Dec 12 2008
Choosing the Services for Your Blog
There are thousands of services that have been created for bloggers to use on their blog. If you placed all of them on your site, it would surely take hours for your page to load, no matter how fast your host is. Therefore, you have to pick and choose, scraping through the different options available.
Remember that when you start blogging, you have already chosen one of hundreds of different services - the blog platform/system. While you may only hear of a select few (the most popular and promoted), there are, in fact, hundreds of them, some of which only have a few dozen users.
When you place widgets in your sidebar, there are millions of different combinations. You can rearrange them, place them in the footer, header, etc., but when it comes down to the basics, you need to place them strategically and only those that will help you in the long-term. Just because someone tells you to place a widget on your site, it doesn’t mean that you have to. In some cases, you may be paid to do this (I advise you not to accept the offer, no matter how much) in order to further promote the product.
The more blogging you can do without the help of these widgets, the better off you will be in the long-run as well as your readers, who will save time loading and visiting your site.
Keep these tips in mind when you select from the following services (if you haven’t already):
- What blog platform/system you want to use.
- How to monetize your site, through which programs.
- “Traffic generating” widgets.
- Plugins that were designed to help your blog become more “powerful.”
- Forum software, if you want to take your blog in this direction.
- Other services and products related to blogging.
