Sarah,
I have been doing tele conferences with the Blog Squad. They have said how great blogs can be for business. I agree, I have been getting new customers from my blog. Yeah!!
Your blog is great & I love that it is not just 1 advertiment as a post.
I fully agree that people need to take control of their blogs. I paid $9.97 for my domain name & registered it in our name no one can sell it out from under me (do not let a company or person register for you - then they have control). My hosting is great it is only $2.99 a month or $30 year. BJ skype chatted with us through the entire set up of getting my blog transfered & domain registration.
I also see that by starting with your own domain you are building the rank of your domain. You have to start at 0 hits no matter when you set up your domain so might as well start now. Even Cait (13 y/o)has her blog on her own domain so she can start building rank.
Cait & I run a B2Evo it is made by some of the guys that made the wordpress script.
Some people have not figured out the B3Evo blogs yet because you can add as many blogs as you want at 1 spot. I also run a rotating front blog because the search engines seem to love it. I have been critisized about my blog because it is 5 blogs in one. That is OK, it is working to get new customers & that is well worth all the grumping I hear.
I am not sure about word press but The B2evo has excellent stats in the back.
A little about the B2evo blog.
This is not your regular blog. You can have as many blogs as
you want all connected.
Each blog can also have unlimited sub sections. If you find
you want a new sub section or blog added - Do it at any time!
Super easy posting! Automatically sends out pings when you
hit the Post button!
The tracking stats are amazing!! Check each blogs stats!
**The Hit Summary shows you how many hits from XML's,
Browsers, & Robots for each day.
**Browser Hits shows Referring searches, Referrers, Direct
accesses, Self referred, **Special referrers, Admin you can see them for each
day.
**Search Hits - This stats page will show you the search
engine that referred someone to one of your post it also includes the words
they searched. If someone searches Google for "Hot Conference" &
they came to read your post that included those search words it is listed with
the "search words".
**Referred browser hits will show you what site referred a
hit to your site. If I have a banner on a forum of social site, someone clicks
it & visits my blog I will know which site the banner was on. This way you
know which sites are producing traffic for you.
**Direct browser hits - These are browser hits from people
who came to this blog system by direct access (either by typing the URL
directly, or using a bookmark.
**Robot hits - This page only includes hits identified as
made by indexing robots a.k.a. web crawlers. Some may include Googles
Googlabot, Yahoo Slurp, MSN msnbot.....
**XML hits summary will show hits from XML readers. This
includes RSS & Atom readers.
**Referring Domains will show total hits from any a domain.
This way I know which domain's are producing the most hits to my blog.
Banned List - Banned domains blacklist
Any URL containing one of the following keywords will be
banned from posts, comments and logs.
If you have found other words you can add them easily! B2evo
also updates the list they have found with just 1 click. Beware - the list of
banned words is just that - words that you do not want allowed on your blog!
You can see these words listed & yes many are not family friendly!!
Complete notification & control over Trackbacks &
Comments
Well there is more I could say but, you would just have to
see it to believe it!!
OK, I am off!!
Hope this gives you a little info about this amazing blog!
Sorry Sarah,
I just get so excited to tell people how easy & great it is to blog.
Blogging - it's not just for crazy people anymore. LOL!
The B2Evo is a free script so this is for information only. So, you can see another type of blog.
Sheryl Loch ~ allmylovecrafts