Once upon a time, there was a doomed, hard working farmer.
He worked every day from dawn til dusk, only pausing to kiss his wife, to eat some soup with hearty bread, and to wipe the sweat from his face.
Due to his constant efforts, his land flourished, and his family had an abundance of food to eat.
However, the farmer didn’t own his land - he rented a small parcel of a much bigger piece of land from the local lord.
Things went great for many years… until the local landlord got sick.
With medical bills stacking up, he ends up passing and the bank takes back all of his lands.
And so one day, the farmer got a knock at his door.
The local authorities were here to announce that the land was now in the property of the bank - and his rent contract was no longer valid.
The farmer and his entire family were unceremoniously kicked out, forced to begin again somewhere else.
You Are The Farmer
In this metaphor, you are the farmer and the “land” is where you publish your content.
Your content marketing is like the crops that a farmer would plant.
And just like being a farmer, being a content marketer is a long term game.
If you choose the wrong blogging platform, you might lose all of your hard work over the years because a bigger company hit hard times (just like the lord in the story).
You need the best long term solution that will keep your content safe - and you'll find out what that solution is in this blog post.
Weebly, Squarespace, Wix - Why Not?
If you'd prefer to listen to this content from the video above, play it or download it from the podcast episode below.
All of these services are potentially easier to use (at least in the very early stages) than my recommendation.
So why shouldn’t you use them?
For one simple reason: YOU DON’T OWN these platforms. They are run by companies.
And guess what?
Companies go out of business all the time. Each and every day.
So if you rely on Weebly, Wix, or Squarespace to host your business… you’re essentially saying, “Gee whiz, I hope you don’t go out of business. Because if you did, I would be seriously screwed!”
Our make believe farmer may not have had much choice with his land - but you do. Why would you choose a blogging platform with this much long term risk?
Additionally, these blogging platforms are run by companies that have one goal - to make a profit.
That profit motive might go above a goal of serving their customers well, or of giving incredibly responsive customer support.
Another Downfall - The Lack of Customization
With Weebly, Wix, and SquareSpace, you’re essentially trading money and ownership of your content for an easy to use layout.
However, that ease comes at a cost: you’re not able to customize!
That means that if you wanna make a little tweak to your website design that the standard editor doesn’t let you do… you’ll be out of luck.
With my recommendation, not only is your blogging setup simple, but it’s also incredibly easy to tweak to make things “just right” for your own business.
WordPress With Thrive Themes - Your Best Blogging Platform
WordPress with Thrive themes is the best blogging platform out there.
many people misunderstand the use of a blog in today's age.
Your blog is your home online, is your website, it hosts your marketing funnels, it can handle your sales funnels… It can even deliver your products or membership offers.
If you begin posting on social media or YouTube, you always need a place to point traffic back to that you own…
This is the power of WordPress because it's more than a blog… It's the platform that launches your business!
The key difference between WordPress and other platforms is that WordPress isn’t "owned" by any profit-seeking Corporation. It can’t be hijacked, corrupted or shut down!
It’s open-source software, which means that anyone around the world can edit the code of WordPress to make it better.
WordPress is also extremely, extremely popular online, as it’s used by 38% of the top 10,000 websites on the internet. For example, the LinkedIn Blog, Forbes, TechCrunch, and The Freakonomics Blog all run on WordPress.
Why WordPress Is Your Best Bet In A Nutshell
The popularity and open source nature of WordPress give you three huge benefits:
- You have access to a vast number of plugins, themes, and support videos on WordPress.
- You can hire someone for a few dollars an hour to pimp out your site even if you don’t know the slightest thing about web development.
- Nobody can decide to “shut WordPress down” because WordPress isn’t a company - it’s an open platform that anyone can use. So your site will always be safe!
- WordPress is the best place to grow an authority site, the types of websites that make the most money!
Why Thrive?
I use Thrive Themes because:
- Thrive has incredible customer support
- Thrive's themes are blazing fast and look great
- Thrive has an intuitive easy page builder that lets me create landing pages and sales pages super easily
Yes, Thrive costs $25 per month.
But the next best competitor for running an online business, ClickFunnels, costs $99 per month.
And trust me - with the amount of time you'll save using Thrive themes as opposed to a free theme, you’ll be thanking me for the recommendation.
But I Heard WordPress Is Hard?
A few years back, WordPress was harder to use.
But now WordPress is just as simple as any of its competitors, at least when it comes to the most important functions of writing and publishing content.
In fact I have a complete step-by-step tutorial teaching how to set up your blog, here.
And the beauty of learning basic WordPress skills is that they’ll ALWAYS come in handy.
Even if you decide to use a developer for a lot of your site, knowing how to go into a post and edit the featured image, for example, is super useful.
OK, But Seriously - I’m Not Tech Savvy At All!
Before you read any further, I’d like to request 3 minutes of your time.
Go to this link and sign up for a FREE WordPress.com account.
Then follow the onscreen instructions for making your very first WordPress blog.
You’ve done that?
Awesome! Now you see how easy WordPress is.
Go ahead and publish a 10 word post if you’d like, just so you can see how easy that is as well.
Just for fun, I made a WordPress.com site in 3 minutes just to show you how simple it is:
What Should You Do Now?
I like to think of life as a “choose your own adventure” story, so here are your choices for how to get your blogging platform up and running:
- If you want the best setup for the long term, set up a WordPress blog and connect it to Google.
- If you have no money but you’d like to use WordPress, go to WordPress.com, sign up for a free account, and start creating! You'll start to get familiar with the platform which will be super useful once you have a bit of money to invest in your business.
- If you want to start creating content without using WordPress this second, go to Medium.com, sign up for a free account, and start creating content. It couldn’t be simpler.