All Entries Tagged With: "Blog Hosting"
Why A Real Estate Agent Should Have A Blog
I’m amazed at the number of real estate agents who still don’t have a blog. This is the one tool I think every business owner should have, but a real estate agent especially.
I recently found an article that promised to discuss the benefits of real estate blogging. I was sorely disappointed.
To start with, the articles has no meat in it for about five paragraphs. Then, when you do find the substance, the author recommends a third-party website for blogging, quizzes, and polling. While that in and of itself isn’t bad, the community the author recommends is a second-rate site at best. If you’re going to take his advice and start a blog on a third-party site such as the one he suggests, you’d be better off going to one of these three as a real estate agent:
Both Blogger and WordPress.com offer free blog hosting for any niche. ActiveRain is a real estate community that offers free blog hosting for real estate professionals. But, honestly, a better solution than any of these three is to own your own domain name and to set up your real estate blog there. It’s much better to own the real estate than to rent it, even if renting for free. Don’t you agree?
Learn more about setting up your own real estate blog from a blog management professional now.
What Kind Of Server Should Your Blog Be On?
When it comes to blogging, you can’t be too safe. The type of server you put your blog on can go a long way to your success. It helps to know what can kind of servers are available. Generally, you’ll run into one of the following types of servers, but which one is right for you?
I won’t get into the different types of broad category servers such as chat, application, and server platforms. This post is concerned with the types of servers you’ll find through web hosting companies. The kinds of servers you’ll use for storing your blog information.
I’m not an IT guy so if I get the technical defnitions wrong, please forgive me. But in general you’ll find shared hosting, dedicated servers, cloud computing, and colocation services, aka root servers.
Shared hosting is the most popular type of server environment. It’s usually cheap and that’s why many companies opt for this type of server, but it does have its risks. There are security risks as well as SEO risks associated with hosting on a shared server. If another occupant of the web server fails to update their blog or CMS software, it could pose a security risk to you. A hacker could gain access to that server through another company’s out of date software and your blog could spend a few days out of commission as your host scrambles to fix the problem. That’s why a dedicated server is usually your better option.
A dedicated server is just as its name implies. You have the server all to yourself. It is more expensive, but you know who your neighbors are. You don’t have any. You and you alone are hosted on that server. This is ideal because you can control what happens on that server by not engaging in risky behavior that could pose a security or SEO risk.
Cloud computing, like shared hosting, poses security risks. It essentially uses the Internet to disperse your information across multiple servers and possibly even providers. However, generally your blog will be hosted on one server while other web properties may be hosted on another server. This could have SEO benefits if your blog is on one server and the website it hosts is on another. But you’d still want both your blog and your website to exist on dedicated servers. Most cloud computing systems use a shared hosting format for all its servers.
Root servers, also called colocation services, provide managed server space for your servers. This can exist in a shared or dedicated format, but the idea is that another company manages your server at a location they provide. Another version of colocation is for a company to rent server space from the company that owns it.
When it comes to hosting your company blog you want to minimize your risks. That means ensuring that you don’t end up in a bad neighborhood or associated with companies and individuals that engage in risky behavior. To learn more about SEO hosting for blogs, visit SEOHostingProvider.com.
Use A Blog To Market Your Business
Some of this advice is pedestrian and I’ll tell you which ideas presented are just that. But it is the same advice that we’ve been giving our customers for years.
How a Blog Can Be Used For Internet Marketing
Did you know that blogging can actually increase your sales? It’s true! Blogging is an effective internet marketing technique than can increase interest in your business and bring in more sales because it helps to broaden your audience with very little effort.
Creating a blog either on another page of your website or using one of the free blog hosts like WordPress or Blogger allows you to speak more casually about topics related to your business. A blog is a more personal medium in which you can write, post pictures or videos of things that would be of interest or amusement to your potential customers. By including regular links to your site and products as well as a few posts specifically about your business, you are able to peak people’s curiosity and interest and give them easy access to your business.
This is the pedestrian part. You really want your own domain name. You don’t want a blog on a free host. There are several reasons why.
First, if you own the property then you control the property. No one can kick you off.
Secondly, you can have more influence on the neighborhood. The free blog hosts have a bad reputation for attracting spammers. By hosting your blog on the same servers as these spammers, you will get a similar reputation. Online, you are who you run with. But if you host your blog on a server where you know there are no spammers then you’ll get much better search engine results.
I’d never tell anyone to host their blog on a free host. A domain name only costs $10 per year. If you can’t afford that then you shouldn’t have a blog.
Examples of interesting things that you can blog about in order to utilize your blog as an internet marketing tool include: funny news about your industry, your products, reviews of sites that are related to your business (not your competitors!), news about new products to look out for, etc.
You can take the opportunity to post pictures of your products or upload personal videos about your company. Remember that your posts should be light, easy to read and informative, and again; sprinkled with links to your main website so that you are making the most of this easy internet marketing technique.
We use these strategies all the time for our clients and they work. Use your blog as a marketing tool and you’ll quite surprised by the results.
While blogging may be quite easy, far less technical and require less work than some other internet marketing techniques, you need to remember that it is still work. As with any other venture you embark on; the more effort you put in and the more time you invest; the bigger the pay off. Updating regularly and keeping your blog as fresh and interesting as possible is a must if you want to succeed. Also, make sure to use all of the same keywords for SEO purposes that you do with your website to help you as well.
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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Fransesco_Ronnie
Blogging is a powerful way to market your business online. Every time you post a blog post you add new content to your website and build new links. Both of these provide SEO benefits and you’ll be inviting the search engines back to your website to crawl it every time you post a new blog post.
For more information on how you can get a company blog, visit Blog Content Provider.
Why Blogger Is Not Good For Business
I still talk to people who are sold on Blogger.com being a great place to host a blog. Just because it’s free. I hate to be the party spoiler (actually, I quite like spiking the punch, thank you!), but the reason Blogger.com is not a good place to host your blog is precisely because it is free.
Human error has a way of killing good grass. Sure, you can pull out the weeds one by one, but the more “free” something is the more weeds you can expect to see. And pulling out all those weeds takes time. So to make it go easier and more quickly, you have to create something to automate the process – something like an algorithm, which is a fancy word for a mathematical equation that is supposed to search out and find the weeds in a big field of grass. In this case, it’s the free blog host Blogger.com and the weeds are spam blogs.
Big problem. Google’s algorithm actually flagged legitimate blogs as spam blogs. Thousands of them. And some of them were rather high profile blogs that had been hosted at Blogger.com for a long time. If it could happen them, do you think it could happen to you?
For every day that your blog is down that could potentially be thousands of dollars slipping through a hole in your pocket. It may be just a few pennies a day, but if you don’t sew up that hole then you could lose thousands over time. That thousand dollars over the course of one year represents hundreds of thousands over time. When you consider what you could have that $1,000 do for you, earning you more in an interest-bearing account, for instance, the problem is a lot bigger than it at first seems. You can’t afford to lose even a dime to someone else’s error.
It’s better, if you can, to own the property. And since you can purchase a web domain for as little as $10 per year, why not do so? Imagine opening up a storefront on the busiest street in your town for $10/year. Would you do that? Or would you opt for the empty warehouse across the railroad tracks that gets graffiti spray painted on its face once a month just because it’s free?
Sorry for the graphic image, but that’s how serious this is. Don’t use a free host. You’re much better off paying $25-$30 per month for a secure host and $10 per year than you are using a free host that could flake out on you at any time. It’s a business blog, man. Run it like one.
