Free Blog and Social Bookmarking Resources

It's not too late for Boomers - who are technophobes or tech challenged - to get started creating something of value online.

And blogging is a really good place to begin because it has a low entry level threshold and you can start with little or no money.

My fiancee is an excellent example of what I am talking about. Prior to last August, the closest she ever got to internet marketing - personally - was spam from her old AOL account. But she took a free online course from Ed Dale and Dan Raine called the Thirty Day Challenge to learn the fundamentals of Web 2.0 and blogging and how to get listed fast in the search engines. Today when I searched on her primary keyword term for her blog, Baby Boomer Life , I found her at #3 in Google.

Pretty cool…

Blogging takes work -  mostly learning how - and consistency. But It's fun…

She's worked diligently on creating good content. It helps that she is a talented writer with a great deal of life experience and ability. She really writes interesting stuff because she is an interesting person. But just the same, she created the whole thing herself and has done an excellent job teaching herself about social bookmarking and creating online relationships with other bloggers. Can you tell I'm proud of her?

She definitely has a healthy wealthy spirit and lots of passion about what she writes. She wants to create a reliable online passive income and I'm certain she is going to succeed admirably in the coming months. She loves to write and she sticks with it.

Anybody can create a blog.  Even Baby Boomers

Granted it may not come as naturally for Boomers as it does for your teen children - or even grandchildren. But the new blogging platforms and current technology is making it easier and easier to create an effective online presence - quickly.

There are a number of ways to get started blogging without costing you anything out of pocket.

You can get a free blog account and create a new blog at any of the following blog platform websites

• www.blogetery.com There have been a few hiccups with this blog host - like they were down for a few days recently with a hard drive failure and it was inconvenient for people with a blog there. But they had everything backed up and were up and running - full tilt - a few days later.

Initially the Blogetery platform was limited in its options but they have begun expanding their versatility responding to requests from the people who have accounts with them. They are adding more modules (called widgets in wordpress language) all the time which are little plug-ins or add-ons that give the user more flexibility and increased functionality.

As the technology improves so do integrating various functions, time saving methods and ease of use. Blogetery is growing on me and it's not just because they are nice to my sweetie. They're getting better at what they do and they are pretty user friendly. They are also becoming more internet marketing friendly.

• wordpress.com Wordpress is a huge blog website hosting a lot of accounts - kind of the mother of blog. Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform around. It is an 'open source' code in Php (a very cool and versatile programming language)  which means anybody can use the code they created and add cool stuff, modify it and adapt it to their own needs. As a result, it is popular and lots of people use it.

When I checked tonight, they are currently hosting  2, 175, 257 blogs (people who have accounts on their server) and today alone there were 16, 585 new posts written on those blogs. This is a very stable organization. But it's kind of like taking a freshman English class at UC Berkeley. There are 2000 students in the class so its hard to get more personal attention. Personally, I like smaller classes. But wordpress.com is awesome.

• blogger.com Blogger is owned by Google and it's pretty easy to work with. They have nicely designed templates and it's easy to get around as a new-bee. It's perfect if you just want to write but it is very limited for internet marketing. You will need to set up a Google account before you can start a blog, but you should get one anyway because they are a lot of free tools avialable with a Google account. Neither one costs any  money to set up.

It's easiest to get search engine placement utilizing an existing blog website like one of the above because they have so much activity and so many pages in the search engines, it gets you "spidered" and listed in the engines must faster.

But there are draw backs.

The biggest ones are:

• You can not modify programs on the host server because you don't have access
• It limits what you can do and restricts your operating mode to whatever their policies are
• You do not own your domain, you are always using someone else's
• They can remove you any time they want
• There are often restrictions on marketing efforts

But it is a good place to start and they are very effective as far as search engines go. There are literally thousands of free blog hosting companies, social bookmarking sites and more springing up al the time. They want people to put fresh content on their sites everyday because it gets them more traffic and traffic = money. And they want your content.

Traffic and links are the currency of the net.

Blogging Takes Time and Regular Maintenance

If you don't have time, you can use a number of services to build your blogs and keep them running for you. This can be very effective in terms of results but it ain't cheap because it is a labor intensive job to maintain a blog correctly. Most of the time intensity is during the set up and establishment of the blog. After it's going well, it takes a lot less time because there are so many aspects that can be automated.

If you have the budget, and not much time, this is probably the way to go - and particularly if you have a business. We will post a discussion about service available in another post. 

Here are two excellent free resources:

1) This is a 51 page pdf report about how easy internet marketing can actually be. Follow this link and download An Obvious Truth for fr*e. It tells you in very simple terms how to make money on the net.

2) This is one of the best free resources I have found about how to blog effectively and really get results. This report has been downloaded over 40,000 times in the last year. It is an awesome document. Get your copy fr*e Authority Black Book

If you want to create an income to replace your day job, a home based business or a supplemental income just to buy things you want - like vacations or a new car - starting an online business is one of the best opportunities there is. You can sign up for a free account and be blogging within 5-10 minutes, so whats stopping you?

Have a healthy wealthy day.