Web site maintenance, website management and web consulting services

The WordPress.com free blogging platform is a great tool for people wanting to start a personal blog, but for someone serious about making money online  the WordPress.com offering isn’t going to work.

The developers of WordPress  made a decision (and a good decision it was) that people running WordPress.com blogs would not be able to advertise on their sites, add pay-per-post content or do anything else that could monetize the blog in any way.

Kind of restrictive isn’t it? But here’s the thing. WordPress.org, the self-hosted WordPress platform that most professional bloggers, and a growing number of companies, use to run their websites lets you do anything you want, and I mean anything.

How your own WordPress site benefits you

The immediate benefits of having your own self-hosted WordPress website are:

• You control your account. Nobody can pull the plug on you.
• Your content is yours forever. While it’s highly unlikely WordPress.com disappears in a puff of smoke, if it did, your blog’s content would go with it.
• You can advertise whatever you want.
• You don’t have to operate as a subdomain of Wordpress. Simply register your own domain. It takes a few minutes and costs next to nothing.
• You can make changes to your blog’s structure if you’re feeling adventurous, or hire a coder to make changes for you.
• Fully hosted WordPress sites can be made more search engine friendly than their WordPress.com counterparts.

Setting up WordPress is not expensive

The crazy thing about the self-hosted WordPress package that I never understand is that it’s so cheap to setup and host. For example, I charge a measly £50 (about $85 depending on the exchange rate) to:

1. Register a .com or .co.uk domain (for 2 years)
2. Host your WordPress site for 12-months (including email and all the other technical stuff you need) on US or UK servers.
3. Import your WordPress.com content to the new site
4. Set up WordPress with the plugins/widgets you need and any one of the hundreds of free WordPress themes available
5. Set up a Google Analytics account on your blog to allow you to track visitors
6. Upgrade to the latest stable version of WordPress when releases become available
7. Provide technical support when you need it

Considering the freedom (and professionalism) this provides, even the smallest of microbusinesses could afford this.

So if you’re on WordPress.com and you’d like to change to something a lot more flexible, please get in touch. I’d love to help you out.

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When Robert Burns said ‘The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry’, he must have been thinking about me. I had planned to write 5 new posts on thinkdave.com last week. Instead, life intervened and I didn’t write a thing - but you probably already noticed that.

To make amends for my poor service, I’ll be writing lots of interesting articles in the next few days. For starters, I’ve planned a nice little list of 5 Internet marketing tools that actually work for Monday’s reading pleasure.

Because getting a website to and from the Web is so important, I’ll be writing 2 beginner articles (on Tuesday and Thursday) to help you understand the process. And I’ll be introducing you to a great free tool to help you upload and download your website.

Speaking of free, I’ve been kicking around yet another idea about Google and how it can help micro businesses grow online. This article, planned for Wednesday, will save you time and money, so don’t miss it.

And finally, I’ll be wrapping up the week with another 10 free inbound links to help you raise your search engine ranking.

All in all it sounds like a good week on thinkdave.com. Personally I’m looking forward to it. So let the games begin! I just had to get an Olympics reference in there somewhere.

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If I was asked to give you just one piece of advice to improve the way you market your business online, it would be this:

Install Google Analytics for your website, and learn how to use it.

I know it doesn’t sound like an earth-shattering revelation, but making this one small change to your site is going to provide you with more insight into the way people interact with you online than anything else you’ve tried in the past.

Get Google Analytics

Since it was released as a public service, I’ve been recommending Google Analytics as my website monitoring package of choice for a small business. Why? Well, for starters it’s free. And the amount of information you can get from just one report is simply mind-boggling.

Without even scratching the surface of what Google Analytics is capable of, you can use a typical report to determine:

• How many people visited your website last month.
• How many of them have been there before.
• What pages were the most popular, and how long people spent on each page.
• Where visitors came from.
• What terms people searched for on their favourite search engine to get to your site.

What could Google Analytics do for your business?

Armed with a fresh Analytics report, you can use the above information to make some startling revelations. For example:

1. Finding out that you are getting 1000 visitors a month to your site, but only generating one sales enquiry means that you aren’t converting prospects as well as you could be.
2. Finding out that 80% of your audience has been to your site before indicates that people are hungry for more information from you. Give it to them.
3. Discovering what people search for to find your website will give you an insight into what people actually want from a company like yours. Perhaps you can change your product offering to suit people’s requirements, or simply make some modifications to the way you present your products online.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

If you can find the discipline to spend an hour every month figuring out what people want from your company, it shouldn’t be too difficult to decide which changes need to be made to your website to improve the results you get.

Within a fairly short time, you’ll start noticing an increase in visitors and qualified sales leads. That’s not half bad for a piece of free software, is it?

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