This is probably because:

• They get discouraged because of lack of traffic
• They run out of things to blog about
• They hit technical problems
• They set the blog up to sell something but they’re not making any money
• They find something new and they shift their attention to that
• etc

Which is all a bit of a pity. It takes time and effort to set up a blog and, if you just abandon it, all that time and effort can be wasted.

But it needn’t be like that if you set about it the right way from the start.

Now, I’m not about to deliver you a big lecture on how to go about blogging. Instead,  I’ll set out a few helpful hints so that you can hopefully avoid the commonest pitfalls.

The first piece of advice is to look ahead. Visualize what you want your blog to be in a month’s time, six month’s time, a year’s time. What topics will you write about? What pages/posts will there be for your visitors to read? What widgets will you display?

As of today, why not write out a plan for your blog’s future? Make a commitment to post regularly and write down in your diary when you are going to post and what you are going to post about. Do this for a least the next three months ahead.

Also, set yourself some goals for your blog. Make some projections for traffic levels, income earned, number of backlinks etc.

Commit to your blog’s future and you’ll find it becomes easier to overcome those seemingly insuperable hurdles when they occur.

And I’ll make a commitment to you. I’ve made a plan for this blog to post a series of articles on how to deal with all the problems I’ve listed above.

Watch this space!

Sarah

Just why is WordPress so popular? Here’s some of the reasons why:

• It’s a great way to get a website up and running without having to learn HTML and all that techie stuff
• WordPress blogs are well-beloved by the search engines
• WordPress is very flexible: you can easily customize it to do what you want
• Maintaining a blog is easy – if you can type you can build a WordPress blog
• WordPress is very powerful: you can create functionality out of the box that would take an expensive webmaster weeks to achieve
• You can use WordPress to build a CMS: a WordPress blog doesn’t have to look like a blog, it can look like a conventional website if you want
• It’s fun!

Come and find out all about WordPress in my new tutorial. Download it from here >> WordPress Weblog Tutorial <<

Look forward to hearing from you!

If you have your own WordPress blog on your own domain you’ll need somewhere to host your files. And when you start looking round you’ll find that not all web hosts are created equal.

So what do you look for? Here’s my checklist:

• Must be reliable
• Must have cPanel with Fantastico and Simple Scripts
• Must provide superb technical support
• Must offer unlimited addon domains
• Must be reasonably priced

Why Fantastico and Simple Scripts? Because these two tools enable automatic creation of new WordPress blogs – no more manual uploading of all the WordPress files! And Simple Scripts not only lets you create a new WordPress blog with a few clicks of the mouse, you can now automatically upgrade WordPress when a new version is released. How cool is that?

I use Bluehost for my blogs. That’s where this blog is hosted and I now wouldn’t use any other service.

On a few occasions I’ve needed some technical support, particularly when I was new to blogging and wanted to do something beyond my ability(:-(), and I found their support staff helpful, smart and unfailingly patient.

It might be tempting to go to a small, cheap hosting service but you won’t get the reliability and quality of service that a larger company can provide. Trust me, I’ve learned that the hard way!

Click here to find out more about Bluehost WordPress hosting

However, I’ve just upgraded this blog to 2.5 and it seems to have gone very smoothly. All my posts and pages survived and I have successfully reactivated all my plugins. So far so good.

As you can see, I’ve made the start of this post red(!) which is one of the new features in the Visual tab. But another welcome addition is the ability to add media files.

You can now easily add video, audio and other media to your posts and pages.  And your videos don’t have to be played via Youtube (although you can if you want) – you can upload a video to WordPress and embed it into a post or page. I’ve played around with this and it works fine.

The very simplest, entry-level version of WordPress hosting is to register an account with WordPress.com and simply get a free blog. That’s all there is to it: the blog is hosted on WordPress’s own computers and you don’t have to pay anything for the privilege.

But this version won’t be suitable for businesses or for anyone who wants to make money from their blog. That’s because WordPress doesn’t like you to use their free service for financial gain. They can even close your blog down if you violate their terms of service.

So, if you’re in it for the money, you need to arrange your own, independent WordPress hosting and register your blog not with wordpress.com but with wordpress.org.

I will be explaining how to do this in my next tutorial which will be aimed at the more advanced users of WordPress.

In the meantime, if you’ve landed on this page because you’re looking for reliable WordPress hosting right now, check out Bluehost WordPress Hosting. This is where this blog is hosted and I can thoroughly recommend them.