This is a post in the series of posts regarding to “How to Create a Powerful Blog” topic. In the future, I’m going to provide you the posts and help you out to create a powerful blog completely for free. This serial will be concentrated to the beginners and blogging amateurs, which wants to know more about blogging.

Wordpress is the most popular CMS specially designed and developed for the bloggers. Allows you to customize your own blog the way you want it to. It’s the constantly updated product, available completely for free for anyone. In this post I’ll try to explain why you should use a Wordpress (self-hosted) as your own blogging system, how to install it and how to work on it.

What’s a Blog?

Before we start, you need to know exactly what makes a blog a blog? There’re so many definitions about that, and I’ll try to describe you on my way:

• It’s a website filled with the articles listed chronologically, in most cases with newest article or a post on the top. Designed to be an easy-to use for anyone.
• Allows you to easily add the new contents on your blog. Allowing the absolute beginners to easily add the new posts, articles, videos or multimedia within a seconds.
• Blog content is updated frequently and regularly, most successful blogs are updated and maintained even few times a day. Allowing the reader to know most recent post daily.
• Visitors and readers can leave a comments for every post on the blog. This is the very good way to build-up community around it and get opinions from your readers.
• Visitors tend to trust the blogs more than other “static” websites on the internet.

Wordpress Hosting

There’re many blogging CMS applications, but I recommend you to use Wordpress because it has a really great amount of features, for all types of the blogs.

There’re two main types of the blog hosts:

• Free hosted – Hosted on the free hosting servers. You can create a Wordpress powered blog completely for free. Anyway, I recommend you to use this hosting solution ONLY if you’re an absolute beginner in the blogging. This may help you to know more about blogging and learn the whole blogging concept. Free hosted blogs are not functional as self-hosted ones. They have a huge limitations in the customization and functions.
• Self hosted – This is the most functional hosting solution for your blog. Allowing you to use your own domain name and get a full-customization potential from your blog. But, this way you need to pay for the hosting and maintain your blog yourself. So, this is reserved only to the users which know more about blogging and actually knows the basics about blogging and Wordpress CMS.

Wordpress Installation and Customization

Wordpress allows you to fully explore and customize your blog. You can use download and install it completely for free and start using it right now. Installation process is very easy and informative, specially oriented to the beginners and amateurs. You can find more information about Wordpress installation on the below links.

• Official Installation Guide @ Wordpress Codex
• Wordpress Install Process @ BloggingPro
• Wordpress Installation Video Tutorials @ YouTube

With a free-hosted solution, you don’t need to install a Wordpress blog. It’s installed once you open a blog. But, you don’t have a functions that are included into the self-hosted solution like:

• Full Customization – Customize your blog through third-party plug-ins and themes. Allows you to highly improve your blog functionality and productivity for sure.
• SEO Functions – Free-hosted blogs can’t change and improve the SEO functionality of your blog. Just because you can’t install any third-party plug-in from their database.
• Advertising Potential – It’s really hard to advertise (and make money) from your self-hosted blog. So, if you expect to get a full earnings potential use the self-hosted Wordpress blog for sure.
• Domain Name – If you already have a domain name – you can’t use it by the default (for free) with your free-hosted powered Wodpress blog. Using self-hosted solution gives you the option to build-up your blog around own domain name.

You can find very useful post about customizing a Wordpress on this link (via MerchantOS).

Final Thoughts

I hope that I’ve convince you to use a Wordpress as your own blogging system for your blog. So, let’s summarize what I’ve think why should you use a Worpdress:

1. Use a free-hosted solution at beginning. Specially if you are a new to the blogging and Wordpress. It’s extremely important to know the basics if you are willing to open the fully-functional blog. It’s important to have a patience and some knowledge here.
2. Use a self-hosted solution when you learn and get more information about blogging. This can be done once you build-up a community around your free-hosted blog and get some quality readers. Once you know how things are going, you’re ready to transfer to your own domain name and self-hosted (paid) hosting solution.

On the next post, in the series of posts “How to Create a Powerful Blog” will be all about how to pickup and choose your own domain name, where to get it and how to apply it on your blog.

This is the first post in the series of posts regarding to “How to Create a Powerful Blog”. Second post under this topic is How to Get a Domain Name.

Related posts:

1. Choose the Right Blogging Platform
2. How to Create an Effective Blog in 30 Minutes
3. Why to Use Blogger or Blogspot ?
4. Best 5 Wordpress Plugins
5. How to Choose Web Hosting