When I first started out and was taking a tutorial on setting up online marketing, the subject of blogs came up. It was suggested that a blog was a very good tool for marketing and making yourself known on the WEB. The program suggested starting with WordPress. I had never heard of WordPress so I went to the WordPress site to find out what it was all about.

This was all new to me so I followed instructions on the site and presto…I had my first blog set up in a few minutes. It wasn’t pretty and I had no idea what I was doing. The interface was new, the tabs were a mystery and the general functions available were a guessing game for me. That said, I forged ahead, wrote a post and then tried out different tabs and selections to see what would happen.

What I didn’t realize was that there are three varieties of WordPress, and you should know that upfront, so you can decide what works best for you. I learned of these 3 options later when I used another tutorial and set up another WordPress blog on a host site.

So what are those three options?

Option One

The first one I’ll mention is one that doesn’t concern the individual affiliate marketer but you should be aware of it. It’s called WordPress MU. MU stands for Multi-User and it allows you to run several hundreds to thousands of blogs on one domain. It really applies to corporations, groups, organizations or maybe super affiliate marketers that have their own servers and run a network of blogs. Until you reach that scale you needn’t know more than that about WordPress MU.

Option Two

The next option open to you is WordPress.com. This is the one I first used. It is hosted on WordPress servers and offers an easy to use template you can follow to start your first blog. You can choose your own user name to individualize your blog and it will get assigned to the WordPress domain. For example, if you choose to go with your name to set up the blog, your domain would look like http://www.yourname.WordPress.com. This assumes your choice was available.

Another point to remember is that on WordPress.com you are subject to the guidelines of your host. That means that commercial applications such as Google Adsense and other plug ins used to create revenue streams or optimize for search engine discovery, are not available. The blogs are really designed for open and useful communication without the volume of commercial and affiliate selling that takes place on other blog environments. This isn’t to say that you cannot create links to affiliate programs and place some banners, but the WordPress.com blog is not the most optimum environment to run a marketing based business. The next option is best suited for that purpose.

Option Three

The third option is the one used by most affiliate marketers who set up their business on an independent hosted environment outside of the WordPress hosted site. It’s called WordPress.Org and is software that is downloaded to your own Web server to run on your domain. It is often accessed through the Control Panel of the Web host you have selected to use in your business or blog. Some free hosting services may not offer the Control Panel feature so you have to follow what ever process they use for downloading blog software.

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