One of my most important tools for networking and meeting other real estate investors is this blog. It makes it easy for other investors to find me instead of me always having to hunt them down at REIAs or through other means. That’s huge because I don’t have a lot of free time after I get done marketing to home owners and dealing with the responses.
Blogging isn’t for everyone, but you should definitely give it a try so you can find out if you have what it takes. I never thought I’d be interested in writing my daily happenings for everyone to read. I still find it difficult at times even though it’s much easier now. I always like to tell people that “after a while, you find your voice (or words)”. Took me over a year to settle in on a style of writing that was both interesting to me and to other people.
The best real estate investing blogs are the ones that share investing experiences and also explains the finer details of the business. I’ve read a lot of great courses but what they never cover the little details that cause me to have all kinds of agida! The greatest teaching tools are actually reading about mistakes people have made and how they solved the problem.
I only recommend one of these free blog hosting accounts so you can get your feet wet and experience what blogging is like before plunking down a some money for your own hosted site. The good part is, if you decide to pursue blogging further, you will be able to transfer all your posts from one of these free blog hosting sites to a self hosted site with no problems.
Blogger.com (aka Blogspot)
My blogging life started out with a blogger.com blog. You can see it here, Scott’s First Blog Ever. I had no idea what I was doing, but blogger.com was simple to setup and I was posting my first post in about 15 minutes. My experience supports all of the reviews I’ve read about this platform and I would definitely recommend starting out here.
Let’s have some fun and see how long it takes me to setup a brand new blog and put out my first post…I haven’t used blogger.com since 2008 when I started this blog and I’m sure some things have changed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpJi8tlJPRs
If you didn’t know, Blogger is owned by Google so these sites will be indexed (put into the search results) fairly quickly and also easily integrate things like YouTube and other Google Services. Here is a great link with video tutorials
http://www.youtube.com/BloggerHelp
WordPress.com
The .Com site is their hosting platform for free blogs while their .Org site is where you would go to download their software and install it on another host like Hostgator or BlueHost. This post is about Free blogs so I’m going to concentrate on WordPress.com here.
Most people use a “wordpress blog” because it’s very SEO friendly. What that means is that the framework that wordpress is organized in such a way that allows Google and other search engines to easily navigate your site and find relevant information to search terms.
Along with SEO, wordpress is very well organized and once you get used to the admin control panel, it is very powerful! I use wordpress for all my sites, even the ones that aren’t blogs. There are unlimited themes and a host of plugins that allow you to add almost anything you want to your blog.
Here is the video of me setting up a wordpress.com blog. Is it faster or slower then blogger?
Comparisons
Here are some other articles that compare wordpress and blogger. They do a very nice job of telling the differences to help you decide which one to start with.
- http://eyeinform.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/wordpress-vs-blogger-%E2%80%93-our-experience/
- http://pulsed.blogspot.com/2007/07/blogger-wordpress-chart.html
- http://profitonknowledge.com/wordpress-tidbits/network-marketing-blogs-wordpress-vs-blogger/
Some other free blogging sites
- Blog.com
- Weebly.com
- Xenga.com
- LiveJournal.com
- Tumblr.com
Conclusion
In the end it doesn’t really matter which blog host you select as they all offer similar features. It really just comes down to personal preference at this point. The goal is to just figure out if you like blogging.
If you ever need help setting up a blog, feel free to contact me.
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Comments 4
I prefer WordPress myself. That’s what I use for my blog. Very easy to use and is very stable.
I agree completely. Before I used wordpress I tried Joomla which was much harder to pick up and a lot less stable. That was 4 years ago, so it might be better now but I’m a wordpress convert and will not go back.
Danny- Could not agree more on WordPress. It’s quickly becoming the industry standard for blogging websites. This post makes it very easy to understand how to start this process. I highly recommend WordPress, I use it for my blog as well and have no complaints.
Most of the financial advice you get around the web is based on opportunity. People are always looking for the newest way to build wealth. I enjoyed reading the blog.