Blogs have set off a trend in online media, being used for everything from angst chronicles to product marketing. Best of all, this popular method of self-expression, earning and marketing among other things comes without a price. Yes, it’s free.

Blogs can be hosted for free on various blogging platforms, of which one of the most popular is WordPress. Fast, easy to use and rich in features, WordPress has become the platform of choice for most sophisticated, conscious and serious bloggers – both personal and professional.

While starting to build a blog, one of the important things to look for is scalability – especially if you want to preserve the content and/or URL of the blog for a few years. Today, you may think you have far more resources than necessary. But a year down the line, you may have a hundred times as many visitors as you bargained for. This is when you begin to feel the need for a sound blogging platform beneath your feet, and wish you had begun with your own domain name rather than the free WordPress(dot)com URL.

Importing an existing blog into a WordPress blog is a one-click affair if you are on any of the well-known blogging platforms such as Blogger or LiveJournal. However, it is impossible to change the URL of a WordPress(dot)com blog to your own domain.

In order to set up WordPress on your own domain, the first thing to do is to install the script. This is also a one-click affair with most web hosts, simply requiring you to select “WordPress” under “script to install”. Once registered, you can choose to start posting immediately, or to set further preferences.

WordPress has a large collection of themes to form your blog header, footer, sidebar and background. Many of these are free, while others are premium and require a fee. Themes can be customizable to varying degrees – from themes that barely allow custom headers to ones that stand as a tall backbone for any structure you may erect around them.

Personal bloggers prefer WordPress because of the advanced categorizing and tagging, which allow them to browse all WordPress posts on a particular topic rather than sifting through Google constantly.

Professional bloggers take comfort and pride in the plethora of features available through widgets and plugins – from the search engine optimization plugins to e-Commerce solutions and directory listings, you have it all.

Every blogger, without exception, loves the Akismet spam blocker – a highly intelligent plugin that lets blogs remain spam-free even without the word verifications that make a commenter’s life hell.

For people who desire some control over their blogging software but are not coders themselves, WordPress is the perfect option. It allows an amazing degree of freedom, with a minimal learning curve and high degree of user-friendliness.

Some business owners start blogs to increase the amount of content on their website while others begin with a blog. To maximize the online impact and ability to make money with your website you need both static content (information that doesn’t change much) and content that is updated regularly (news, specials, tips, etc). The updated content (blog) builds interest, traffic and authority, helping make you the one people trust. The static pages convert that interest and trust into sales.

For most companies, there is no need to have both a website and a blog, you can use the blogging software, Wordpress, as both. Wordpress uses ‘pages’ for your static content, (like the description of your business) and ‘posts’ for dynamic content and news. Pages can have pages and subpages, allowing you to create easy site navigation for your visitors. Categories and tags make it easy for your visitors to move around your site, finding the things they’re most interested in.

Content for Static Pages

Every website should have the following:

* Information about your offer; your services and products
* Benefits; how do you help your customers?Why should they choose you?
* Examples and testimonials. Do you have happy customers? Tell everyone!
* Frequently asked questions – what do most people ask about your product or service?
* Contact information. Where are you? How do people reach you? Maps are always welcome. Ordering information. Don’t make it hard for people to buy. Can people book appointments? Can they buy your products? Don’t bury this, this should be foremost in your planning.

Satisfaction guarantee. If people don’t know you, why should they do business with you? The dynamic pages of your blog can be used for relationship building with your customers and potential customers.

For your blog pages, think about:

Are you running a special promotion? Has anyone new joined your business? Do you have any tips you can share? The amount of things you can share to build relationships is limitless. You don’t have to be a great writer, just be yourself.

With WordPress, it’s easy to design and build a professional website with very little money.

If you are beginning to learn your way around blogging and you are using WordPress it would be best for you to stick to the free themes that are available. The reason I say this is because some of the paid themes that are available are more for web developers.

Some themes will have you enter certain codes and hooks. I learned from experience, even though the theme looks like you must consider how much of a learning curve it will take to customize the theme. The good thing about using paid for themes is that your blog will be unique in format and style.

Plus if you see a theme that you like but is not free more than likely you can find one that is free that is close to theme you want. So one thing you have to ask yourself is what you want your site to look like.

These are some common questions to ask when choosing a theme. What color scheme are you going for? How many sidebars do you want on your blog? Do you want rotating images on your home page? Do you want a custom header?

All of these questions will help you narrow down your search of the perfect theme. If you find 2 or 3, then add them to your theme folders and see how each of them looks on your site. You can always delete the ones that you do not like. So start off with a free theme and then once you get the hang of blogging, move to a custom paid for theme.

WordPress has a templating system, which includes widgets that can be rearranged without editing PHP or HTML code, as well as themes that can be installed and switched between.

The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced customizations. WordPress also features integrated link management; a search engine-friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; multiple author capability; and support for tagging of posts and articles.

Automatic filters that provide for proper formatting and styling of text in articles (for example, converting regular quotes to smart quotes) are also included. WordPress also supports the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites that have themselves linked to a post or article. Finally, WordPress has a rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install.