What are plug-ins and where do I find them?

Well first of all, there’s a link under this audio that links you directly to the plug-in directory from WordPress, but if you’re in your WordPress dashboard, there is a link in the navigation for plug-ins and you’ll see a link at the bottom of that page for going to the plug-in directory.  Plug-ins are basically technically add-ons to your website that make the functionality even more powerful than what it already was.

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I notice that you use Quansite. Why is that?

Well, in case you don’t know what Quansite is you can go to QuansiteRevolution.comAskBobtheTeacher.com is my central hub for my marketing.  That’s where I have my blog and several other web pages that I use to help people find solutions to the issues that they face in internet marketing.  Now I personally use Quansite even though it’s a premium service. I do pay for it every month – because it’s like hiring my own research and tech team for my blog and for my website.  I get support, so if anything happens they are there to help me out.  They’re also there to go and research what’s happening in the internet marketing community.

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Should I have a personal blog and a business blog?

Well this isn’t one of those questions, as many in internet marketing, with an answer of ‘it depends’.  I would recommend that you do have a business blog that includes elements of your personal life that you can somehow tie in to your business one way or another.  If you are an entrepreneur who is a service provider; if you have some role where you’re dealing with clients one-on-one, including the stories of your personal life can help them to get to know you, to like you, to trust you, because you’re not just after making a sale.

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Which is better to use – www.wordpress.com or www.wordpress.org?

Well WordPress is the standard of blogging software, and WordPress.com is where you can go in order to create a blog on their website.  So you have like, www.BobtheTeacher.WordPress.com as your web address, okay?  That, of course, wouldn’t be your address because you wouldn’t want to have a blog that looks like it’s for me.  But the point of the dot com is that they host your website for you and they do that for free.  So that’s a great way to get started with a blog if you’re worried about hosting costs or domain costs and all that kind of stuff.  Dot org – WordPress.org is where you go to get the free software that you can download and install on your own website.  However, you don’t even need to go to WordPress.org to get that software, you can go straight into your website’s cPanel and you can install the software through Fantastico if you like.

If you’re a little bit picky on having extra security on your website and to prevent hackers from jumping in to your blog at some point down the road when you get rich and famous, you definitely want to do the dot org free software and install it yourself, because you can put some extra security there.  But for most people, including myself, I find the cPanel/Fantastico system works perfectly well.   Just make your password a very difficult password to guess – very long, use some characters, use some numbers, etcetera.

The point though, of why you would use the WordPress software on your own site versus WordPress on WordPress.com, is that you want to really be ultimately in control of the content that you produce, and at any point in time WordPress.com could deem your site to be inappropriate or whatever that they feel, and simply just shut it down and close down your access.  That would be a big problem for you, I bet.  So I recommend that you have WordPress on your own site.

One of the types of hosting accounts you might want to look at – and we talked about hosting back in the second call of this series – a good blogging host is HostGator.com.  If you go to PoweredbyHostGator.com and when you go to order, go ahead and put in the code ‘wordpress’ and they’ll give you a big discount off of your first month or your first bill.  Having your host, if you want a hosted blog, just gives you a lot more control and gives you that sense of security that you have ultimate decision of what’s going on with your blog.  However, that being said, there’s nothing wrong with having both.  You can go on the WordPress.com, create a blog or two about a specific topic, and then have your own hosted blog and then point back and forth to one another.  That can be a very effective traffic tool, and it’s one that a lot of advanced bloggers tend to utilize.  Okay?

So I recommend WordPress.org, but feel free to use both.  Especially if you’re just getting started, go ahead and use WordPress.com.  You can always export what you make and import it into a new blog of your own when you’re ready for that.  The real key here is don’t let the decision of using dot com or dot org prevent you from starting with your blog.  Go ahead and do whichever one you feel most comfortable with for now, and you can always revise that later by transferring the content from one blog to the next.

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Can I still benefit from a blog?

Can I still benefit from a blog?  You don’t need to be a professionally trained writer to write a blog.  All you need to do is be able to have an audience that wants to learn what you have to talk about.  You can misspell words, you can use the wrong syntax, you can do whatever you want with a blog – it’s your blog.

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