The time has come to blog with the Big Dogs!
We are now officially hosted through HostGator and are living under a real domain name, www.mlmnetworkingwomen.com!
We have a new look with a new theme, color scheme, and WordPress software. This is going to be exciting learning a new format and playing with the plugins and widgets…as soon as I learn what those are for…haha!
This is a new phase of my blogging journey and I am excited to share it with you. Blogging is an important facet of your online marketing campaign.
The first step was signing up with HostGator. They have a lot of tutorial videos and live chat support. The technicians don’t mind if you ask what you might think are “stupid questions”. If you’re like me, this is unchartered territory and there is NOTHING obvious about this process. Some days I just sat and stared at the computer screen waiting for the heavens to open up and enlighten me.
You want to talk about alphabet soup?!? cPanels, FTP, IP, SSL, SSH, MySQL, php, MIME, and what the heck is a GnuPG key???? I am a Green personality type and I like to research and understand everything I do before jumping in. But this was getting ridiculous! I may not understand all of this stuff until my kindergartener graduates high school! Besides, being techie is not my passion or talent…I had to accept the fact that I couldn’t afford the luxury of being an expert in this case and just get off the bean and DO IT.
I got through the process though, and so will you. I watched the videos and learned how to set up my cPanel (by the way that is your Control Panel). I even learned how to upload a new theme and “unpack” it…process also known as “unzipping”…something you do to a bunch of related files that get packed (like in a box) or zipped (like in overstuffing and zipping a suitcase for your vacation) so they are smaller in size for sending through the internet.
Why host your own blog?, you may ask. Because it is going to be the center of your internet business efforts.
If you are building your business and use your blog as your central hub, it would be catastrophic if you logged in one day to your blogging account and found that your blog was blocked. Why would they do this? Perhaps the blogging service you’re using found your content in violation of their terms of service. Yikes! There goes your connection with your clients and target market!
Hosting your own blog, like with HostGator, allows you to own your blog. The content is stored on your host’s servers. You pay a monthly subscription fee for the service. HostGator still has their terms of service you have to abide by which are generally no illegal activity, no spam, etc.
Also with hosting, your blog has a more professional presence…you have a clean and accurate domain name that remains consistent with every page of your blogging site. This is different than buying a domain name and having it redirect to your free blogging service blog (like Blogger).
I was happy with the service at Blogger and have no complaints. Like I said, it came time to start blogging with the Big Dogs.
Wishing You the Success of a Lifetime!
Karen
karen@mlmnetworkingwoman.com
skype ID karen.j.miller
