Are you having trouble deciding which blogging platform is right for you and your business? If you’re looking for an easily customizable and user friendly option, look no further than WordPress.

What WordPress Has to Offer

WordPress offers easily customizable templates with many of templates to choose from. Some of these templates are free and can be found online through a search engine, via the WordPress website, or from developers themselves. Other WordPress templates can be created and designed by a professional to meet your specific business needs.

And you can also find WordPress templates available for sale online. In short, you can create a 100% unique website with WordPress templates. I use Catalyst Theme (affiliate link) and can’t recommend it enough. I can do anything I want with it and don’t need to know CSS.

It’s so very easy to use. Whether you’re a blogging novice or an industry expert, WordPress offers a user friendly control panel. Even the customization of readymade templates is pretty straightforward.

And there are blog posts, manuals and forums on just about every WordPress topic under the sun which means if you have a question, chances are the answer is out there and easy to find.

Widgets and plug-ins. Because WordPress is so very popular, there are literally thousands of developers continuously working to create widgets and plug-ins to solve the needs of business owners like you and to make your blog experience unique for your readers and customers.

Widgets and plug-ins cater to just about every interest or need from games, to social networking to SEO tracking and data. If you need it, you can probably find it in a widget or a plug-in.

Do you use another blogging platform? Which one is it and why do you like it? Do you know it’s fairly easy to transfer most blogs to WordPress. It was once a plugin but now is built into the framework.

Tell me your thoughts on WordPress or other platforms in the comments below.

For aspiring entrepreneurs or ministries looking for different ways to fund their passion but who don’t want to mess with the hassle of offering services or the responsibilities of selling products there are still extremely profitable options to build an online business.

One of the concepts with the potential for profits is blogging. However, just putting up a blog and sitting back hoping it will make money doesn’t really work.
The answer lies in having a proven step by step system for creating profitable blogs.

First Week of Blogging has the data and experience behind it to make it a proven, and extremely profitable, product.

You learn:

• Foundational brainstorming techniques
• How to create a content plan…as well as content
• How to build a social media presence
• How to develop your blog’s ongoing strategy and so much more.

ProBlogger.net is a great resource for aspiring bloggers. Darren Rowse has developed products to take your blogs from one level to the next. This one is for when you’re starting out. I’ll tell you about the more advanced products as time goes on. I have them all.

This isn’t an affiliate link check out Problogger’s Guide to Your First Week of Blogging here: http://www.problogger.net/first-week/

Looking for a few reasons to set up a blog? Here are seven to get you thinking about this amazing tool to connect with and grow your audience.

1. Search Engine Marketing – Blogs are one of the premier tools you can use to attract organic search engine traffic.
2. Direct Connection – Blogs enable you to connect with your audience in a manner that’s different than articles and other social networking.
3. Brand Building – We buy from people we like and feel we can related to. Personality marketing is easily achieved via your own blog.
4. Niche Specific – Your blog allows you to fine tune your niche to a very specific market and audience.
5. Media & Public Relations – Blogs are great tools for the media to get to know you, become aware of you and contact you.
6. Expert Status – A blog provides you with one more opportunity for publication and the ability to showcase your knowledge and expertise. (We also buy from people we perceive to be experts)
7. Low cost – Blogs offer a low startup cost (you merely need a domain name and hosting) and you can be up and running.

You could be making money from your blog next month!

Do you have any more reasons why you think blogging is great for a business or ministry? I blog because I’m a writer and a pastor. Being a writer, I write things like blog posts on blogging. Being a pastor, my sermons easily turn into posts.

Why do you blog? Tell me in the comments. If you don’t blog, tell me what’s keeping you from it?

I can’t really tell you how long I’ve been blogging on RevTrev.com. All I know is I have over 800 posts and WAY TOO MANY categories. I suppose you can say the same thing about the number of plugins I have as well.

That didn’t keep me from installing one more…and maybe another to help it. I’ve installed the Organize Series Plugin and so wish I had it when I started blogging. You tag your posts when you post them (unless you’re me, then you go through series and label them more tediously) and the plugin adds the series at the top and navigation on the bottom. I’d like to change the CSS to get the color to match my scheme better, but other than that I’m impressed with how painless it is.

Why do I want to set up series? Well, it helps me refresh content. I’m going to be setting up training around some the series I’ve done so I want to get as many people to those series as would be interested in the training. Setting up series allows me to structure the posts from first to last rather than last to first the way WordPress needs to. Finally, it gives me some satisfaction that what I’ve written will be enjoyed beyond the SEO traffic…by the way I’ve discovered my early series had no SEO, so it gives me a chance to better optimize the site as well.

I’ve got a few series set up – you can see them in the sidebar under “Featured Series” I’ll be adding others as time goes on. I’m turning this site into more of magazine feel and back issues are a great resource.

Check a series out and tell me what you think. I appreciate the comments.

Training and Encouragement Will Be More Structured on RevTrev.com in 2012. I’ve decided to pull my knowledge of social marketing and blogging, and book writing, publishing and marketing into RevTrev.com. I may have time for some coaching in these areas so I think the best way to see if there is any interest in my experience with these topics is to blog about it. We’ll see what happens.

I’m also setting up email courses for topics I’ve written on – hope, honor, forgiveness, overcoming shame, overcoming sin,  overcoming worry, living life God’s way…and more as time develops. I’m still working on a time frame for releasing these ones. Can you let me know which topic you’d like a course in first? Feel free to write in your own choice.

Check out the Training Page and see my thoughts.

In 2012 I’m planning on becoming consistent blogging on Social Media Tips. I have series almost ready on Basic Blogging and Using Newsletters Effectively as well as some videos on Twitter Tips.

I also have all kinds of training around every aspect of Publishing – writing, printing, distribution, marketing. My plans were to package them into informational products and I still might do that with the juicy stuff it took me 5 years and countless dollars to figure out, but I’ve decided to truly centralize my many interests into RevTrev.com.

With all that in mind the question becomes…are you already finding RevTrev.com too random?

I appreciate the feedback. As always, you can put more thoughts and discussion in the comments. I appreciate hearing from my readers.

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I’m setting up my blogging schedule for 2012 and have some great ideas from readers of my newsletter for what to right on. I’d appreciate knowing what’s the most important for more of my readers. So please take this poll and let me know.

[polldaddy poll=5712049]

You can leave any comments below.

The subscribers to my weekly newsletter will know I have regular features that are usually included and special features that may be in and maybe out. Next week’s newsletter is going to be highlighting a couple of changes to both.

First off, the regular feature called “Blogging Buddies” has been changed to “RevTrev Recommends”

Gone From RevTrev Newsletter

New to RevTrev Newsletter

I started having “blogging buddies” because I found out when people commented on my posts, other people would also comment. I thought if I would do the same for others it would increase the conversation on their sites as well. It turns out I don’t have all the time in the world and I haven’t become a professional blogger yet so I haven’t had time to comment 2x a week on every other persons blog. I still read everyone’s blog posts every week, but that’s been a Saturday morning pleasure for me and I have well over 150 blog posts to go through.

So what I’m going to do with RevTrev Recommends is give you links for great blog posts that have encouraged me. If you have ones that have encouraged you that you think my readers will appreciate, let me know. You can send it by email, twitter or even stumble upon.

The new section to the RevTrev Newsletter I’m expecting to be a special feature, but hoping it will a regular one as more people share their good news with me so I can pass it on to you. This section is called “Kingdom News”.

Every week lately I’ve been getting amazing stories of salvation, healing, deliverance, and financial blessing. Most of these are coming from places like Pakistan, India, Iran, and several parts of Africa. News I get encouraged by I’ll be passing on to the readers of my newsletter.

So SEND ME YOUR STORIES! We need to pass on the good news of our Good God! As you can tell, I’m quite excited by all this. Now maybe I can get onto making the changes to revtrev.com…or maybe not. I just looked at the time. Better run.

It seems this site is always in flux. It’s worse than our house, but that reminds me I need to remodel the bathroom.

I promised myself to stop blogging about what I want to do since I found out it when you tell others about your plans you have a far less chance of getting those plans done. It’s because when we tell, instead of keeping us accountable, we psychologically feel the project is closer to being done than it actually is…I think I’m talking myself out of this blog post.

Ah…I’m calling it Wish List because I’m not certain I can do it all without conflicts in the code or dramatically slowing down the site. I know it might not be possible, but I thought a blog post would remind me for the next week to troubleshoot the solutions I’ve found and I know some of you who read this blog are much smarter than me using WP, PHP, Javascript and coding in general, so any advice you can give would be great.

I want more white space in the design. I also want more content. So here are the 3 things I want to change in the little while.

1. I want the Twitter + Feedburner widget that you can see on TentBlogger.com I found out that it’s only for the Standardtheme, although the company told me if I bought the theme I could hack out the widget.
2. I want a tabbed section for Recent Posts, Categories, Comments, Tags and possibly the “About Me” section I have currently in the header. I found out the one I want is only for the WooTheme.  MichaelHyatt.com uses the Standardtheme but has the WooTheme widget which tells me his programmer most likely hacked the WooTheme. There are days I dream I can hire people smarter than myself so they can take care of all this little whims I get.
3. I set up the space below the Logo to be an image rotator. I’d like to get it to work.

The problem with #2 and #3 is that they’ll likely use javascript that can either conflict or slow down my site or slow down my site because they conflict.

Do have any suggestions for me for widgets or workarounds you’ve used to:

a. Combine counts for Twitter followers and Feedburner stats (plus any other legitimate ones you can think of)

b. Have tabs in a WP widget area – I’d prefer to control what I can place in a tab.

or

c. Rotate Images in WP – it will need to have links connected to the images.

I appreciate any help you can give.

I have a new server for http://revtrev.com that can only back up 7 gb of data. So I wanted to get rid of my self-hosted video posts. Here’s my thought patterns for doing it now. I might go back to iTunes in the future. Right now I’m more concerned with having a fast and secure website