There are many types of Blog software, but in general, they can fall into 2 categories: Remotely Hosted Blogging Software and Self Hosted Blogging Software.

Remotely Hosted Blogging Software

Blogger.com, MySpace.com stand for this type of blog software. They provide you with a blog platform including blog software, and the hosting. In order to start blogging, you will need to open an acount with them, and everything will be ready in miniutes. And usually, you can get all those as free. 

But there are some cons. of  this type of blogging system, such as:

• They are less configurable - Most of them are very limited in terms of features and it’s very hard to design a professional bog template with the functional they provide. You will see that almost all the blogs hosted by them looks close.
• Generic URL - The URL to your blog is either a sub-domain of the site or an inner link of them. You will not have your very own Blog URL. When it comes to a time that you plan to host the blog by yourselves as the growth of it, then there are 2 big issues you have to face: 
  • It’s hard to migrate the content of the existing blog to the new blog platform since the technology used is not open
  • All your SEO marketing (or blog promotion) effort will be wasted. Search engine only recognizes the URL, and all your marketing effort are on your old URL, which cannot to go with your new blog. In the other word, you have to rebuild your blog brand online. This will be the biggest lost when you shift from remotely hosted blogging to self hosted blogging. Rebuilding a successful blog really takes time.
• Less control - This means a lot. You cannot fix the bug of the system if there any. There is no guarantee on the reliability of the system since it’s free (you are somewhat at the mercy of their platform in terms of whether their blog is working or not). If they plan to close their blogging service, then your blog will be gone.

Self Hosted Blogging Software

For self hosted blogging software, you will need to download the blogging software, and install it in your own hosting environment. There are some Blogging software you can choose, such as WordPress, B2evolution, and MovableType, etc. And the most popular Blog software right now is WordPress, which is used by most of the famous (and serious) bloggers.

Self hosted blogging means that you need to purchase a web host to place your blog, you need to upgrade the blog software when there is a new release, you need to backup and maintain the blog by yourself, but it does bring you a lot of benefits, such as:

• You very owned URL - Having your own domain name is great for many reasons. It’s more easily brandable, and it’s also more professinal and easier to remember.
• Blog Software is Opensource and free - The beautiful thing about WordPress is that it’s developer and maintained by a very active open source community. You can get a more and more powerful application regularly, you can download a huge list of free and beautiful free template to use, and a lot of developers has developed some very useful plugins to power your blog. And it’s all because of open source.
• Full Control of Design - You can redesign the whole UI and enhance the function of your blog if you want. Everything is open to you.

What’s the Best Blog Software for you

You will need to balance branding, cost, fexibility, technology requirement, and control when selecting a blog software . And below question will help you figure it out.

• What’s your main purpose of your blog - If you plan to do the blog long term, if your blog is more than a hobby, if you plan to profit from your blog, or if you want to build up your own brand online, then a self hosted blogging solutiion will be the right choice for you
• What’s your budget - Budget is always an issue. To set up your very own blog, you will need to purchase a hosting solution. Here is a list of very top Blog Hosting, and each of them will take your less than $7/month. This is affordable but it means some.
• How technical you are? - For self hosted blogging softwware, you will need to install WordPress by yourself, and then deploy the new template, add new plugins to your blog or redefine the UI if necessary. Although most of the blog hosting solution will provide you with a tool to setup a WordPress blog in some simple clicks, you still need to be skilled to make your blog look professional. All those can be done with some basic knowledge of computer and HTML, and can be outsourced if you want, but it does take some time to learn.

Blog has been so hot nowaday. Many people have given a definition for it. And below is what from wikipedia.org.

“A blog is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.”

Most of the blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; other function as more personal online diaries. And the ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of blog, which has made blog a great platform for bloggers to build community and exchange the idea with their readers.

The boom of blogs happened in 1999 when several companies & developers made easy blogging software and tools. Since 1999, the number of blogs on the Internet has exploded from a few thousand to over 100 million.

Blog Types

There are many ways to differentiate blogs, but in general, they can fall into two categories.

Personal Blog: The personal blog, an ongoing diary or commentary by an individual, is the traditional, most common blog. Personal bloggers usually take pride in their blog posts, even if their blog is never read by anyone but them. Blogs often become more than a way to just communicate; they become a way to reflect on life or works of art. Blogging can have a sentimental quality. Few personal blogs rise to fame and the mainstream, but some personal blogs quickly garner an extensive following.

Business Blog: A blog can be private, as in most cases, or it can be for business purposes. Blogs, either used internally to enhance the communication and culture in a corporation or externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes are called Business Blogs.

Blog Software

You can write Blog for free. Some big companies, such as Blogger or MySpace, have provided their users a free platform to write blogs. But considering proprietary and the reliable issue from those free blogs system, most of the blogger would like to host Blog by themselves when they take their blogs serious.

In order to get your very owned blog, you will need to purchase a web host, download Blog Software and get it installed. Currently, the most popular Blog software is WordPress, an free and open source application. The communitiy of WordPress is very active, you will be able to find a huge list of free WordPress template, integrated WordPress Blog Tools to power your blogs. Till now, more than 5 million bloggers have chosen WordPress as their Blog platform.

Build Community

Your Buisness Blog give you a chance to share your expertise and knowledge with a larger audience. Once you have built up your online brand, those in your community are highly possible to follow your instruction and become your customers.

Build Relationships

Blog will allow you to publish the news of your company timely, and its also provide the ability for your customers to leave comments on your posts, you can get a sense of how they react to what you say and your products. All those will greatly enhance the relationship between you and your customers.

Blog not only can bring you potential customer, it will also bring you potential employees. People would like to read about the company they are going to do business with or work for in the future. A successful blog will be able to turn your readers into your employee, who can help your company tremendously, since before they join, they have got a good understood on your brand and the cultures.

Free Search Engine Traffic

Blog can help driving high quality free traffic to your web site. Search engines, like Google, love web sites that are regularly updated with fresh, well written, keyword-rich content. And Blog is exactly what they are looking for. Usually, the new post from blogs can be ranked higher than static web page in search result.

Low Cost and Easy to Use

Blogging is a low-cost alternative to have a web presence. Blog software is free, and it’s easy to use. Simply write your thoughts, link to resources, and publish to your blog, all at the push of a few buttons. Blog software - such s WordPress - will offer you easy blogging tools to get started.

In order to write blog, you have no need to have deep knowledge of HTML or the money to hire a designer/developer. Blog software will allow you to focus on the content of your blog, and save your time and money at the same time.

The only startup cost is to find a place to host your blog. Personally, I would like recommend ANHosting, a great web hosting solution for Blog, and small business.

Besides ANHosting, you will also be able to find some other award best blog hosting from webhostingclue.com, all of them will cost you less than a cost of lunch, but give you top reliable solution.

It’s Fast

Another big benefit of Blog is that your audience can subscribe to your blog via RSS and get the notification via email or a centralized Blog reading tools once you publish a new post.

Web hosting industry is very mature and is very competitive. But considering Drupal is still young, there are still a lot of space for Drupal hosting to grow.

When looking for a Drupal hosting, below are 10 things you should know about it:

1. Drupal is developed by php, although you can choose an Windows hosting and PostgreSQL, the best platform to run Drupal are still Linux and MySQL.
2. Just as I have mentioned in above, Drupal hosting is still a new market. Not all big hosting companies can provide you with a solution to give your Drupal site enough support
3. Even a company provide you with free Drupal installation service, free theme, etc, it doesn’t mean they can provide you with a great Drupal hosting solution. Those type of free service comes from Fantastico, every hosting company get this tools installed with be able to give you this service, and Fantastico has been very popular in web hosting companies already.
4. Clean URLs support is an important need from Drupa hosting since it will be able to make your URL more friendly to search engine
5. In order to get multi-sites features of Drupal work, in most case, you will need to have access to Unix Shell to create Symlink. But for security reason, this might not be allowed from the web hosting companies. In this case, you can create a php script to do it. Don’t worry.
6. A optimized-drupal hosting solution will need to get the database run very fast. A lot of hosting compaines fails in it, and make their solution a suck to Drupal.
7. Some companies might set the limitation for you to use the CPU resource or Memory resource. Please check with your hosting providers to know the data. You will need to check your log regularly to see is your web site down frenquently for that reason. If yes, you should start to think about upgrade your hosting plan.
8. Choose a hosting company which allows you maintain cron job easily, such as a tool in control panel, etc
9. Overselling is very common in shared web hosting market, you will get unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth from your vendors. Don’t trust this number, your site will be down if you use too much resource. Remember, you pay for what you get.
10. Last and the most important one, backup your web site regularly.

Do you have more to add to the list?

According to that article and some thoughts from me, below are 5things you should know about SEO:

1. SEO is just like Doctor, both of them will tell you how “Healthy” your web sites are from the areas of the web site, web design, Internal Link navigation and external link bulding. All those will be reflected in your SEO result.
2. SEO is a game defined by Google, the game rule is defined at “Google Webmaster Guide”, they might change the rule as they want, and your SEO results are managed by them. You can make the result different, but cannot decide your postion
3. You cannot feel about the benefit of SEO immediately, it takes something for Google to know about it. So, please be patient in SEO. But you will need to change your SEO strategies if you don’t see any change after 1-2 months, just like you have to look for another doctor if your current one cannot bring you good result. Good or not, you have to try it first and then wait for about 1 month
4. SEO is a team work, there are a lot of factors which might influence your SEO result, from web design, web content, link building, web site maintenance, etc. It’s hard to be done by only one person. Want to get the best result in SEO, think about how to leverage the strength of the others.
5. Be a smart player in SEO. SEO is just like a War, you need to know what you need to fight for, should you spend time on “rural area” (less competitive key word, but easy to win), etc? A good key word strategy will help you win in SEO

Do you have more want to add?

The reason it’s simple is that you will only need one tools - Google’s Keyword Tools.

This tools will allow you to find out what people are looking for and their search volumn every month. But how can you leverage those number? Let me give an example.

Now, Let’s assume that I want to write some article about “Domain”, so first, I input “Domain” in Google Keyword Tools to get to know what people are usually looking for on “Domain”. Below is part of the result.

Now, what we need to do is to go through about key words

1. Although there are a lot of people look for “Doman”, it’s so general that you can not get it covered within 1 article
2. What about “domain registration”. this could be a good one. There are many people search for information about it, and you can write an article about how to register a domain and where to find a reliable and affordable domain register. Yeah! Now, you find one topic for domain now!.
3. You can continue the above process to find more topic about domain. And I believe what you write will attract many readers since you are actually writting for them.

This is the most common way I use to find the topics to write for my niche, hopefully, you can do better than I have done.

HostMonster is the biggest winners in Shared web hosting category. It’s #1 overall best web hosting. Besides this, it’s also selected as one of the best web hosting solution for Drupal Hosting.

Below are the detail listed of top web hosting awards, you can get to know more about it by visiting them.
Best Linux Web Hosting
Best Windows Web Hosting
Best VPS Web Hosting
Best Linux Web Hosting
Best Small Business Web Hosting
Best Family Web Hosting
Best Drupal Hosting
Best Blog Hosting

But today, I’m interested to hear who you use and recommend to host your blog? And what are the cons. and pros. of them?

And I saw the same kinds of post can be found in Joomla.

This Open Source CMS Award is sponsored by packtpub.com, and has been ran for many years. In last year, Drupal wins the Overall Winner award, and Joomla is the Best PHP award. The result looks interesting since Drupal and Joomla are both build on php, how can Drupal is the best of all, but not the best in php? Looks like to me it’s the result of balanced.

But any way, this is a big event for all those contributing a lot to open source world, especially in Content Management area. The winner will deserve those awards.

Which is your preferred CMS, Drupal, Joomla or WordPress? Don’t forget to vote for it now.