I will avoid getting into comparative charts between different blogging platforms and directly advocate my personal choice – WordPress

You surely heard of wordpress before, but let me make a clear distinction between wordpress.com and wordpress.org.

While WordPress.com provides the software and hosting services for free, the second, wordpress.org, is a freelance software, free to use on any website, by anyone. You might wonder why not just take the hosted version of wordpress.com and start blogging.

For network marketers this is a next-to-impossible approach to blogging because in your endeavor to drive quality traffic and generate leads for your business, you’ll:

• have to make reference to other players/products or services in your market and to do so it could be considered advertising.
• getting advertised via email lists, other blogs and web sites, and similar unsolicited promotional methods – interdiction stated in their terms of service.
• want to have your own branded domain name.

WordPress.com doesn’t allow any of these three things.

WordPress.org, on the other hand, being a freelance software, is not just free to use but also has a huge repertoire of free plugins developed by freelance programmers actively seeking to improve the wordpress experience.

In order to utilise the free wordpress software you have to follow four distinct steps, namely:

1. Register a Domain. Best practices, not so much from the SEO stand point but rather from the marketing perspective, dictate that you should pick a domain name related with your niche market. These days is getting harder and harder finding the right word combination to depict what your business is all about. But, after a respectable amount of brainstorming you should come up with some satisfying results.

2. Create a hosting account. If the company from which you bought the domain name also provides hosting services, that’s OK, can open a monthly account. My personal combination is getting the domain name from GoDaddy.com and hosting it to HostGator.com. If you’ll apropriate the formula I use, know that you must point your domain to your hosting account. I won’t go into details because every company selling domains has a well documented tutorial on how this process is conducted.

A little piece of advice, though: don’t pay your domain name for a longer perioud of time just because you heard that it will guarantee you a certified presence online or even improve your SEO. Since when paying 50$ or so makes you a certified marketer online? That’s obviously absurd.

3. Set up your blog. Fortunately, this has become a one-button process. If you choose to host your blog with HostGator.com, all you have to do in order to set up wordpress blog software is just press Fantastico icon and every thing is done automatically for you.

4. Customize your blog. These can be done either by installing one of the, aproximatly, 3000 free wordpress themes, or if you’re eager to spend some money, some hight quality premium themes can be found at: WooThemes.com and Revolutiontheme.com.

(all the links inserted are not part of my scheme to make sales as an affiliate with you reading my content).