog.
Writing your About page.
A few things to think about when naming your blog:
Most likely, the title should reflect the primary topic(s) you expect to cover in the blog.
Use a pithy title! Both Blogger and WordPress allow a subtitle or tagline that allows for more expansive explanations of your blog.
If you are expecting to create a separate site for your book (see Chapter 11), avoid giving your author website blog the same title.
Don’t just toss off a title! Give it some thought, unless you plan to make the blog private while you work out your topic schedule and other details. While you can nearly always change the title of your blog, this is part of your brand. Often the title will also be reflected in your web address (which you can’t change).
Consider these facts:
Every site on the web has a unique, specific address.
WordPress is the only vendor that talks about its size; they say about 100,000 new blogs are created every day.
The reality is that whoever you choose to host your blog, millions of blogs are already registered on your chosen site, so finding your unique address can be tricky. Always check first for your blog’s title (or some shortened version). If you’re focusing on a particular topic, look for an address that people interested in that topic might search for. You may want to start with your name, if it’s not especially common. Have some backup ideas ready. You’ll learn right away whether the address is available.
No matter