When internet marketers set out to make money online, eventually they all run into the same problem and come to the same realization: You need lots of traffic to succeed online. For some people, blogging is their main source of income online. For others, a blog becomes a tool to help expand their online business – whether they’re an affiliate marketer, network marketer, product creator, and so on.
Blogs Are “Traffic Machines”
A blog is much more than a place to jot down your thoughts on a subject. It’s much more than an online journal, or a place to rant about certain topics. What many people still don’t realize is that blogs are GREAT for building traffic – and then driving that traffic to your other online businesses/products/affiliate products, etc. Blogs themselves have come to be known as great traffic machines for one main reason. Search engines LOVE blogs. The coding and design of blogs, along with the way you can frequently publish content to them, make them amazing for search engine optimization purposes. Having established that blogs are great traffic machines, there’s one blogging platform that seems to stand tall above all the rest: Self-hosted WordPress.
Why WordPress Is Better for Building Traffic
There are many blogging platforms out there to choose from, some free and some paid. Typepad, Blogger, Tumbler and WordPress.com (free version), just to name a few. But self hosted WordPress (where you pay for hosting costs and domain name), stands out in the crowd for a number of reasons. WordPress, as a general rule, is a lot easier to attract traffic to than other blogging platforms. Why?
WordPress SEO
Search engines prefer WordPress for multiple reasons, the main being site structure and the addition of “tags” (which some CMS such as Blogger don’t have). In addition to having content arranged into both categories and tags, with WordPress you have complete control over the SEO of your blog. For example, with WordPress, you can easily adjust the meta tags for each individual blog post (Title tag, description tag, keywords tag). This is much more difficult on a free platform such as Blogger or Tumblr. With WordPress you also have more control over categories, menus and pages – which helps boost your search engine optimization as well. In addition, you can set up breadcrumb navigation, prevent search engine indexing of categories, tags and other areas of your site that would be considered duplicate content.
Plugins
With WordPress you have the addition of add-ons called plugins. Plugins are basically having code added to your blog that performs a variety of functions. The great part though is that you don’t have to edit any code yourself! You just install the plugin with a few clicks, then adjust the settings to customize it. Plugins can do just about anything you think of to your blog – specifically helping you drive more traffic. For example, with WordPress there are countless SEO plugins that let you have full control over the SEO of your blog. Most WordPress themes have built in SEO settings, but with a plugin you go beyond that into the realm of complete control.
With plugins, you can also add social bookmarking share buttons to your blog with just a few clicks – once again fully customizable. Letting your blog readers promote your content for you through social media can mean the difference between your success and your failure.
Blog Design
Having a clean, professional blog design makes all the difference. If a blog looks sloppy and unprofessional, do you think you’ll return to it very often? Would you tell your friends about it? WordPress has countless clean, professional looking blog themes for you to choose from, some free and some paid. It’s true that you get what you pay for.
As you should be able to see by now, when you choose WordPress as your blogging platform, you have complete control over your blog. WordPress is superior and is clearly the number one choice if you want to be able to drive substantial traffic to your online business.
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