What are /r/Blogging's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I got the book Everybody Writes.

In that book it says the About You Page isn't really about you but should instead focus on relaying who you are in relation to the visitor.

>All good content puts the reader first, and that's no different on your About Us page. In other words, About Us gives you a chance to talk about yourself, but always in the context of what you do for your customers. What burdens you help them shoulder, what problems you solve for them.

You had a wordpress.com blog then. When people talk about getting their own Wordpress site, they are referring to self-hosted installs of Wordpress from Wordpress.org.

I run any scripts I need just fine on all my self-hosted Wordpress sites. (And have heavily modified functionality through custom plugins I've written.)

Use Hemingway App http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ to help you judge how easy your writing is to read. It will point out long sentences, simpler ways of writing the same thing, incorrect grammar and things like that.

If you want to be 100% focused on your content, you could go through a blog platform like wordpress.com and learn the tech basics along the way (host + domain through them) whilst not interfering with your main goal of content.

You can workaround that with a service like BuyMeACoffee, and I think there are also other services for a one-time donation (although I can't find them in my bookmarks now).

I just wanted to say that, if it helps you, it's worth doing. You are doing it as some sort of release? If that's the case, then who cares whether others read it? If people do read it and comment, then awesome!

As for getting started. You can easily get started at WordPress.com with a free blog and a domain like seanf999.wordpress.com.

Wordpress.com is not free (partially it is, but with limitations), but wordpress.org could be if you would have your own server at home. The platform itself it s free, but you need hosting and a domain name. That s what you pay for.

It's your blog, you can do whatever you want. It's a question about what you want to get out of your blog or in other words: What is your main goal? Why are you blogging in the first place?

There are a lot of people who want to reach a lot of followers, get as many visitors as they can and make money out of it. It seems like you don't care a lot about these things (which is totally fine) and it is more like a hobby to you. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Another thing is that your blog doesn't look like it would work really well on social media. Your site is kinda minimal without bright pictures and such. Again, this is totally fine but won't work really great on social media anyway. As always CONTENT IS KING and yours does look pretty good. I just skipped through it and it seems like your articles are well written and thought out. Good content will always find its readers, just give it some time.

On the other hand it is possible to get social media going without the need to do a lot on your own. Just setup a Twitter and Facebook page and use a service like IFTTT to automatically publish your new blog posts to your timeline. You don't even have to visit any social media sites on your own but this will most likely increase your audience a bit. You can install some sort of social media buttons plugin as well. That way your readers can share your articles without you doing anything.

I like your "more is less" attitude and after all it's up to you. But if you try to make money and reach a lot of people, you definitely need social media to assist you.

I wouldn't use Tumblr for long-form writing... it's definitely more geared towards short pieces or like a single image/image set that you can like, reblog, move on. Microblogging as opposed to traditional blogging. Definitely consider a Wordpress blog, whether self-hosted or through Wordpress.com. You also will probably find a better blogging community/audience looking for the sort of longer essays, reviews, etc. that you want to write.

You can use your own domain name with Tumblr (as you can with Wordpress, Blogger, etc.) but you'll probably have to pay a nominal fee. You can buy your own to use for Tumblr (https://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains). Wordpress.com has a way to buy one through them, not sure about Blogger and others.

As far as layouts you can always make your own (i.e. for a self-hosted Wordpress install) or at least customize ones available on any major blogging platform. So I wouldn't pick a platform based just on their out-of-the-box layouts.

> nt. Just

I agree to some extend. Instagram is not made to move people off the platform (this is why you can't add links to posts), Facebook trained their audience to be more of an Entertainment site (this is why videos do so well), but Pinterest from day one trained people to click links (this is why every post has a link attached to it).

You can use a website like https://www.similarweb.com/ to look at your competitors and see where their traffic is coming from. In many industries I searched, Pinterest has been the #1 Social Referral and many times the top referrer in general.

Hi there. I have a couple of suggestions. I agree, Wordpress is an excellent blogging platform. I do search engine optimization for a living and know that, properly configured, it can do wonders for website traffic and conversions.

That said, I read a post recently that was written by a new blogger explaining "A teenager's view on social media". What I liked about it (medium.com), was the placement of comments. Really encourages engagement. I have no idea how SEO friendly it is, but I think it would be a good place to test out your ideas and see what kind of a reaction you get. Speaking of testing out ideas, I also read a subreddit comment that eventually led me to this downloadable guide that helps you figure out an angle for your blog. The woman's comment was so insightful and pragmatic, it might be worth downloading.

1. Choose a theme - eg. mine is beginner web development - and stick to it. This will help when you try to promote, and also help you come up with post ideas.
2. Come up with 50 post ideas. Yes, 50 post ideas! It may take a couple of days, but just do it - it will help a lot to get you started and keep you motivated. I recommend using something like Trello, then do a brainstorm - here was mine:

And don't remove any 'bad' post ideas you come up with until you've got over 50.

1. Schedule blog posts at least a week in advance, to keep you motivated so you're like "Well I said I was going to post today, so I will do it"

2. When your list of post ideas gets down to 30, top it back up to 50!

Ehhh... Little bit of a misnomer there. WordPress.com owns the rights to display your content wherever they want to, yes, but they don't own your content. Once you delete it off their servers, they no longer have any claim to it.

Here's a topic on the WordPress forums that discussed the intricacies: https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/who-owns-the-content-i-post/

If you are using Google Analytics, then it can be due to Spam bots sending fake data to your analytics. Read more on Moz Blog: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data

Most big companies have news or press release sections of their sites where they post information and provide a set of photos that you can use - that's why most sites have the exact same images unless they took their own pictures. You can't just take a picture from anywhere on their site - only the ones officially provided for press coverage.

For example, here's Apple's press site: https://www.apple.com/pr/library/

The self hosted option is something you can install on your own website. This gives you more control and more options. But you need to pay for you own hosting and most likely a domain name as well. This would cost more money and involve more work.

But I think most major hosting companies have a very easy WordPress install option now. On my website I just had to click some buttons and things were up and running pretty quick.

on WordPress.com they host and manage almost everything for you. You get less control but you don't have to set up very much. On the free plan you can not use display ads for example and there are some other things you can't do as well.

You can move from the free .com version to a self hosted version in the future if you do use it. So you just want to get a feel of blogging and test things out it is not too bad of an option. Just keep in mind there are some limitations.

OK, simple enough. First step is to get a domain for each blog. The easiest way to do this on blogger is to go through Google Domains here. A domain from Google starts at $12 a year and is based on the extension you use (ie, .com, .net, etc). Once you have a domain, the steps to configure it are located here. It can take a couple of days for a new domain to reliably resolve to your website (sometimes up to 72 hours). But that's really all, just do this for each blog that you want to add a custom domain to. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

I use the Shortpixel plugin (https://shortpixel.com) and I don't do anything with my images before upload.

I upload a big jpg and Shortpixel shows an optimized webp, easy and pretty cheap :D (and I'm lazy...)

Ah, I thought I was too harsh. Take the below advice with a grain of salt because I am not the usual reader. I'm a blogger for money and/or amusement.

My current screen is 1280x200 so basic 16:9-ish laptop screen. I think your image sizes are all over the place - post header is fine but really that teeny tiny image in the tokyo ghoul post? Also must the images for your related posts widget be so large?

I just had a thought. Did you get a BLOG theme or a WEBSITE theme because really those are two different things. Your site looks like it would be great for say like a shopping site or something but for a blog, it's too wide and formatted oddly.

At the moment, your blog has this This Is Halloween vibe going on and if that your thing, go with it but there is no reason it should look so bad. If you aren't sure about colors use a tool like Pletteon to make a color scheme that is not only pleasing to the eyes but with hexcodes so you can put it in yourself. Personally, I just pick out colors I like [light blue, black, silver] and dick around with the colors until I reach a happy medium.

Another thing I noticed [after further inspection] is that you have links to social networks you don't use. Take all those icons down [just because they came with your theme doesn't mean you have to use them!] and only link to the ones you are active with.

Yoast. Yes, +1 to everything above said - it's a must-have one.

GetSiteControl, because it brings the entire set of 7 engagement widgets (opt-in, promo, survey, share buttons. etc.)

And Vectr, because it allows for easy image editing right in the post (text over picture, or simple graphics - comes handy sometimes)

One of my favorite sites for free images is Unsplash. They have gorgeous, eye catching photographs for free. You can also sign up with Death to the Stock Photo to receive a free file of photos each month, many of which are great for stock photos.

The score does not always mean a faster site. It is frustrating to optimize towards a score that may make things slower overall. I've seen this happen all the time.

I suggest picking a real site speed tester (that measures in seconds, not grades). My fav is WebPageTest. Then consistently run it so you're always aware of how recent changes (such as a new post or plugin upgrade) affected your real speed.

Set a calendar reminder to do this at least weekly, or find another way to automate it. I ended up setting up a private instance of WPT that I have scheduled to run tests daily for me (I made it available to others as MachMetrics if you're interested).

Now I have my speed data aggregated in nice charts emailed to me weekly, and I'm not concerned with any one score that could steer me in the wrong direction.

Ok so what I understand from that is:

1. You take all of the content from a small site (Site 1) and compress it into a single page document
2. You post that single page document on another site (Site 2)
3. You then want to create a 301 redirect Site 1 to Site 2

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Fundamentally, it can be done.

First of all you would need access to both sites' .htaccess, which allows you to create 301 redirects. Content under two different domains will be ranked separately, so having "duplicate" content on Site 1 and Site 2 will both rank. Therefore the huge information on Site 2 might rank better for "abc" while the fragmented Site 1 may have articles that rank for more niche queries.

The difficulty will be, with the 301 redirected pages, ranking Site 1 content, but I'll leave that to you to figure out.

There will be problems once Google figures out that it's duplicate content from two different domains however. They don't know that they're both your site, and therefore it appears to them that either Site 1 has copied Site 2, or vice versa.

I'm afraid there's no way to really combat this, because Google will penalise either Site 1 or Site 2 based on which one has the better DA. The lower DA website will be penalised for having the duplicate content.

Usually a canonical tag would be usable but those are reserved for internal to your domains content. This would not work if you're working with Domain 1 and Domain 2.

However,

What I have been playing with, which might be a solution to this, is using Structured Data Markup, particularly JSON-LD. JSON-LD allows you to create a sort of "profile" for your website through a script in the <header>. One of the things you can state is "asSeen" which states that there are related websites, related in a broad way.

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Hopefully that helps!

I'm a WordPress fan. You can always start a free WP blog and then make it self-hosted later. The main difference is that a self-hosted blog will have a better domain name (yourdomain.com) while a free blog (yourdomain.wordpress.com) is much longer. The cost for hosting and domain name is less than a $100./year.

SEO is built into the platform.

I cannot comment (at this stage) on how it performs as my blog is still password protected (and therefore not live) and (SEO) is something I need to learn more about when the time comes as I'm still writing material.

Quality is better than quantity. Ask yourself why you're posting so often and why you share photos. Are you trying to flood your niche with as much content as possible so people notice you? Are you afraid that without enough content, people won't know you exist?

Writing good content is hard and it takes time to learn. I've been blogging for almost a year and am slowly improving. Content is king in blogging town so take the time to write well-informed, well-structured, easy-to-read articles. You'll read a lot of blogs that advise on posting once a week, or even multiple times a week, but beginners (myself included) often don't have the skill to write well that fast.

So my advice is to learn to write well and do that as often as you can. As you improve, you will get faster at it and as a result can post more often.

Belle Beth Cooper is a writer and has some great tips for improving your writing. She wrote some articles for the Ghost blog. There's also a really good book called "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lammot, which is more about writing novels but absolutely applies to blogging.

You may not post often because the quality should be high, but you should always be writing, for yourself, to practice your art.

Good luck.

Sadly, almost entirely.
TechCrunch article from 2010: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/13/rss-is-not-not-not-not-not-dead/
And another from 2013: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/13/google-readers-death-is-proof-that-rss-always-suffered-from-lack-of-consumer-appeal/

RSS has been mutilated by Twitter.

I like the navigation at the top with the logo and subheadings. Clean and modern.

I noticed there's no commenting system on the posts. Is this a personal choice? If so, why (just curious)?

Even if your site isn't monetised you can't use images that aren't yours. I pay an artist for all of my illustrations and a few times I've seen them pop up on other sites without permission. A swift email and they're usually removed, but it makes me livid that someone would just take another person's work and pass it off as their own. Don't do it, image credit or otherwise. There are a few free image sites, and you have the option of places like Shutterstock or even Canva.

One thousand words is a good number. As long as it's over four hundred Google will consider it favourably, but online SEO isn't everything.

Overall, a good site that's well on the way. Consider a more suitable posting schedule. Be careful that posting every other day doesn't wear you out. Better to stick to once a week and build from there, than every day for a month then not again for another three.

Only use a watermark if it isn’t in the way, but then again it may be easy to remove.

Personally, I make illustrations and publish them under a Creative Commons license. It allows about any use of the illustrations, but has the requirement of attribution. I chose that because many people are interested in other creations the author made and that way they can find you. It’s friendlier than a watermark and has a solid legal foundation.

Check out the CC-BY-4.0 license here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

I'll actually answer your question with a yes. I believe those 95 likes are from people viewing your posts from the reader. Take from the WordPress stats info page: Readers may like your post without visiting your site, for example on the Reader. Since they didn’t actually visit your site, liking a post in this way does not count as a visit.

Source: https://wordpress.com/support/stats/

I think some of it depends on what your purpose is for your blog. General place to post your thoughts about things? Sure, Blogger or Wordpress.com are good places to go with that.

Do you intend to monetize, or eventually make this a part of a business strategy? Use it as a portfolio for a freelance career? You'll want something self-hosted. And most people who have transitioned from hobby blog to business aspect have regretted not going self-hosted from the start. So there's that. Which means you buy hosting, then load up a content management system like Wordpress or Ghost. Lots of hosting companies now have a one-click upload for Wordpress these days.

Even if you don't think that's likely to happen RIGHT away, if there is potential to try to make it part of a larger online business or marketing strategy, I might recommend at least doing Wordpress.com. For no other reason than because you can get used to the dashboard and interface. When you DO decide to move your blog to self-hosting, you're likely to use Wordpress for that, and you'll already know how it works.

By free plan, you mean where your url has ".wordpress.com" at the end? On that plan, no you can't have plugins. The lowest tier that lets you have plugins on Wordpress.com is I think the Business plan. On your free plan though, you can have blog followers, but no email newsletter sign up thing. People can follow (they'll get notified when you publish a new post) through their Wordpress accounts or by email, but that's it.

If you want those extra plugins (which is a good idea if you're wanting to do this as a side hustle or business-type thing), the you either have to upgrade to one of the paid plans OR self-host through sites like Siteground and Bluehost (there are many more; those are just the two most people I know use). And those self-hosted sites use the Wordpress.org as the backbone of the site - basically it does all the hefty coding parts; most of the internet is run by some form of Wordpress! So the process for that is buy a domain -> host it on one of those places -> install Wordpress -> install whatever plugins and post to your heart's content.

I had some Wordpress credits, so I ended up just upgrading to a Business account myself when I decided I wanted to do more with my site than just blog posts, but I think either is a viable option, and there are tons of people out there who are willing to help you get started (I'm one of them!). I hope this answers your question, but feel free to follow up here or in dms. I'm always happy to help! Oh also I love astronomy, so would appreciate the link in dms if you don't mind sharing! I'll follow you!

Sure, those reasons are very good reasons to blog.

Since you are not wanting to "go pro" or "go semi pro" in your blogging...you might find that blogger would be the better choice. For just the writing part of blogging, blogger has been a much more productive platform than WordPress. However, that being said, if you have some interest and or ambition in web/graphic design/development then you might want to check out the WordPress hosted free options on WordPress.com.

It will really be about the focus of the project. If it is primarily a vault of your research online where you and others can freely access it from anywhere, then you want the focus to be on ease of writing.....if you want it to be a site that becomes more than that in the future then give WordPress a spin.

Good Luck!

I'll do my best to explain it as simple as I can!

When a user goes to Google, they usually have something set in mind, they want an answer to a question or a guide etc. When we're writing content, it's so easy to get caught up in writing specific keywords and optimising content around that keyword.

But finding out search intent for that keyword is literally half the battle, knowing what people will search so that you come up in their query makes your content visible.

Moz has a fantastic example of this:

>Take pizza for example. Searching for a pizza recipe has a different
intent than searching for a takeout pizza, which is also different from
searching for the history of pizza. Though they all revolve around the
same overall topic (pizza), these users all have different intents.

The keyword/topic is pizza, but one has a different intent than another. One will get more traffic than the other.

So, if you use tools like ahrefs etc to find keywords, try and make content around what people will search rather than what you think people would search.

Should be fine if the blog owner adds a canonical meta tag to the page. You can read more about it here on Moz's website.

Basically it's a tag that tells google that this is a copy of your page.

Also try words which are synonymous with wanderlust, there are many words. :O example

http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/wanderlust

I deleted two blogs just because I didn't like the domain name, so take your time but don't overthink. ^_^

Blogger and tumblr are good options! I feel wordpress.com is very limited compared to the other two, plus on tumblr you could end up being part of a community! which is very hard through blogger or wordpress.com

I like tumblr because you can just reblog images you like and just add your text!

Considering it looks like you're just seeking a place to archive your content, probably nothing that's going to effect you.

If you're seeking an absolutely free existence, you're probably not going to have a custom domain either, so that's probably going to be the only major drawback as a brand identity outside of a lack of blog customization and features available through plugins WordPress.com doesn't have access to.

But again, if you're just looking for a place to host your content as a historical archive without much effort in whether that content gets seen, you're probably not going to notice any downsides. If you have some expectation of having that content still be viewed routinely, you might want to look at syndicating it as guest blogs (with canonical links) or using Medium.

I've used bluehost before. I would recommend dreamhost or wordpress.com though as I've had much better speeds through them. Wordpress.com can be a little limiting depending on what you are looking to do though. Basic package with bluehost will be more then enough to get you up and running. It can handle a fair amount of traffic if you are light on plugins. :)

Wordpress.COM is a private company and you can host exactly the same version of WordPress with them as with any other host.

Every web host these days has WordPress preinstalled and ready to go, so there’s no real advantage to paying the higher prices at .com for what you get.

Great question! So I rely on a business model where basically I make money, then I blog about it - as opposed to trying to make money off the content. If you want to read about it a few months ago I wrote about it in great detail

I differentiate my business model by calling it documentation, as opposed to content creation

There are several plugins that can do that for you. Just google for something like "Wordpress automatic Facebook Post", you'll find plenty options. I used this plugin quite a while and it worked good for me: Social Networks Auto Poster

IFTTT is a service that connects multiple of your accounts and products so they can communicate between each other. For example: You create a recipe like this one that will automatically publish your new blog posts on Twitter. You are some sort of programmer, right? So you should be familiar about how IFTTT works. It is based on IF and ELSE statements. So you create a so called "recipe" and tell it to look for new posts. IF there is a new wordpress post THEN tweet about it, ELSE do nothing.

I hope this makes it somewhat clear to you. Just check out the website, it's really easy to get it up and running.

It's different for every niche and search term, and to be completely honest, it's not something that can be explained quickly.

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo is a good starting point if you want to learn about SEO and how it works.

Direct just means they don’t know the source. It could be typed or bookmarked, it could come from an app or non-web site referral, or something broke. https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-direct-traffic-google-analytics

I would start with this guide https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

It's a bit outdated (they are rewriting it at the moment) and SEO experts say that it sucks, but it's a good place to start. Once you figure out how search engines work you'll know what to feed them.

Go register at serpstat.com and create a project for your website, it's freemium so you'll be able to some minor work, most importantly you can audit up to 100 pages for free every month, which is helpful.

You don't have to pay for tools to start, most of them have free trials or something similar. We have 2 weeks free trial, and you do an audit of your website too, but it's too technical, I would start with serpstat's simpler audit.

So all an "embed" really is is linking to an external site from yours and displaying that content (different than an iframe, which are usually pretty terrible for SEO).

Similarly to embedding a youtube video into your page, you can embed a Google doc.

With Google docs, however, you can set permissions within the document itself to make private, only show to someone who has the link, or to make it public.

Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, I'd assume you want to change those permissions to "only show to someone who has the link", and then use that link to embed into your page. Thereby making certain that nobody else is taking your document link and pasting it on an uncontrolled page.

This guide may explain it a little better. Just replace "video" with "Google doc", and realize unlike youtube or another video hosting site, you can keep your personal document from being viewed anywhere else but on your page:

https://moz.com/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

First I would work on some optimization. It was taking a long time to load for me so I checked on lighthouse and you’re scoring low. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthesavourista.com%2F

Similar thoughts to u/cjmarshall94 in terms of the layout - way too disorientating and messy. Consider either columns or a grid layout to give a better understanding, especially for first-time viewers.

As I've mentioned with others here, are you hosted on Wordpress? Do you have to have wordpress.com at the bottom? If not, lose it. These are the things that make your site look amateurish, especially since you've gone to the effort of buying a domain name.

I'm on desktop here, and I find your font in the articles hard to read. I'm guessing because I'm fullHD the text isn't scaling past a certain size, restricting it. Consider changing this or making the font something easier to read on a screen.

Not a fan of hamburger menus on desktop but that's a personal preference. If you have all that space at the top you might as well use it.

Hope that helps?

First reaction to your blog I am not sure what it is for. Is it for entrepreneurs to start their own business or are you just chronicling your journey?

The season and episode thing is fine I just assumed their was a podcast to go along with it. Perhaps you need section for newbies to quickly link to the first post like a 'start here'. Also thunbnails for each article could help entice more clicks.

I'm not sure what your goals are with this blog, if you want to monetize it you might want to switch to wordpress.org instead of using wordpress.com. I'm not an expert but .com you don't own your content.

If you are looking to build an audience I would focus more on teaching to reach more people.

If its just a hobby carry on :)

Wordpress.com has a lot of restrictions. It's better to move to a self-hosted program. There are plenty of great hosts like Bluehost, Siteground, Hostgator.

If you need a really cheap and efficient hosting. You can go with Namecheap. I also have a small blog hosted with Namecheap. Namecheap is famous as a domain registrar but I've not encountered any issue hosting with them. I am currently using shared WordPress hosting which cost $2.88/month.

I've recently posted a blog post delving deeper into the above 4 platforms. You could check out for more reference.

Put down the credit card!! You're making a big mistake

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You're able to get a full refund off of wordpress.com if you do it quick enough. then, find a host ( I use A2 but they all work) after you pay for a host and a domain you will be able to do a 1 click install of WordPress on their server.

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If you need help contact their support. My host has helped me countless times. if you already have a domain you can transfer it to the new host. its something like 85$ CAD/ year for the full package. Don't waste your money & time with wordpress.com Its made for people who do not want to go through the process of hosting and all the technical stuff.

If you want some pictures of the game atmosphere (crowd, tailgating, cheerleaders, etc.) then you can probably just browse a site like Flickr for "Minnesota Vikings" and start finding some candidates. If you message them, they may be interested in giving you rights to their pictures for a fee.

I would also search something like "Minnesota Sports Photographer" or "Minneapolis Sports Photographer" and start a conversation with those folks.

You might want to check out ThumbTack. Never used it before, but it could be helpful.

If you're looking for high quality, on-field pictures, this gets exponentially harder. There are few folks who can secure a media pass that gets them close enough to take the action shots. Here are a couple of ideas:

• Do some research into Minnesota print news sources. Try to find their Sports writers/editors and track down who they are using for their photography. The trick here is to find a way to contact the photographer directly and see if they are interested in making some extra cash doing a gig they are already going to be doing anyways.

• Find a blog similar to yours that covers another NFL team. See where they are getting their images from and start there. Odds are you can probably email their editor or fill out a contact form and they would be happy to discuss where they get their images from.

The key to blogging is consistency. The more content you create regularly, the more the algorithmic lords will reward you. Use tools like SEMRUSH to find keywords to target in your posts and tools like Wordblot to create more posts.

Truthfully, you can try to game the system with various SEO hacks, and it’ll have some success, but if you’re in it for the long haul, write blog posts at least weekly.

Something I’ve done in the past is write 5-7 blog posts ahead of time and schedule them to be released.

Also, consider using a platform like Ghost or Substack and also building an email list.

as others already pointed out, if you publish the same blog post over two separate domains, you'll get penalized for duplicate content.

I strongly suggest to think again about why you'd need to do that and, for example, why it couldn't be the case for translated versions of your blog posts.

The best way to manage that scenario would be to let Google know that "there's another version of the same content in another language". Specifically, you can do that by using rel="alternate" and hreflang="en-us" (or whichever language code applies in your case).

This is a terrific guide on how to do that: https://woorkup.com/seo-two-domains-content-two-different-languages/

In a general perspective, publishing the same content around is not a smart move, from an SEO perspective.

Learn more about canonicalization on this Moz page: https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

Hi /u/sebu!

My recommendation is to go with Tiny Letter, a bare-boned newsletter service without all the unnecessary click-tracking etc features. Best of all, it's free. To quote their tagline, "TinyLetter offers a clean and straightforward writing experience for people who aren't looking for advanced reporting or features for businesses."

Links: Tiny Letter!

Feel free to PM me if you need further recommendations! Best of luck!

You can find what to write about by:

Researching

Reading

Using topic generating tools to find new topic ideas

Some topic generating tools are:

https://answerthepublic.com

https://hubspot.com/blog-topic-generator

It's definitely a good idea to have at least one image in your post. If your posts tend to be on the long side then you can use images to help break up the text. Since you have a personal blog you can use your own photographs. You can also find some really great pictures that don't look like stock photos on sites like UnSplash and Pexels.

I use Kadence and I like it a lot. Before you pick a theme make sure it's not going to slow down your site and is mobile friendly. Also, go to Canva.com and you can make a good banner for free. The purple background everywhere might be a bit much. Lol. Love your niche by the way. Fellow nerd here :-)

What do you know about images and graphic design? I'd suggest a vector graphics editor. Vector is great for logos because scaling/size is not an issue.

I've had good success with Inkscape, for this purpose: creating logos for a blog.

https://inkscape.org/en/

Lots of things it could be. You bought shared hosting, not a dedicated host. This means hundreds of sites are sharing the same resources at namecheap.com. Why Divi? It's a lot of code to say "hello world" on the internet. You might switch temporarily to a very simple theme and see what kind of page speed number you can get. Divi doesn't advertise "our pages score great on Google page speed". Well, at least, I don't think they do. I went to their website and pulled 5 sites they say are running Divi and plugged them into Page Speed. I got 44,9,59,28, and 31. So, Google has plenty of suggestions on the tool's page of things to address, but you might be fighting an uphill battle, i.e making Divi get good scores might be like saying why doesn't my Ford350 get Toyota Prius mileage figures?

hey guys, thanks for reply

Im not afraid, just want take all steps for precaution that i can make, what will happen, let it be. Im pretty sure nothing would happen becouse like i said, things im going share with people are not THAT sensitive to kill me, trackme down or something BUT there could be chance in future lets say if i would go very deep in some subjects, who knows. I think we have sometimes go beyond life and death for greater purpous, thats my point of view.

About writting style, like i said im going focus in audio podcats like recording things and posting them instead of writting i like this method much more.

Im very grateful for any advices and tips, ty.

I thought beside using tor+vpn+ solid email services that are proposed by https://prism-break.org/en/ lets say, also having ONE seperate machine like laptop with DEBIAN system and using it only to post posts @ blog lets say going to some place with public WIFI so im going be pretty much untracable BUT like you said, everything in internet thesedays can be traced if somebody want this really much. Just few words, im going do it anyway just preperating to do it SOLID with all steps i can do to prevent any bad situations in futre.

thanks again cheers

Ghost offers their own hosting platform, for a low cost (but the benefit is that you can have them make sure it's always up and correctly configured).

I've set mine up manually with Docker on a server on linode, and I use Mailgun for email, but that can be involved if you're not familiar with Docker.

If you want to host it yourself, for you I recommend using DigitalOcean to host it. You can get a "droplet" (a server) with ghost installed and ready, and I think they're like $5 or $10 a month?

To set it up yourself from scratch, I suggest following the instructions on https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost#quick-start-install. All you need is nodejs installed on either your home computer or server (https://nodejs.org/). It's pretty easy, and that's a great way to try it for free to see if it's for you. The official ghost site also has trial hosting.

Without getting into the "complicated" stuff (SEO, customization, etc.), it was important for me to be able to write a post from anywhere. I feel like it's not the easiest process in the world to write a post for Weebly, Wix, etc. because they do so much else. It's easy with Wordpress. (Of course, for the same ease of use I'm using Wordpress.com rather than .org.)

I started one last year on Wordpress. I bought the package up from the free one, not the full blown business one. I think it’s under $200 for the full year, which I was happy with. The page designs are all there for you to choose from, depending on the aesthetics you’re looking for. Very very easy to use, navigate and post. I only write once a month or so, whenever I get time. I’m no expert on gaining readers, subscribers and traffic, but social media is always the first place to go for promotion. Write from a source of passion and you should go well! Good luck 👍

Wordpress

inside the belly of the beast

Hmmmm... excellent question.

When you follow the installation instructions, it gives you a default theme that looks a lot like this structure, where the theming files are in the templates directory and assets in the directories named css and images. With that set of default files, you could edit the css files and link to it in the layout .html page using the <link> tag.

Now, if you'd like more customization than that the answer would be "it depends on what you want to do".... could you be more specific about elements you'd like to have in your theme? ;-) For example, are you looking to theme navigational elements, restructure the pages, or different url structure, or custom post metadata?

For choosing colors, I usually just play around with the element's background color in Firefox's (or whatever browser you use) web developer tools until I find something I like.

You could look up color palettes with your main color for inspiration, like at: http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes. Or, look up your main color and find shades, opposites, etc.: http://www.color-hex.com/ (plenty of other sites for both of these, just 2 examples)

Just search "free RSS feed directories". Tons will turn up. Find the ones that show off your niche best and you should be good.

I put everything on StumbleUpon. It doesn't take long to do and will keep constant traffic rolling in. Also, I know I've said our bounce rate is likely because of this traffic, but we've also acquired subscriptions to our email list from some of it. So it's still helping out.

Social media is tough because you need to figure out which works best for your audience and then develop a marketing strategy. I highly encourage HootSuite for making your posts because of the short-link generator for Twitter, the ability to create feeds and watch them all in one place, and for the statistics they give you. Also, it's free. Not much better than that.

Oh, they also have Podium which is a site by HootSuite that teaches you how to use social media better. It's also free and really well structured.

If you haven't tried a lot of social media yet, make a page for everything. At least Twitter, FaceBook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Use HootSuite to make your posts but structure each one to display in a manner that's supported on that medium (a Twitter post doesn't look as good on FaceBook, etc...). Use HootSuite, Google Analytics, anything that can tell you how your posts are doing. Decide which ones would be worthwhile and then stick to those. There's no sense in wasting your time somewhere that you and your audience don't frequent.

Hey I read your posts and might have something that would be perfect for you. Steemit.com is a new social blogging platform that rewards their users based on the content they provide in cryptocurreny (like bitcoin). It doesn't cost a thing to post except for your time and you can get rewarded for posting.

Check out the trending section of it currently: https://steemit.com/trending

There are all sorts of posts from all sorts of people. Let me know here in case you decide to post there and I'll have a look at the content and vote correspondingly. :)

Jekyll is an awesome flat file CMS and it works out of the box with Github pages if you wanted to use that as your hosting. You can easily point a domain name to it as well. Or you can host it elsewhere pretty easily.

You will need a really basic idea of web development and particularly with Ruby.

Hi there! I've been using a writing platform called Write.as for over a year. I planned to just start a few blogs there to get into the habit of writing every day and ended up staying because it's the simplest blogging software I've ever used.

Check out https://write.as/

It takes seconds to start a free blog. No signup required. Hope this helps!

To get it up and running, I think you can easily get something for less than $15-20/month. There are even cheaper routes, but $20/month can get you a top performing host.

I personally use WPX Hosting and it's been fantastic... $20/month for up to 5 sites. It's really easy to set up and it's supposed to be one of the fastest hosts. It just takes care all of the basic but necessary things such as getting an SSL cert, installing wordpress, etc.

If you want to use ghost (probably a little bit more advanced), you can get that through digital ocean or through ghost.org.

More than happy to help you get setup if you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

>You can use Ghost as your blogging platform. It's simple & free to download, but you can host on their servers which has some pricing I now don't remember

Host it on your own server. Ghost's pricing is based on view counts.

I am deleting the unnecessary plugins, but I think I need MailPoet no? As bloom tells me to select an email provider and MAilPoet is that. I was using Instagram as a widget but I don't need it. And holy shit.

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https://gtmetrix.com/reports/inverseinvesting.net/jHipmNax

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Can't believe I'm such an idiot. Thank you for helping this idiot.

I can't help much on the color aspect that you want, but for the actual size and all that, here are a few tips.

• Know the resolution of the image you want to use on your pages. For instance, if you know your images are all going to be 640x320, upload an image that is 640x320. If you upload a larger (or smaller for that matter) image, the browser has to first scale the image to the right resolution, and then it can be displayed. This causes a performance hit when people view your pages.
• Once you know the size of your images, you can then take whatever images you want and take them through Photoshop, Gimp, etc and resize them to the appropriate resolution before uploading. I would recommend for most of your images to use JPG file types since these can compress down a bit more. Things like logos or any images that require some form of transparency, stick with PNG's.
• Install the WP Smush.it plugin. This plugin is seriously awesome. It basically automatically compresses images that you upload (and can also compress previously uploaded images for you). I've not noticed any loss of quality on mine, but there is definitely a savings in the number of bytes being sent per image.

Hopefully these tips help out. Once you've implemented some of these, I'd take a spin over to WebPageTest or GTMetrix and see how these help. It's nice to see a before and after so you can see how your visitors will benefit!

Take a second to look at Typora though. It does the opposite of what you describe, as it integrates the writing and preview in a single window. You can also export to a ton of file formats, including docx, pdf, html and tex.

Not the one you asked the question to, but with regards to limits you can just write HTML in markdown, or use an extended Markdown version (there's a few options). This gives you highlighting, footnotes, tables and much more. The learning curve is a bit steeper than rich text editors, but it's worth it to me for the independence from a specific software and the freedom to do it my way.

I imagine any old mic should work, but I bought this cheapo mic for the job, and it works great (especially if you're in a noisy house with kids/fans/etc).

As far as programs, I'm on a Windows PC, so I just use the built-in Windows dictation (not to be confused with Speech Recognition, which I find doesn't work as well).

I'm not sure about any other speech-to-text programs or how they stack up to Windows dictation. But given that it's free, I find it works just fine for my use.

I've used a gopro before, I know you can get an app on your phone to see what it sees. I'm sure you could probably get one for desktop as well. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gopro.smarty&amp;hl=en

However if you set up everything before you start, stick a camera on a tripod, get a remote shutter. Then focus it in on where you would be sitting. This way you would know you were going to be in frame, and you wouldn't keep shifting your eyes from lens to display. Obviously this depends on the type of vlog.

When you say "no fans" I presume you mean not many (returning) visitors to the site? How do you know it isn't the presentation format?

This because, I visited, and my first thought was: "Hey that's a bit unpleasant reading." Medium is the best I've seen. Perhaps a design that compliments your reading would give you more "fans".

I wrote the story below on medium, because I was a bit disappointed at the situation. The feedback on the writing however is very positive. Perhaps because the few people who did read had very low expectations but I'm going to count it as a win for now.

https://medium.com/@giwan/twilight-zone-wednesday-at-a-lab-75ee5ea8ce76

The Future of Medium

There's a lot of interest surrounding this writing platform, and as someone who's been on it since its very first days I wanted to try and unpack its appeal, see where it was headed.

The result is a long-form essay, part exposé and part review. I hope it's interesting for those who are considering writing there! :)

Use a trusted VPN like Mullvad, use TOR, use TAILS, don't use Windows, don't use Mac, don't log onto any of your online accounts on an insecure device, don't use your real name, don't post any personal identifying information, hide your WHOIS if you have a website, use a tracker-blocking browser extension, don't use a debit/credit card tied to your name to pay for your hosting, etc.

I’m new to writing, so I purchased On Writing Well by William Zinsser. It’s very insightful for my writing itself, and the advice translates well to blogging.

https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-Classic-Guide-Nonfiction/dp/0060891548

Nah, use markdown instead. So much more readable. Every blogger should be writing in markdown. I am sure there are online tools to convert your BBCode to markdown. As for the platform, I like Notion

You should check out IFTTT.com it's free and lets you automate your apps like Instagram, Pinterest etc. I suggest you create an account to create "Applets" to automate the sharing part.

This way when you post something on Instagram or Tumblr you can have it get automatically shared to Pinterest or Twitter or Facebook etc...

It's super easy to use, there are tutorials on youtube, I highly recommend you take a look at it.

You can use a free service that will automatically post on twitter and other social media sites and bookmarking sites. You can set it up to automatically send out post of your blog posts.

You can basically set it up and create a ring posting to whatever platforms you choose

So that every blog post you upload can be automatically shared to twitter, blogger, tumblr and more

This is the site with the free service - https://ifttt.com/discover

I have it set up to automatically share my new youtube videos to twitter, blogger, tumblr and a heap of bookmarking sites.

I tested it on a new twitter, blogger and tumblr accounts and I am getting more followers everyday

Yeah, sure man.

IFTTT basically allows you to create recipes where if you do one thing, another related thing happens. They have three widgets that you can use through the IFTTT app: note, camera and button.

For your purpose, camera widget will do. You get the IFTTT app, link your tumblr account to it. Then create a new recipe in the IFTTT app. In the THIS section, choose camera, in the THAT section choose create a new post on Tumblr.

It will give you an option to place an app shortcut/widget on your iPhone screen. Click it, it'll show camera interface, and you can click the picture of anything you want and it'll be posted to tumblr instantly.

It might sound a little complicated, but it's a one time thing and once you set it up, it's exactly what you were asking for.

Or just link your tumblr and activate this recipe: https://ifttt.com/applets/258170p-post-a-photo-to-tumblr

No offense, but I think your question demonstrates the wrong approach from most new bloggers, but I understand why your question is so common.

The problem is that many bloggers and YouTubers build their spiel around the "Blogging is easy, and I teach you how to make big bucks overnight."

Yes, that sells better than: "Work hard for a few years, and one day you may get some rewards."

Honestly, I think most new bloggers should take the "let's write a book" approach and focus on writing only.

Think about it this way. One of the best-selling books of 2021 has 400 pages and about 120,000 words.

If you were a first-time author and had never published a book before, you would have to write the book in your spare time while working a full-time job somewhere else.

Blogging is almost the same as writing a book but easier.

Why? Because you can publish a few "chapters", and get feedback.

At the same time, you should not seek payments from your readers after only publishing a few pages of your upcoming book.

Ask them what they think, and give them more of what they liked. Once they keep coming back for more, charge them a fee (show some ads).

Unfortunately, most bloggers are unwilling to accept the ads are a payment for your (unfinished) book, and the vast majority are not patient enough to finish the book.

"Anchor text matters greatly to SEO, as it can indicate to Google what a page is about. In fact, using anchor text as a ranking signal is included in several Google patents. Not using anchor text or using generic anchor text, such as "click here" is generally considered a poor SEO practice." Moz, Anchor Text

According to google, that is not a good strategy for building links to a blog, due to the vast majority of sites that allow links to be created in that way automatically adding link rel tags that designate the content as user generated ("ugc") and thus not really helpful for SEO. Here's an article .

Read this (noting the highlighted section): https://mailchimp.com/help/about-campaign-footers/#:~:text=Your%20Physical%20Address,office%20box%20as%20an%20alternative.

If you go into the email template in MailChimp and remove the information in the footer that includes your physical address, MailChimp will add your address at the bottom of any emails you send by putting in a separate image that can't be modified or removed. I've verified that this does indeed happen. They do this because it's required by law (see link above).

Thank you so so so so much. This is much more detailed feedback than I ever expected.

Some clarification:

1. The images are all compressed on upload. The 2MB limit is for the compressed image. I will change the help text to be less confusing for the user.
2. The heading and body fonts are not limited to Roboto. It works with ANY Google font from fonts.google.com. Just type the font name and it'll work. I wrote some of that in the help text under the field, but I guess it could be clearer.
3. In the settings, on the same page with the logo and nav menu there's an "After Post Content" box where you can enter some content that is added at the bottom of every post.

Again, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this feedback.

The most popular site is WordPress.com.

Blogger has its own pros and cons and is a little easier to set up because they don't have as many free themes to choose from.

Wordpress.com is proven the more popular site. Alexa.com and Wikipedia.org statistics.

You can check using http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo .. this webpage gives you a rank of a domain depending on its traffic.

Medium: 381 Wordpress: 42 Blogger: 125 ....

You can have a look also to this article: http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-choose-the-best-blogging-platform/

If you're thinking of moving, then go to wordpress.com, because when you need a better site you'll be ready for the 'pro version': wordpress.org. You'll find lots of freelancers available to help you expand—everyone and their dog knows WordPress.

If you think that you are going to end up using Wordpress, just go straight to Wordpress. Wordpress.com offers free hosting using a subdomain. If you learn the system and buy your own hosting, you will already know the Wordpress CMS, which is much different from BlogSpot/Blogger.

If you just want an easy platform to use, I would advise Medium as you will likely get more exposure.

If you want to keep it as a more casual project and focus mainly on writing, then you'd probably do best with WordPress.com (not .org) or Medium.com. Medium is probably better since you don't have to worry about picking a theme and you'll get more visitors right away just for publishing original content on their platform. You also won't have to pay anything (no domain or hosting)

Creating a site of your own with WordPress (.org not .com) is more like starting a business. There will be a lot more work to do outside of writing. I would only go down that path if you are genuinely interested in learning how to make websites and potentially build online businesses in the future.

>Firstly, could I possibly adopt all 3 content types?

Definitely. You'll probably have more success with the first two early on. Guineau-pig / Case studies might be the best way to get noticed with a small following.

>What’s an SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the never-ending struggle to improve your content's visibility in Google and other search engines. Switching site-builder platforms can cause a temporary (sometimes permanent) drop in rankings. It's better to choose the right platform up front.

>So, first things first, buy the name of my website on Namecheap (recommended), then jump over to WordPress and create my blog there? Correct?

You want to install self-hosted WordPress on your web hosting server, not register an account at Wordpress.com. They're completely different platforms. (dot)COM is the crippled version. Self-hosted WordPress(dot)ORG is infinitely extendable with thousands of 3rd-party plugins or even custom code.

I would suggest you start by reviewing the difference between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org. One offers plans (which it sounds like you already saw), and the other is a self-hosted website.

Self hosted might sound intimidating, but it really isn't that bad and will be significantly cheaper in the longer run. If you are serious about the store you will want to host everything yours.

Wordpress.com is free. Blogger still exists and is free. Medium is free. Substack is free. There's more, but you get the idea.

Use any of them. or some of them, or all of them and move to your own domain when you get some attention from readers.

Good luck

I purchased my domain on wordpress.com without doing much research. I found out that there's a limit on plugins. You can get access to them on the higher tiers. I am unable to transfer that domain in 60 days or whatnot.

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I am thinking of starting a blog and maybe another down the line. Which platform is easy to use, allows automatic back up, plugins and works well with wordpress? I don't necessary need the top of the line, since I'm pretty new.

What are your goals for the site? Then I could help you decide whether to host or not or go with other platforms as other users have suggested.

If you want to quickly start a blog just to write and customizing isn't super important and you don't want to maintain it, go for wordpress.com or blogger.