If you’ve got a website (or even if you haven’t!) there are a lot of advantages to having a WordPress blog as your content management system (CMS). Many of the top Internet marketers are doing just that and their lead is now being followed by business start-ups and budding entrepreneurs.

Here are the top five reasons for using WordPress as your web platform:

1. It’s the lowest cost way to get a web presence. You only have to spend a few bucks on a domain and get a hosting account and you’re in business. The WordPress software is free, the blog themes (design templates) are free and the plugins are free. And you don’t have to pay a web designer to get it up and running for you.
2. It’s the quickest way to get a web presence. The design work has been done for you, the coding’s been done for you and all you’ve got to do is to get typing.
3. A WordPress blog doesn’t have to look like a blog. If you want to have what looks like a conventional website, that’s easy. You can make a WordPress blog have a static front page and have your other pages accessible from navbars down the sides or across the top or down the bottom (or all of the above!)
4. WordPress is flexible. If your needs change or you fall out of love with your blog’s design you can easily change it. Your precious content will be preserved. You can move your content around, delete pages without leaving broken links, or add or remove widgets at will.
5. The search engines love WordPress blogs. Put up a few pages of content and keep building out your blog and you’ll get indexed in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Search (and all the others) in no time.

In fact, it won’t take you months or cost you megabucks to get your business online. You can do it in a few days, all by yourself, with WordPress!

WordPress is the #1 blogging platform that virtually all the experts advise you to use. When you look at some of the most successful blogs on the Internet they invariably display ‘powered by WordPress’ at the bottom of the page.

But, if you’re not a techie, and you’ve ever tried to begin with WordPress, you’ll maybe find it difficult to get started. Here’s what I recommend:

1. Educate yourself first. If you’re new to WordPress, start at the beginning. Begin by starting a free wordpress.com blog as a training exercise. Download my free tutorial at
   http://wordpress2go.com/wordpress-tutorial/ to show you how.
2. Use your free blog as a prototype. Explore and experiment with themes, colors, layouts. Don’t worry if you make mistakes. It’s only a trial!
3. Create a few posts and pages and see how it’s shaping up. Do you want your blog to eventually work like this? If not, poke around the dashboard and find different ways of doing things. Change your theme, if necessary.
4. Compare your blog with others in the field. What have they got that you haven’t? Find out how to do the things they’re doing. Maybe you find things that you can’t do on a free blog (like plugins), in which case just make a list of the things you’d like to do.
5. Decide whether you want to stay with your free wordpress.com blog or whether you want to upgrade to the more functional wordpress.org platform. If you upgrade, you can have all the bells and whistles of a fully functioning WordPress blog, just like the experts whose blogs you’ve been admiring. But, if you’re happy with your wordpress.com blog, fine, you’ve got started in 5 steps!
6. When you’re reading to upgrade, get my ‘WordPress In 1 Day‘ video tutorial and I’ll show you how. In the 12 lessons of the tutorial I build an actual blog on a domain and you can follow along step by step as I do it. This isn’t free but it doesn’t cost megabucks. What I can promise you is that it will be a fine investment in your skills base and a lot cheaper than hiring a webmaster to do it for you!

Once you get started with WordPress you’ll discover that it’s not that scary. Why not get started on step 1 today?