Blog: Create a Website Tutorial

Many do not know there is a difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org Even though you can create a blog (also called weblog) using either one of these publishing platforms, there is a huge difference between them and this post will give you a better understanding of the differences.

Wordpress.com

Hosted by a third party and if you wanted your blog’s name to be thegreatestblog it would be thegreatestblog.wordpress.com.

If you use wordpress.com to host your blog, you will be very limited to the look of it. You are also not allowed to use any affiliate links or any advertising that you would get paid for (ie: Google Adsense, Widget Bucks, etc). If you do use affiliate links within your posts and you are reported, you could end up having your entire blog suspended.

Creating a blog using .com just for the sake of creating inbound links to your oun website (or another 3rd party site) is also against the Terms of Service (TOS).

To create your free blog using wordpress.com, you need to decide on the name and if it is available, create your account and you’ll be blogging within a few minutes.

You get many different layouts with the free blog. You can customize the look and feel by moving different sections around and even uploading your own header to the blog.

But you cannot upload any available plugins using wordpress.com. They do have a few already on your free blog to help with spam, but that is about all.

If you are looking to blog to make money online, then wordpress.com is not your answer.

Wordpress.org

This is used with a paid web hosting plan. There are many affordable web hosting plans that have a quick installation of wordpress so you don’t need to download from the wordpress.org site and upload to your hosting plan.

Many are turning to creating blogs instead of websites as they are very easy to install on your hosting account.

When you purchase web hosting and install a wordpress blog, you have complete control of it. With hundreds of plugins available, you can make it search engine optimized, add Google Adsense, create a sitemap for the search engines to spider your site better, and much more.

You also have hundreds of themes available which you can customize with your own colors and how the blog will look on your site.

If you are on a limited budget, but want to create a blog to make money online, you can get web hosting and register a domain name for about $50 a year through GoDaddy. Their basic hosting package has plenty of space to get you started.