- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
Most everyone who knows anything about internet marketing knows that blogging is a great way to drive traffic to a business website. Put up a blog, start posting some unique content, and include links to your business website. Post new articles regularly and often, and you will start seeing Google pay more attention to your business website. This is a very important step on the road to helping your business make money online.
You may have heard that Wordpress is great software for blogging. That's true, but you need to be very careful. Whatever you do, DO NOT set up a blog at Wordpress.com. You need to own your own domain, upload the software, and set it up where you have total control.
Here's why:
I set up a blog on Wordpress.com to promote a home business website. Since I never do anything black hat, but always employ standard and ethical internet marketing techniques, I did not read the Wordpress TOS before I set up the blog. I figured that Wordpress, like other free blogging sites, would welcome unique content giving great information to others who are struggling to build an online business and make money online.
Big mistake!
A couple of weeks after setting up the blog and posting regular unique content, I was happy to see that other blog owners were linking to my articles and I was starting to get some traffic.
Then suddenly my blog was deactivated by Wordpress for "violation of the Terms of Service". What???
As it turns out, Wordpress does not welcome business-related blogs at their site. Anything else is OK, as long as you are not trying to promote a business.
Here is a quote from their TOS:
"here are some examples of blogs that are banned from Wordpress.com (all of these fall under the general heading of "spam blogs", or splogs, and we will be deleted as soon as we find them or they get reported):
* Scraper blogs: Blogs that take content from other blogs and re-publish it without permission (this is sometimes called scraping). If a blog contains all or mostly stolen and unoriginal content, it's gone!
* SEO blogs: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them highly. Wordpress.com is not meant for this type of activity.
* Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs and get-rich-quick schemes ("Make six figures from home!!", "20 easy steps to top profits!!", etc). To be clear, examples like people writing original book or movie reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category.
* Warez blogs: Blogs that promote pirated copies of ebooks, software packages, music, movies, games, etc.
Automated blogs: Blogs that are generated by computers, including randomly generated blogs, blogs that re-publish press releases, marketing material, search engine results, link dumps or any other mass-produced content."
I was doing none of these things, but Wordpress deactivated my blog anyway. I have not bothered to try to get them to reactivate the blog, since I know from others who have experienced this, that the geeks at Wordpress are very unresponsive.
Fortunately, I have saved all my posts and I will set up a new blog at a site which I own and control.
So, lesson learned: stay away from Wordpress.com if you are trying to promote a business. Set up blogs only on domains that you own and control. Don't let Wordpress.com, the Big Brother of the Internet, control how you run your business!
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Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
PO Box 121, Amherst, NS B4H 3Y6 Canada
Ph: 902.667.0511
Fax: 760.280.8685
Skype: billbrine
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