As a new blogger, with little experience, how do you choose a weblog platform? My current blog runs on Quick Blogcast from Go Daddy and it’s beginning to feel limited. The number one reason I chose it, when I started blogging a little over a year ago, was that it looked easy to implement and was affordable. Frankly I’m very frugal, especially while I’m proving to myself whether or not something work for me. The good news was I was up and running in no time and my blog has brought me business.
Ironically, two of us new puppies are currently using Quick Blogcast. I’ve found some tricks and gotten some great lessons in CSS and rigging things to make them work the way I want from the tech support, who are patient and helpful, BUT they have to put me on hold and scratch their heads to make it happen almost every time.
I really want a more functional platform that allows me more creativity and control, but I’m intimidated by wordpress.org setups and every time there is an update, it seems that I see a few really frustrated real estate pros over on Twitter. Now the time has come for me to shut up or put up and this seems like the perfect opportunity to make a platform move, but I’m still not sure I have the technical skills to take on a more complex platform.
Now that I have a functional blog that makes me money, with a growing Page Rank, should I risk the change?
I know there are great bloggers out there who have made these hard choices and I really need to know what you think about choosing platforms, which one you recommend, and anything else you can suggest to help. If you were going to start a new blog today, what would you do? Thanks for taking the time to share the pros and cons and I’m really looking forward some help with this decision!
Tom Vanderwell says:
Michelle,
Very well said. I started mine 13 months ago on blogger because, well, it was free (and still is) and I could figure it out myself.
So far, it seems to be able to do most of what I want it to, but I’m anxious to hear what the experts have to say on this because I’ve wrestled with it as well.
Tom
June 26, 2008 — 8:01 pm
Cheryl Bower says:
I started on Blogger as well which was really easy to set up. I’m considering a move to Word Press (possibly a few more features based on a quick look).
Any thoughts out there on Word Press?
cheryl
June 26, 2008 — 8:21 pm
Michelle DeRepentigny says:
Tom, let me tell you, seeing the admin end of WP while putting this post up made my palms sweat! I couldn’t figure out whether to laugh or cry when all I got from Greg was the site, user name & password in an email. I was absolutely scared to death that I was going to do something wrong and send everything crashing to the ground – but BHB is still standing!
June 26, 2008 — 8:28 pm
Greg Swann says:
How deep of an RSS feed can you push? In other words, could you pump everything out in one feed? It looks like you have around 200-225 posts total. If you could punch them all out in one feed, you could suck them all back into WordPress, probably mostly without changes. You would lose the comments, but there aren’t a lot, and I don’t think WordPress will import using any other filter.
Your Toolbar Page Rank right now is 3. That’s not bad, but I would have expected you to be at PR4. You have strong content in a thoroughly dominable long-tail niche. That argues that Blogcast ain’t your friend.
It would be easy enough to set set up WordPress in subfolder while you build out your theme and get a feel for how it works. Then when you’re ready to swap over, you just set up the new database and do the big suck. It will take Google a few weeks to reorient itself to your new URLs, but you’ll be on a strong SEO platform, and we’ll be talking about how to optimize WordPress for SEO and other performance issues.
It doesn’t pay to obsess over this stuff, though. Real estate weblogging is Direct Marketing, not Search Engine Marketing. You want what you can get from Google, but the important job is forging relationships with the people who can bring you business — most of whom you already know of or know how to target.
Project Bloodhound going to be WordPress-centric, because we already are. But the important job of real estate weblogging is writing. This is where you will win friends and influence people. The rest is just a vehicle.
June 26, 2008 — 8:45 pm
Barry Cunningham says:
Michelle unless you plan on being self taught in PHP, CSS and the rest, your best bet would be to get a customized blog from RSS Pieces. You get the blog, the hosting, the tutelage, the support and the SEO all under one roof.
It’s a no-brainer for you new guys and should not even be a moment of doubt. give Marry a McKnight a call and if you need her contact info let me know.
Spend the money, do it right and move on to doing what it is you are supposed to be doing which is SELLING REAL ESTATE. Leave all the other stuff to someone else.
June 26, 2008 — 8:52 pm
Stephanie Edwards-Musa says:
Michelle,
Awesome question to start it off with, and honestly I’ve had the same question. I have decided to suck it up and learn WordPress, dumping GoDaddy for the same reason that you are considering. Over the last week the sidebar has gone completely wild, like it has a mind of its own, can’t customize it, just tired of it.
I was going to consider wp.com but the templates are just horrible for what I need. Mine is so niche specific that I want the pretty, slick and flashy look..yet organized and clean. I just don’t see that with other platforms.
I’m fascinated with Greg’s comment above, great information.
Greg, I’m extremely curious as to what you mean about the long tail niche and blogcast not being a friend. I get the long tail part, but not the rest. Are you referring to page rank?
Also, don’t know if you had thought about this, but in the future if I decide to change it up some more..customize the design a little different..etc. Wouldn’t that be easier on wp than blogger? Hmm…
SO Glad you asked this question.
June 26, 2008 — 9:00 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Greg, I’m extremely curious as to what you mean about the long tail niche and blogcast not being a friend. I get the long tail part, but not the rest. Are you referring to page rank?
I was surprised that AllAboutAthensGa.com wasn’t stronger in Toolbar Page Rank. Almost all of the older local RE blogs are PR4. I would expect that Michelle is dominating her long tail anyway, and this is a reason why making the change might not be too painful: When you’re all there is, you always score well.
> Also, don’t know if you had thought about this, but in the future if I decide to change it up some more..customize the design a little different..etc. Wouldn’t that be easier on wp than blogger?
Infinitely easier — or at least more adaptable, even if making the changes isn’t all that easy. WordPress is a growing universe. Whatever replaces it will grow out of it. Blogger.com is a bullet point on Google’s org chart.
June 26, 2008 — 9:09 pm
Michelle DeRepentigny says:
Greg, I had no meta tags on my blog until January (couldn’t find the spot for them) and was not posting very consistently at first either, possibly the reason. So I had a PR1 then and jumped to a 3 with the last update.
I have no idea how big of a feed I can push, but I will find out, I did just find an “export” feature on my admin side, so now I officially have homework. 🙂
Barry, I actually read Mary quite often and had the pleasure of meeting her at RE Tech South in Atlanta a couple of months ago. It’s kind of sick to admit but I really enjoy learning this stuff, although I am considering your recommendation.
Stephanie, glad I’m not the only one unhappy with Quick Blog – hopefully we’ll both learn/find a better way!
June 26, 2008 — 9:28 pm
Greg Swann says:
You might ask the support people what would be the best way to move from Blogcast to WP. They may have a set procedure. It’s possible Blogcast is exporting to a WP-ready or MovableType-ready format, in which case conversion would be duck soup.
Regarding Barry’s suggestion: It doesn’t matter, in our context, what you choose to do. We’re going to go through all this stuff, anyway. That’s why we set this all up, and my own particular (and particularly radical) view is that the more of your work you can do without entangling vendor alliances, the better.
June 26, 2008 — 9:46 pm
Stephanie Edwards-Musa says:
Funny, I was half tempted to do the export deal the other day to see what would happen/if there was a wp option or what kind of file it would export to.
I totally agree with that ‘radical’ view, like having control over it and don’t like having my hands tied.
Michelle, obviously I’m in the same boat as you but IMO you want more control and creativity..I have yet to find that in a site that someone else hosts, designs and maintains. Although, I’ve not worked with RSSpieces so I can’t speak for that.
June 26, 2008 — 10:02 pm
Brian Brady says:
I write on a WP platform, Typepad platform ,and RSS Pieces platform. The easiest is the Typepad. It ranks pretty well. The drawback is that I don’t know how to customize the face real well (nor do I want to learn).
RSS Pieces does very well for me (PR5). It is VERY attractive and the folks there do a very good job at submitting to various engines. I have great results with my RSS Pieces blog. The drawback is that I have to rely on the staff to make changes whereas I can “play” with my Typepad design.
WordPress seems to be the choice of the geekiest of us. It strikes me as the easiest to customize (which I don’t want to do).
CJ should check in; she writes on both platforms and actually understands geekspeak.
June 26, 2008 — 10:47 pm
Todd Carpenter says:
Well, you don’t have to pay a expert forever if you have an expert set up a WordPress.org site for you. You just pay them to design. Pay them to install it, and every once in a while, pay them to upgrade it. At the same time you can pay for hosting for like $10 a month.
The hosting fees are where most vendors extract their pound of flesh. Plus, the best thing about paying for your own hosting is that you can go in and make small changes like adding a widget, or say… The REMBEX search engine 😉 without paying the vendor.
I agree with Greg that the more you can do on your own, the better off you will be. I learned html from HTMLGoodies.com. I learned the very small amount of PHP and CSS by playing with WordPress on a test blog that nobody knows about. At this point, I can take a nice blog theme, change it to fit my needs, and have it up and running in a matter of hours.
Michelle, I faced a similar problem using Blogger for lenderama. The switch took a lot more work and involved my site being down for two days because of a mistake I made in installing WordPress. You’re going to have similar export problems so it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get a WordPress expert involved. But that doesn’t mean you have to keep paying them indefinitely.
That’s the great part about WordPress. It’s open source, and tons of people will bid to help you.
I blogged on Typepad while I was onboard with Inman News, and Blogging Systems while I blogged for Realty Blogging, and Blogger, and Movable Type, and Squarespace, just as experiments. WordPress is always the solution I recommend to others, and what I use myself.
June 26, 2008 — 11:40 pm
Cheryl Johnson says:
Consider me checked in. I’ll come up with some specific posts next week … but for now I’ve copied my WordPress info over to http://www.queenofkludge.com (A WordPress site) and TypePad, WordPress, and everything else info is, as always, at http://www.dablogmother.com (A TypePad site).
As a hosted platform, TypePad does take away some the the admin chores that you have with self-hosted WordPress.org; but it does give you a surprising amount of ability to customize. (Brian, I could show you how if you really, really wanted 🙂 )
And here’s a public confession – for the first time: When I republished a couple hundred tutorial-style posts from Active Rain to DaBlogMother, I did it by hand. Copying and pasting 8 or 10 per day over a couple weeks. Was it a bother? Yeah. But probably less of a bother in the long run than if an export thingie had gone bad. 🙂
June 27, 2008 — 3:40 am
Eric Blackwell says:
Great question!
Of the 3 choices presented, (and being an SEO enthusiast) I am CLEARLY a wordpress fan. There are several considerations to be made SEOwise before taking a blogger blog and moving it over, lock stock and barrel.
In my mind, the largest of these is not the content, but moving the individual urls of the pages to a new permalink structure. (geek speak for changing the url in the address bar for each of your posts and the search engines getting confused.) You don’t want to lose the traction you have already gained just for the sake of changing to a new platform. There are some specific things you can do to help with that.
I will try and write a post on the how to for that. Maybe Cheryl already has one on Da Blog Mother…you have one on that subject Cheryl?
June 27, 2008 — 4:48 am
Teri Lussier says:
I can only weigh in with my experience in using WP and while using WP is not easy, honestly, if I can use it, anyone can use it.
As far as the tech side, Greg hosts The Brick Ranch and does most, if not all, of the tech work involved, however: I would pay someone to help me out with WP because of the customization possibilities. In my mind that also includes ownership issues. Think about who owns the blog, the content. This is crucial for me.
I’ve got a long term plan in place for branding TBR, so it’s very important to me that I have ownership of the blog, and that it reflects all my marketing efforts- there needs to be consistency with logos, and taglines, etc. If you look at my AR blog, I’ve recently pimped it to match the look and feel of TBR. I want that same feel in everything that goes out of my hand.
These issues might not be your issues Michelle, and I can see that Steph probably isn’t quite as concerned about branding her blog due to it’s focus, but for me, the blog needs to become one of many parts of a marketing system that brands me personally as quickly and seamlessly as possible. I don’t believe I could get that anywhere else but WP.
June 27, 2008 — 5:09 am
Teri Lussier says:
BTW, Michelle, Awesome job! Thanks for being the first puppy to scramble out of the box. 😉
June 27, 2008 — 5:17 am
The Harriman Team says:
Wow, great question, one I know every blogger wrestled with at one time or another. Lots of good input from some “big dogs” in the RE.net, I’m gonna give my imput as the “Heinz 57 mutt” that nobody knows:
I am very new (3 months) to blogging and currently using the free Blogger platform because it is free and it’s VERY easy to use. The hardest thing I’ve ever done (adding Disqus comments) took just minutes to do, with nary a bead of sweat from my brow. The bad thing is that there’s that pesky “.blogspot” in the middle of the URL that probably hurts my PR some, and who knows what else. I like the ease of use, but would like to rank better. Of course, my SEO practices are probably on a par with the caveman in the GEICO commercials.
Many people swear by WordPress, but as Michelle points out, whenever there’s an update it seems like Twitter becomes one big collection of cuss words about the problems bloggers have with it. I know it’s more customizable, but the learning curve and the effect moving my current posts over would have on my current place in the SE’s is also a concern. I’ve heard that Blogger posts do not move very well to other platforms.
My other choice would be RSS Pieces. I love reading Mary’s blog and she and her staff do a bang up job building those sites. Her knowledge of SEO for real estate blogs is unmatched IMHO and I would love to have one of her blogs, but the price is a little high for my mongrel blood! I could have had one of the free ones she offered to bloggers who posted about Vlad Zablotskyy’s situation, but I didn’t pursue it because I didn’t need a reward for helping Vlad (helping him is reward enough), and because I was too busy (lazy) to tell Mary I qualified. You snooze, you lose.
So, my bottom line is: I would like an easy-to-use, customizable, free (or inexpensive), hosted blog platform that is easy to optimize for SEO and that will easily accept an import of my current posts from Blogger without needing to get an an entire IT team involved. Such a beast may not exist, but I’ll consider any suggestions with gratitude… and much tail wagging! (apologies for such a looooonnnggg post)
June 27, 2008 — 8:16 am
David Esrati says:
Hi Michelle and all-
First thing I’m going to share- forget any hosted service that may own your url- if it says wordpress or blogger or typepad in your url you are nothing but a digital sharecropper.
Second: If you need validation on using WordPress- look at how many of the SEO experts keep their own blogs/sites in WordPress.
Third: stop thinking there is a difference between a “site” and a “blog”- they are one in the same- unless you just ramble- then, it’s a blog. Content defines your site- not the content management system you use.
Fourth: WordPress hard? Hardly- Microsoft Word is hard, Excel is hard- WordPress just needs a little bit of getting used to. Granted- it still has its growing pains (the new media handler is a mess- and they took Press it out of 2.5 but it will be back in 2.6!). You need to learn how to use the MLS- learn how to use WordPress- it will build community and get you to the top of Google in your market if you know what you’re doing.
Fifth: don’t try to learn HTML or CSS or PHP or MySQL- you wouldn’t try to fix your motherboard- hire a pro who can help you out. WordPress can look like anything- trust me- most of you have ugly business cards already- and you don’t complain about that. Hire a good ad agency or design shop- with digital knowledge (and their site better be in WP- not Flash) to help you get the look you want and do the backend management.
I’ve taught more than a few Realtors about WordPress- some like Teri get it- others don’t. Be glad not everyone gets it.
We have a 1 day seminar that we give called http://www.websitetology.com if any of you can organize enough people to make it worth our while to travel from Ohio- we’ll come educate you on the ways of the wordpress masters.
Thanks.
June 27, 2008 — 8:57 am
Stephanie Edwards-Musa says:
Someone mentioned copy and paste existing permalinks so not to confuse Google. Is there a plugin for that on wordpress, or possible at all?
June 27, 2008 — 10:50 am
Todd Carpenter says:
>>>”So, my bottom line is: I would like an easy-to-use, customizable, free (or inexpensive), hosted blog platform that is easy to optimize for SEO and that will easily accept an import of my current posts from Blogger without needing to get an an entire IT team involved.”
It’s called WordPress.com. Go start one for free. Try exporting/importing your Blogger posts, and watch your eyes light up at how easy it is. You need to switch now! No excuse. I had Blogger. Trust me.
WordPress.com is free. Yes you’ll have a .worpress url, but you can map a unique one for $10 a year. It’s an upgrade called Domain mapping.
Don’t listen to all they hype on SEO. You don’t need to know anything about SEO to rank well on a WordPress blog. Sure, it helps, but if you just show up and write, good things will happen.
When I built The Secret Diary of Greg Swan last winter, I did it on WordPress.com because I didn’t want people to be able to track it back to me. I built the whole thing in one night, spending more time on the blogroll (another so-called no no), then everything else combined. That simple blog, that I put absolutely zero SEO effort into, ranked as a PR4 in THREE WEEKS. I’m not saying that would be easy to repeat, far from it. But it shows you that paying big bucks for a fancy smancy optimized blog platform is not the only way to skin a cat.
June 27, 2008 — 12:30 pm
Teri Lussier says:
Todd-
Correct me if I’m wrong, but FakeGregSwann’s PR4 in 3 weeks is not going to be repeatable by the average real estate blogger. You had an unusual blog that got a whole lotta buzz immediately, and was discussed on other blogs, with links, right away. It wasn’t the WP.com that did it, but your subject.
I’m not saying people couldn’t do well with a WP.com, simply that “results not typical, your results may vary” as the weight loss commercial’s fine print says. 🙂
June 27, 2008 — 12:47 pm
Stephanie Edwards-Musa says:
Using Cheryl’s tutorials I finally got the theme up and running and able to log in. I must say, I do not find it difficult at all to use. Much like GoDaddy’s Website tonight.
Now, If I wanted to redesign or change the theme, that would be a different story. Honestly, I’m diggin’ WP right now.
June 27, 2008 — 12:55 pm
Todd Carpenter says:
Teri, I said in my own comment that it would be far from easy to repeat. The point I was illustrating is the experience proves that you don’t have to spend a bunch of money on a platform to get good search engine results. A free WordPress blog does not have a glass ceiling. You can probably rank well there as quickly as on any other platform, including some very costly options.
Good blogs tend to rank high because good blogs get referenced by other good blogs. Not because some guru “optimized” them. The single best bit of SEO advice is to write a good blog. A very good friend of mine says that “Blog SEO is for people who are too lazy to write good content”. There’s a lot of truth to that.
June 27, 2008 — 1:02 pm
Lori Gilmore says:
OK I’m going to chime in here…I’ve been roaming about the bloggersphere looking for a simple cost effective place to start a blog as well. I tried the free WP but wanted more ability to customize. I tried to install WP to a Go-Daddy account and felt overwhelmed by the technology. I have no desire to be a tech expert and the time it was taking me was frustrating.
Then I stumbled upon a lovely site and platform called squarespace. Totally user friendly, customizable and reasonably priced.
I’m a newbie blogger so I don’t have a lot posted on the site yet and I don’t know how google will like it, but some of my posts are already coming up for some of my key words. No page rank yet, but other sites using squarespace are showing some nice PR.
Just thought I would throw another option out there and see what you all think.
June 27, 2008 — 1:50 pm
Michelle DeRepentigny says:
“forget any hosted service that may own your url- if it says wordpress or blogger or typepad in your url” David, I own my url now – I would never go backwards but it is good advice for brand new bloggers.
Todd, I almost wish I had Blogger, my biggest concern is exporting from QuickBlog. “Good blogs tend to rank high because good blogs get referenced…” I agree with you to some degree, but I also think it is a huge challenge for a very locally focused blog (like mine) to acquire that type of linkage, in a town where there are few other bloggers and not a lot of controversy.
Stephanie – you go girl! I’m planning on following right behind you, I am too much of a control freak to have to wait around on someone else to do something or change something for me, so it looks like this weekend in the really late eastern hours, I will attempt my first WP.org installation – I really hope some of my west coast twitter pals will be online if I start crying for help!
June 27, 2008 — 1:53 pm
Vance Shutes says:
Michelle,
I started on Blogger in August, 2007, because it is free, and I could easily figure out what to do. I’m no tech geek, so I’ve never “gussied up” my blogger site. I just write and post photos there. That was enough for me.
As the BHB Unchained event approached, it became clear to me that I was going to have to migrate to a more powerful platform. That led me to RSSPieces. We heard Mary present at Unchained. From that point on, I knew I had made the right choice to have RSSPieces host my new site.
For the past month or so, I’ve been doing my best to follow Mary’s guidelines for starting a successful blog. When I check my statistics at RSSPieces, it’s even more clear to me that Mary knows what she’s talking about. Results don’t lie.
Due to that, I highly recommend RSSPieces.
June 27, 2008 — 7:14 pm
Chris D says:
Go self hosted wordpress. It’s not that hard, and there are a lot of good plugins for upgrading.
It’s as easy to use as you want it to be, but scalable to be a pretty decent CMS.
June 27, 2008 — 8:02 pm
Tom Vanderwell says:
So would I be summarizing the advantages of making the switch from blogger correctly if I said that they are:
1. Having a private domain name that helps with searches (www.straighttalkaboutmortgages.com rather than .blogspot.com)
2. “owning” the content rather than having everything on bloggers site (like I do now?)
3. Having additional options in terms of how you customize the look and feel of your site?
Please correct me if I’m mistaken.
That leads up to a follow up question. Todd recommends http://www.wordpress.com but many of you use wordpress.org. It sounds like the one is a lot easier than the other. If I did wordpress.com with a unique domain name, what am I missing out that I’d have with wordpress.org?
I want to do it right but at the same time, I don’t want to spend more than I need to, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time with techy stuff when I should be spending it talking about and writing mortgages.
Thanks for all of the advice and the information. This is great!
Tom
June 27, 2008 — 8:52 pm
Todd Carpenter says:
Tom, the difference between .com and .org flavors of WordPress is that .com is hosted and upgraded for you. You pick a theme, maybe add a custom header and some wigits, and you’re done.
With .org, you have authority over every aspect of your site. You can change the CSS, add PHP, Install plugins… Change everything about how the site looks and operates. You just have to learn how. Not everyone want to learn how, at least, not at first.
June 27, 2008 — 9:01 pm
David Esrati says:
Tom-
Essentially- you have the right reasons.
Wordpress.com is the hosted solution- but NEVER do it without buying the domain name.
It’s a good place to get started.
You can easily move to a self hosted site using the exact same software from WordPress.org later.
It gives you the ability to do full customizations- and to monetize your site.
Yes- the self hosted site requires a support person who knows WP and code- however, it’s getting easier and easier to maintain the updates yourself.
Google doesn’t care what your site looks like- it’s blind as a bat. If you have good content- people will come. If you don’t – you’re wasting your time.
June 27, 2008 — 9:02 pm
Todd Carpenter says:
>>”Wordpress.com is the hosted solution- but NEVER do it without buying the domain name.”
It’s so darn cheap to map your own domain name, that it makes sense to do so. But I can’t agree with “NEVER” running a yourname.wordpress.com site without it. These sites rank just fine. They may even rank better than a new URL with zero authority. I talked about Fake Greg Swann above, but here’s a better example.
Miamism, a beautifully crafted RSS Pieces blog (IMO, the best looking blog in real estate). It has a PR4.
Miamism Pix, a free wordpress.com blog that Ines started several months later to share her photos on. It has a PR5.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the RSS Pieces blog attracts and converts more business for Ines. All I’m saying is that whoever originally put out the advice that having “wordpress.com” in your URL is a death nail for SEO, probably was trying to sell a blog platform of their own.
June 27, 2008 — 9:31 pm
David Esrati says:
Todd-
It has nothing to do with SEO- it has to do with ownership of your content- and the ease of moving from WordPress.com as a starter site, to your own hosting solution.
All the links people build to you will be to ______.wordpress.com instead of to ________.com
You don’t want to lose the links.
June 28, 2008 — 3:08 am