I for one am tired of hearing horror stories about peoples clueless, expensive and confusing experiences with website designers. So many Web Grower people set themselves up to be exploited and walked on!
If you have a business, club, hobby or just a few pictures you want to put up on the Internet, you really don’t have to spend any money. But for most people, money isn’t the issue (given that you can find some kid in college that will throw a single page together for a cheeseburger and 3 pages for a steak dinner.) The fear of “the code” (you know, all that technical junk that makes everything work) is what stops most people. “I’ll never learn all of this stuff, it’s over my head, it takes too much time” whatever!
So, lets find a way to easily, quickly and at no cost to build a web presence for whatever need you have. This next concept will blow you away… blogs. Blogs are an incredibly powerful, easy to setup and easy to use tool that you can, in less than 5 minuets, have a web presence. Blogs allow you to add as much content to your site that you want, add an unlimited number of pictures, videos, slide shows and a plethora of other digital junk to be distributed across the world. All free.
Let me get to the point. Go search for Google’s blogging platform called Blogger and sign up. By the time you have finished the sign up (yea, go ahead and burn 3 minutes of your life) you will have your web site up and live on the Internet. No joke, it is ridiculous how fast it is.
Keep some things in mind though. Just because you can’t figure something out on your blog doesn’t mean it cant be done. I have seen some pretty amazing Blogger blogs in my time, some that I would have never guessed were even blogs! I have seen people take a small idea, launch it using a blog and turn it into a full time business.
One of my favorite customer stories regrading blogs was from a small computer repair website. They started the blog really just to vent. They would add a page here and there, just as a hobby. One day they enabled AdSense (Google’s advertising program that can be enabled any time at no cost directly through Blogger) and found that they were bringing in about $10 a day just from venting about work! Yea it’s not much, but thats an extra $300 a month!
Another was a small Maui coffee growers association that simply wanted a place where they could list their contact information, links to their main websites and a little bit of information about growing coffee on Maui. (And there is some surprisingly interesting stuff about it too!) The site ended up bringing in new customers to every coffee company listed on the blog! Just because they made themselves findable they gained customers they never would have had.
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