BEST BLOGGING PROGRAMS!

A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO PREMIUM AND FREE BLOGGING PLATFORMS

Last updated: 6th April 2018

Blogging is a great way to connect with the world. Whether you blog to express your passion for your hobbies, blog to connect on a personal level with others or blog to help promote a business, it can be a great way to connect with the world. In this article I’ll be reviewing each of the popular blogging sites available today.

Since blogging is much more than writing or posting photos, finding the best platform for your needs is important. You will want to have a platform that is easy to use and provides you with the customization tools you are looking for to give your audience everything they need to read and interact with your blog.

If you have never blogged before, you will want to choose blog platforms that cater to beginners. This means in many cases you will be giving up the option to change HTML or CSS code. If you who have been blogging for a while, these options for coding may be more important to you.

As a blogger you will also have to decide whether you want to pay for the options that come with some platforms or stick to the free platforms that may have less options available. This choice can be determined by what your blog’s focus is and whether you plan to make money from the blog itself.

There are also blogging sites that provide both free and paid services, which can be useful when your small blog turns into a big hit. Here are some of the top blogging sites that are available and the pros and cons of using each to create your next home on the Internet.

THE MAJOR BLOGGING PLATFORMS COMPARED ( FREE & PREMIUM BLOG SITES )

These popular blogging platforms all have positives and negatives, especially when you take into consideration your level of skills as a blogger and as a coder. The longer you blog, the more skills you will pick up, so it is important to either find a platform that meets your needs at the time, or to find a platform that gives you the ability to change the type of services you get to better serve your needs and the needs of your blog’s audience.

WordPress.org

The .org version of WordPress provides many of the same features as its .com counterpart, but it also provides additional customization features for any blogger. This WordPress option works out well for folks who want to have complete control over the customization of their blog, but it is not a platform that is easy for beginners to use effectively but there are lots of free and paid options to learn WordPress.

WordPress.org lets you install your own custom plugins and themes to make your blog look exactly how you want. To use this platform for your blog, you will have to find your own web host, perform routine backups and maintain the blog on your own.

For people who are just starting their blogging journey I recommend that they use BlueHost as they offer an easy WordPress installation process, reliable up time and excellent support.

Use this link to get a free domain name with your hosting.

In fact, I use BlueHost for this site and many others that I own.

UPDATE April 2018 

You can now get BlueHost’s high quality hosting plan for just  $2.95 per month (36 months sign up) plus you get a FREE domain name. This is for a limited time only!

Normally this would cost you $7.99 per month, so jump on this deal now while its still available.

Here’s what you get for $2.95 per month with BlueHost hosting:

A FREE domain name ( worth $15 )Fast, high quality & reliable web hosting
One-click WordPress Install and 24/7 support.
Unmetered bandwidth
5 email accounts
100MB on each account

BLUEHOST DEAL - $2.95 P/M + FREE DOMAIN

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Ghost

Ghost is an open source blogging platform that provides a simple, clean interface that makes it very easy to use. It also provides a live preview of your post while you are writing it, so you can easily correct any writing or coding mistakes as you go along. This platform can be great for beginners because of its ease of use, but expert bloggers may also prefer it because of its interface compared to other blogging services. The downside to Ghost is that it can be difficult to install at first but once it is, it can be a great tool for any blogger.

Again for running a blog on Ghost you will require web hosting – I recommend BlueHost.

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Drupal

Drupal is a great option for blogs associated with businesses because it is not just a blogging platform, but a complete content management system. This means that along with your blog, web pages and other online content can be created and organized within this platform. Drupal does not host blogs for users, so bloggers using this platform will have to find their own host someplace else. Drupal is also not a platform that readily accommodates beginners, so it is better for those upgrading from a free blogging platform rather than for the blogger just starting out.

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Joomla

If you are looking for a full content management system, Joomla is another great option for bloggers. In terms of the ease of use, Joomla may have more of a learning curve than WordPress, but can be much easier to use than Drupal. Many businesses and large corporations prefer this type of platform because it can give you flexibility with a wide range of content options.

Joomla, however, can be expensive. While the first month is free, after that a blogger can be charged anywhere from $20-$100 per month depending on the options and upgrades they want. For many novice bloggers, this can be a high cost unless the blog is attached to an existing business that already generates a profit.

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WordPress.com

WordPress is one of the most popular free blogging platforms on the Internet. Millions of users like the options it provides for simple, free blog creation and maintenance. The platform is free and offers services such as hosting, the ability to have a custom domain, integrating your blog with social media and popular features such as comments and polls are available without installing plugins. A number of paid upgrades are also available. The biggest issue with this version of WordPress is that options such as custom themes, plugins and editing HTML are not available. However, WordPress.com also has a sister site, WordPress.org that provides many more customization options.

Both WordPress.com and WordPress.org are also known for the detailed amount of support provided. Not only do these sites have the standard tutorials to get you started building on these platforms, but WordPress also has a large community of users that are more than willing to help out a fellow user with common questions and concerns about various aspects of blogging on WordPress. With all of the information available, it can be easy to learn this platform quickly so you can start customizing your site without too much trouble. I am a huge WordPress fan and recommend it for all my clients, check out my free tutorial if you want to start blogging with WordPress.

WordPress.com in my opinion is probably the best free blog site available. If you’re a newbie starting out blogging, then do consider this option.

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Medium

There are many great platforms out there for starting your own blog. They include sites with customi

Milkshake Shipped All across UNITED STATES

Milkshake shipped across US to grant dying woman's wish

•  02 August 2017
 
• US & Canada

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Image copyrightFACEBOOK

Image captionEmily Pomeranz, 50, had happy memories of her time at Tommy's in Cleveland Heights

An Ohio restaurant has made a dying woman's bittersweet last wish come true, by shipping a milkshake to her deathbed across the US.

Emily Pomeranz, who was in a hospice near Washington DC with pancreatic cancer, had a hankering to taste a mocha shake from her hometown diner.

She told her friend, Sam Klein, and he contacted Tommy's in Cleveland Heights to arrange the long-distance order.

The drink reached her bedside four days before she passed away last Friday.

Mr Klein, who also grew up in the Cleveland area before moving to Washington DC, had asked his old friend during a visit to her hospice if she needed anything.

"She said with a smile, 'I wish I could have one more Tommy's mocha milkshake,'" Mr Klein said.

He said he contacted the general information email address for the restaurant.

"A few days later I got a call from Tommy Fello, the owner of Tommy's. 'Yes. We will figure out a way to do this,' is what he said," Mr Klein said in a Facebook post.

Mr Fello told Cleveland's Fox 8 News that he had never dealt with an order like this one in the restaurant's 47-year history.

"I wasn't even sure if we'd be able to do it," he said, adding that those involved had dubbed it the milkshake mission.

Mr Fello put the beverage on dry ice and paid $123 (£93) for overnight shipping 370 miles (600km) across the country.

Mr Klein said Ms Pomeranz, 50, was overjoyed to taste her favourite shake.

"I know Emily would love the fact that she's making people feel good even though she's not here with us anymore," Mr Klein said.

WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING?

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Some people remember the 1990’s as a tremendous period of growth for grunge music and Jim Carrey films. While this is true, most people will probably tell you the 90’s were responsible for this big, beautiful, technology called the World Wide Web (aka the internet, the web, the vast digital ocean of information at our finger tips). And with any new technology or media, companies quickly realized they had a new opportunity to market their products and services to consumers via the millions of websites they visit every day.

With the emergence of search engines in the mid-1990’s, the internet ballooned into a massive e-commerce and information machine. Website owners were creating valuable content and providing tremendous benefits to their visitors, and these website owners wanted to be compensated for their hard work. Early forms of online advertising like CPM or fixed placement started seeing competition from emerging, more accountable forms of online advertising, like affiliate marketing. So, what is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing at its very core is about relationships,
a relationship between three parties:

In the world of affiliate marketing, an advertiser can be a company selling a product like electronics, airline tickets, clothing or car parts, or an advertiser could also be an insurance company selling policies. The most important thing to remember is that you are an advertiser if you are ready to pay other people to help you sell and promote your business.
Find out more »

A publisher is an individual or company that promotes an advertiser’s product or service in exchange for earning a commission. Advertisers contractually agree to work with a publisher, then provide the publisher with creative – in the form of links, banner or text ads or even unique phone numbers – that the publisher incorporates into their website.
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The final component that completes the affiliate relationship triangle is the consumer. The consumer is the one who actually sees the ad and then makes an action (either by clicking a link or by submitting their information via a form) that takes them from the publisher’s website to the advertiser’s to complete the action, which we call a conversion.
Find out more »

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Let's face it: technology, especially the internet, can be pretty daunting to try to grasp, and with terms like malware, cursor and spam, it also seems pretty dangerous. So kudos to the guys who decided e-commerce and affiliate marketing should rely on an innocuous technology called a "cookie."

A cookie is a technology that works with web browsers to store information like user preferences, login or registration information, and shopping cart contents. Have you ever opted-in to have a website "remember" your password and username for one of your online accounts? That's a cookie. Ever notice while searching the web for "travel deals" and you suddenly start seeing travel display banners on other websites? Those ads are appearing for you because you've been cookied (it's okay, you won't get hurt).

In affiliate marketing, one task that cookies manage is to remember the link or ad the visitor to a website clicks on. Cookies can also store the date and time of the click, they can even be used to remember what kind of websites or content you like most. There are many different types of web cookies and uses, but the kind of cookie affiliate marketing relies on is called a first-party cookie.

When a user visits a publisher's website and clicks an advertiser's creative ad, the visitor's browser receives the CJ tracking cookie that identifies the advertiser, the publisher, the specific creative and commission amount. This data is stored within the link information in what are called "parameters" and can include even more anonymous data used for attribution.

The sample link below includes some of the identifiers Commission Junction uses to enable proper tracking and auditing of the affiliate marketing process:

<a href="http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-5377085-10590299?sid=012-123" target="_blank"> webservices.cj.com</a><img border="0" height="1" src="http://www.ftjcfx.com/image-5377085-10590299" width="1" height="1" border="0" />

• PID: 5377085
  PID (publisher website ID) is used to identify the publisher's website. A CJ publisher may have multiple PIDs under one single CJ account (e.g. if you maintain multiple websites, you will have multiple PIDs).
• AID: 10590299
  The AID (ad ID) is a number which identifies a specific link and enables CJ to track creative performance as well as credit the publisher when they earn a commissionable transaction. Because each link has a unique AID, it also allows CJ to identify the appropriate advertiser.
• SID: 012-123
  SID (shopper ID) enables publisher to track where their referred actions originated so they can target and/or reward their unique shoppers. When the visitor makes a purchase or completes a lead form, that transaction is tracked and recorded by Commission Junction.

The CJ Network is capable of tracking and processing an enormous volume of actions and transactions. In 2011 alone, Commission Junction tracked a total of over 3 billion website visits, 175 million transactions and over $6 billion in online sales.

Links & Learning

Hopefully you've learned some basics about how to be an affiliate or an advertiser and how affiliate marketing works.

Below are a few resources out there to help you learn some additional tips and tricks.

CJ Support Center

Our Support Center has a wealth of answers and popular topics that will answer many of your questions. Only publishers and advertisers in the CJ Network have access.

Find out more »
Publisher Training Tutorials Playlist »

I.A.B.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the U.S.

Find out more »

HTML Learning Websites

There are hundreds of HTML tutorials websites like www.htmlgoodies.com or www.w3schools.comwhere you can learn the basics.