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.