I’ve written before about how valuable it is to have a blog to support your life passion. Whether you’re using a a blog to market your business or as a platform for an online business, you can’t operate competitively in the business world without one.
A blog can stand alone or be part of a business or ecommerce website. You can build a site around your product or service and use your blog as a way to keep your customers informed, entertained, and engaged. A blog helps you build and maintain relationships, which are the life blood of any successful business.
Even if your passion is a side interest or hobby, building a blog around it can eventually allow you to generate income if you desire. With a blog, you build a community of likeminded, loyal followers who like what you have to say, find value in your ideas, and ultimately trust and respect you enough to purchase something from you.
Building a blog isn’t really that hard, even if you’re a non-techie like I was when I first started. But before you begin creating your blog, it’s smart to have some knowledge about the essential resources and tools you’ll need to get started.
Here are some of the most valuable blogging tools I use for my various blogs and sites:
WordPress
WordPress is a free open source software and content management system that powers millions of websites, including all of my sites. It’s the most popular blogging system in use on the web. It has thousands of free themes and plugins to choose from as you build your blog. WordPress.org is the center of the WordPress community where the core software is hosted.
WordPress.com is a commercial site which runs off the same software as WordPress.org, but WordPress.com handles the hosting for you rather than you having to set up and maintain hosting on your own server. All of this comes with some fees as well as certain restrictions you don’t have with WordPress.org. WordPress.com is more convenient, but it has its limitations.
You can read about the differences in .org and .com on this post to see what might be the best fit for your goals.
If you want to build a business or ecommerce site with a blog as part of the site, and you want a turnkey approach to creating the site and blog, check out Just Add Content. This a service that does it all for you. They will design and build your WordPress site, as well as handle hosting, security, site maintenance, optimization, and support. They create sites that work beautifully for any device.
Hostgator
This is the web hosting service I use for several of my sites. I highly recommend Hostgator for great pricing and excellent customer service. They provide top-notch service to clients from over 200 countries internationally and provide server packages for both beginners and professionals alike. Their plans include 24/7/365 phone and live chat support, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and a 45-day money-back guarantee.
Bluehost also is an excellent hosting service that’s great for first-time and advanced bloggers. It’s incredibly easy to use with 1-click automatic WordPress installation and excellent customer service – via phone and chat. Also, you can use the same hosting account for multiple domains if you plan on creating more websites.
AWeber
AWeber is an email marketing software that helps you to stay in touch with your customers and send out targeted and personalized emails easily in bulk. This is one of the most effective ways you market your business in the internet age. I use AWeber on my sites to build my email list of people interested in my blog and to send out blog updates, share information, and present new products and services..
With AWeber, you not only build your email list, but also you can create autoresponders, segment your customers and track your results. AWeber is easy to set up and use. You can automate the process of sending out blog posts to your subscribers by email, and it has useful networking features like social sharing buttons to include in emails so your subscribers can easily spread the word.
AWeber is arguably the most popular email marketing platform on the web, and is used many top bloggers and internet marketers. The cost of the service begins at $19 a month for up to 500 subscribers and increases as you build your list. There are plenty of other email services out there, but I’ve found AWeber to be the most reliable and user friendly.
Custom Site Designer
My most recent sites have been designed, built, and optimized by an independent contractor and online expert, Ron Clendenin. Ron is a pro not only with design and site navigation, but also he’s an SEO (search engine optimization) expert who can help you create a site that ranks well with search engines like Google. He can help you choose a URL, set up hosting, and help you maintain your site. Most recently he built my Simple Self-Confidence site. You can contact him ronclendenin [at] gmail [dot] com.
Paypal
PayPal is an online payment service that allows individuals and businesses to transfer funds electronically. I use Paypal to accept payments for my courses and coaching services and to make mass payments to my affiliates (other online entrepreneurs who sell my products). It’s a necessary service for any online entrepreneur or business.
E-junkie
E-junkie is a centrally-managed, copy-paste shopping cart and digital delivery service that allows you to easily sell anything, from information products to tangible goods. E-junkie provides you with shopping cart and purchase buttons to let you sell yours goods and services on your website.I use E-junkie as the shopping cart for my digital products.
It’s compatible with Paypal Standard, Paypal Pro, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, TrialPay, Clickbank, and 2CheckOut. It works great for a very low price, and comes with a decent affiliate program for your products.
Pop-Up Domination and Pippity
Pop-Up Domination is a WordPress plugin for attracting email subscribers. It creates a lightbox based pop-up window on which you can promote your blog updates or a free opt-in gift which helps increase opt-in email list conversion on your blog.
Although many people find pop-ups irritating, they are pretty much ubiquitous on all sites, and they do capture attention. I’ve found I get far more email subscribers with it than without it. All you do is purchase and download the plugin, upload it on your blog, and follow the very easy instructions for designing and creating the pop-up on your site.
They offer a variety of design themes and color options to choose from, and you can determine how and when you want the pop-up to appear. It’s definitely worth testing a pop-up to see how it impacts subscription sign-ups on your site.
On Live Bold and Bloom, I use a pop-up from Pippity. They have a lot of beautiful designs, and you can customize your own look. You can create several pop-ups and easily test which one works best on Pippity. I’m using Pop-Up Domination on one site and Pippity on another, so I’ll come back in time to tell you how they compare.
Market Samurai
Keyword research is super important for bloggers because as you create content, you want to target specific keywords and phrases that Google and other search engines will rank you highly for. There are hundreds of thousands of websites online often competing for the same words and phrases.
If you want to capitalize on search engine traffic, you have to research “profitable” keywords — those with a good number of searches and minimum competition.
Google’s Keyword Planner tool is a free service that helps you get started with basic keyword research. But Market Samurai is a much more robust program that will help you find those gold nugget opportunities in your niche. It gives you advanced strategies very quickly for finding relevant, high-traffic, high-quality keywords that will help your post go viral, build your traffic, or sell your product.
You can test Market Samurai with a free trial by clicking here. With the trial, you’ll get four brief “how to” videos showing you how to use the product to help you build your traffic.
Hey, are you thinking about building a blog or a site with a blog about your passion? Or are you just getting started and don’t know what to do next? If you have any questions about how to build a blog, what resources to use, or how to decide your blog niche, please post them in the comments below and we’ll respond to help you.
P.S. Full disclosure — I am an affiliate for some of these products.
photo credit: veryuseful via photopin