These days, many of us are dreaming of taking professional blogging seriously, enough for it to become a major source of income. And fortunately for some of us, blogging as a business has been rewarding, especially financially.
This phenomenon has inspired many others to consider blogging as an additional revenue source, to supplement what they may be earning from their day jobs. Once you’ve got your blogging ideas ready, all you need is decent hosting and a good blogging platform.
There are many options available, though if you observe individuals running their own little blog networks, more often than not, you would see WordPress as the platform of choice.
Why WordPress? Personally, this choice has been a no–brainer. The application comes with all the basic features you’ll need to get a blog running. Additionally, it offers endless customization options as you learn the system, and the possibilities are endless. Because it is based on PHP and MySQL, you can easily learn the system, with the whole open source community behind you, providing lessons and tools for rapid learning and development.
WordPress also has a very large community of selfless individuals who continuously contribute and improve the application with various plugins, themes, and even hacks to make it do just about everything. The app has taken various incarnations and served varied purposes, it’s that good that it has been modded to simulate a photo gallery solution, a content aggregator, and quite sadly, it has also been a splogging solution for evil–minded souls.
A big seller for professional blogging is the fact that WordPress is pre–optimized for search engines. Using the clean permalinks option, it produces friendly URLs that are preferred by search engines. It also supports the various XML syndication formats which has almost been a requirement for almost all new web applications.
Lastly, WordPress is free. Free as in beer, or in whatever way you want to see it. You don’t have to pay anything for it, and you can pretty much mangle it to suit your needs.
Don’t you agree it’s the best for professional blogging?
4 replies on “WordPress for professional blogging”
Do you know how to change the layout of a wordpress.org blog? I’ve been trying to change mine — upload the downloaded theme to the server but the theme doesn’t show up when I try to change it. 🙁
Alfa, you mean wordpress.com blog, like yours, am I correct? I don’t think you can upload new themes to wordpress.com, but they do have a good set of themes you can choose from. If you really need personalized themes and other functionalities, using a hosted WordPress install might be a better idea. I’m sure yuga/ploghost can help you with that, or maybe evan I can. 😉
No. This blog is what I’m talking about: http://alfamercado.com
My host is Yahoo!. How do I go about the customization?
Hi Alfa. You can customize your WP install just like any other WP weblog. You can install plugins and themes by uploading them to your host. I’m sure Yahoo hosting provides that functionality. 🙂