Note from the Editor

I’m still going on my starting a home business series. There’s some good information in it on blogging, article marketing and social media marketing I hope you will find useful.

I’ll probably wrap it up as a series in the next few days. I’m about to launch my first ebook – and it’s NOT in the Internet Marketing arena – and I want to chronicle that a little. I’m really hoping to do well in that area, and have several more planned, on a variety of topics.

How to Choose a Blogging Platform

Blogging is one of the easiest ways to set up a website. Pick a topic, blogging platform, host and theme/template for your blog, and start writing. It’s low cost and can be a lot of fun.

Picking a Blog Topic

Just about anything will do, depending on your goals. Blogs have become successful businesses on all kinds of topics.

However, your blog needs to be on something that you can write consistently about while maintaining your readers’ interest. If you can only come up with a few post ideas you might not have the right topic for a blog.

While choosing your topic really has little to do with your blogging platform, it is so relevant to starting a blog that it is worth mentioning. It can also matter when it comes to deciding how serious you are about your blog, which can impact the platform you choose.

Choosing Your Blogging Platform

Blogger and WordPress are the most popular options out there, but there are several others worth considering, such as Typepad.

Blogger is not especially flexible, but it’s very easy for beginners to use. Some people like to just learn to blog with Blogger, then move on to more powerful options once they understand what they’re doing. There’s good and bad to this.

The good is that if you really mess up early on, it’s easy to abandon the blog and start fresh. You can do this with other options too, but when blogging platforms have more options you’re increasing your overall learning curve. Blogger also has an adequate number of templates available to you.

The bad is that if you want to get serious and move to self hosted there’s no easy way to forward your traffic. Blogger also lacks a lot of functionality. You won’t miss it while you don’t have it, but if you someday switch, you will know the difference.

Platforms such as WordPress, on the other hand, offer much more functionality and aren’t really that much harder to learn in my opinion. You have a lot more flexibility when it comes to themes (what your blog looks like) and how it functions.

Choosing Your Host

Both Blogger and WordPress have hosted options for blogs on their sites. Free hosting has the obvious advantage of free, but for blogs that you want to build a business with they are rarely the right option.

WordPress in particular is picky about what you do with your blog when you’re on their hosting. You’re very limited in what you can do to earn money with a WordPress-hosted blog. It’s their hosting and they do delete blogs.

Blogger is less picky about advertising and earning money on their blogs, but they also have the right to delete your blog and it does happen. Most often is when a blog is reported as spam. If you miss that hint that someone has reported your blog, it can vanish. A good clue is if you suddenly have to fill in the CAPTCHA form when one was not present before.

In both cases, you also don’t have your own domain name. This can make you appear to be less serious about your blog and make it harder to earn money from it.

Choosing the right host will make a difference. Hosting is very cheap these days, and you can get great hosting packages for under $10 a month. Domain names can be had for under $10 per year. It’s an exceptionally affordable form of home business.

You want a host that has a good reputation. This can be difficult to figure out, since most recommendations will come from affiliates, and it’s hard to come across genuine reviews. But most sites do have forums or blogs where they communicate with current and potential customers, and you can see how problems are handled there.

Most hosts offer one click install of the WordPress software. WordPress has no worries about how you use their software on other sites, only on their own.

Picking a Theme/Template

Depending on how you’re hosted, you may have a lot of choices for blog themes or just a few. It also depends on how hard you research the matter and how much customization you are comfortable with doing.

Blogger has 30+ templates available on their site, and you can change them around to meet your own preferences. WordPress offers a range of themes when you host through their site, but if you’re hosting your own WordPress blog, the number of themes available goes out the roof. You can even have someone design a theme for you.

Your theme should go well with your topic. The more relevant you can make it, the more appealing your blog will be visually to visitors.

Once you have your blog set up, it’s up to you to fill it with content that will interest your visitors. Blogging can be fun, stressful, time consuming and sometimes even profitable. There’s a lot to learn to make the most of it, but the best way to learn is to simply get started.

Note from the Editor

I’ve continued to make good progress on my starting a home business series. It’s a lot of work to write out, but a lot of fun too. I even have plans to chronicle my next big step in business – releasing my first ebook for sale! Not on an Internet Marketing topic, either. I’m looking forward to it.

How Important is a Good Niche?

Niche marketing is a big topic in home business. A good niche helps to define your target market and focuses your efforts overall.

Yet many people don’t worry that much about having a niche. They just want to get sales moving, to anyone who will stop by their website.

Only trouble is, it rarely works. Much of the time this hurried approach is the fast way to failure, rather than to profits. It’s too hard to sell to a vague audience in most areas.

Sometimes the product defines the niche well enough, but other times your smartest move is to narrow things down further yet. If you sell beauty products, for example, you may choose to focus your efforts on getting the most from the products you sell, despite a busy lifestyle. Having this kind of a target helps to give inspiration as you create content for your website.

And that’s one of the keys. Being focused means you have something definite to work on. You aren’t writing random item descriptions or articles, hoping to appeal to someone. You have a definite client in mind. It helps.

Failing to consider an appropriate niche is a mistake I’ve made plenty of times myself. I’m much better now at spotting that failure, so that I lose less time on unfocused efforts. I can see that my more niche-focused sites excel more quickly than the more general ones. I can make a general one succeed on its particular topic, but it’s a lot more effort.

I’ll echo what many people have said about finding niches. Wordtracker is a great resource. You can find out what kinds of things people are searching for in a given area, and gain some ideas for what you want to do. They have a free trial, but the paid version can be quite worthwhile, especially if you want to get serious about pay per click marketing.

But there are a lot more resources. Look at popular products on Amazon, eBay and other websites. Use a generic term for what you’re planning on selling, then see what kinds of sites there are. Some will be focused on a niche, and while I won’t say go for the exact niche, you can gain some inspiration as to the kinds of consumers you can target.

Combining some research into a niche with your own interests can product delightful results. While not an absolute guarantee of success, it’s a better place to start than many others.

Note from the Editor

Today’s article caught my attention because I keep thinking about doing podcasting, but I have a certain lack of confidence in my speaking voice. It relates to being shy in large part, and not quite being over the sheepishness of talking to a microphone. Just can’t do it with a straight face or steady voice yet. One of these days…

But I know that podcasting is different in many ways than the public speaking I so dread. No immediate audience, for example. I can cope with that… eventually.

If I get serious about it someday, I have my eye on this microphone. It looks like a really nice setup.

Make Your Voice Buttery!

Your speaking voice is one of the biggest assets you have when developing an online business. It’s true. There are a number of different applications where you can use your voice to enhance your online presence and your business model. In particular, you can use your voice to record podcasts, add audio messages to your website and create audio information products.

Modern technology has made the recording of your voice very easy indeed. You can download a free version of the Audacity software and purchase a microphone and quickly record digital audio files with whatever spoken message you like. This article will discuss a few techniques you should use to make those spoken messages smoother and buttery, just like those radio announcers.

The first thing you need to do is purchase a pop filter. Pop filters eliminate the plosives in your speech like P’s, B’s and D’s. All three of these tend to pop into the microphone, thereby popping into the ears of listeners as well. Pops can be extremely distracting when listening to an audio recording and can even discourage your audience from listening to any more of it. A simple $10 pop filter looks like a big foam rubber cover for your microphone and it can eliminate the distracting plosives quickly and easily.

Next, it’s time to start recording. And after your recording is complete, there are three electronic effects you can use to make your voice sound all milky like the radio announcers. The most effective one is called the compressor. It compresses the dynamic range of your audio file so that the loud parts are softer while keeping the volume of the softer parts the same. The net result is that you voice sounds smoother to the audience.

I usually lower the pitch slightly as well. On Audacity, you have four ways to specify the change you want: musical note, semitone, frequency or percentage. I only lower it by half a semitone which works out to a 2.87% drop in my voice pitch so it’s a small change but I think my voice sounds better afterwards. You can play around with this to see what pitch suits your voice best.

The last effect I use is the bass boost. Predictably, it amplifies the bass frequencies of the audio file. Now, it does NOT lower the pitch of the file. It only amplifies the bass frequencies while leaving the treble frequencies unchanged. This effect rounds out the bottom and takes the tin out of the recording. Sometimes, my voice can sound tinny and shallow. The bass boost eliminates that and leaves my voice sounding like honey.

At the time of this writing, my audio files have been downloaded over 17,000 times in 27 countries. I don’t use these effects to completely alter my voice. If you listened to my recordings, it sounds just like me. But the effects I’ve described above make it incredibly smooth and pleasing to the ear, allowing the listener to absorb the content rather than being distracted by a poor voice quality.

I have two pieces of advice. First, find a way of incorporating voice recordings into your business. It adds a personal dimension to your online presence and enhances trust. Second, use the effects I’ve described above to improve the sound quality of your recordings. Your audience will respect you more as a result.

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