Do I Want WordPress or WordPress?

Do I want WordPress.com or do I really want to use WordPress.org?  That is a simple yet important question in your blogging career.

WordPress is the most popular and powerful blogging platform and media generating software.  Bar None.  But you may be a bit confused when you realize there are two different WordPress sites.

First you have WordPress.org.  This is an already established, nothing to do but write and post blog.  You sign up, configure the options and start to write.  Hit the “publish” button and you are done.

It is also one of the most spider’ed websites on the Internet.  So what you publish is almost instantly fed to the popular search engines.

From a publishing standpoint this is awesome.  From sign up to publishing is a few minutes and a few mouse clicks. Nothing to know, nothing to learn nothing to maintain.

From a business standpoint, this can be a business killer.  It’s on another domain, not yours.  Yes, you can make it so that your domain name points to this website, but its not the same.

Visitors come to your site and can easily go to the next WordPress.org site at the click of a button.  They are not your captured audience.

Plus you cannot customize it to your tastes and its not able to be monetized.  You can’t make any real money from it. You can change patterns and colors, but that’s about it.

If you want a blog for business, you want to use WordPress.com

WordPress.com is where you go to get the software. This is where you get YOUR blog from.  Dot Com is where the real business bloggers go for software, updates, new ideas, plug-ins and support.

Most hosting plans now come with some form of a WordPress blog preloaded, so you use this site more for the extras.  The authentic additions, help forums and inspirational ideas  are all found here.

This is also called “self hosting” since the WordPress blog is hosted on YOUR site, not theirs.  It’s your blog to customize, monetize and do what you want with.

If properly set up and seo’d, your site and blog should be indexed or at least spider’ed in about an hour.

Now here is where you may call me a hypocrite, or something like that.  You want BOTH sites. Yes, you want to use your own blog but you also want to utilize the power of the already designed blog that gets a lot of traffic.

Get yourself an account at WordPress.org while using WordPress.com as your support site.  Rewrite your important posts and repost them at Dot Org with a link back to your real blog for more reading and more information.

The reason you want to rewrite before posting to Dot Org is so that the spiders and search engines see two different articles.  Make enough changes in one so that it will not be an exact replica. Especially in the opening paragraph, search engines really don’t like duplicate content.

Doing this gets you more exposure faster. So go ahead and use WordPress!

Mark Anthony
Internet Marketing Coach