Matt Mullenweg of San Francisco came up with an idea in college to simplify getting your ideas quickly and easily onto your website. Now he’s on Business Week’s list of 25 Most Influential People on the Web, PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, and Inc.com’s 30 under 30.

Google statistics say the blogging software he gives away for free is powering nearly 1% of all web pages on the entire internet. (Matt has products too. He sells optional services for those who use his free stuff.)

Surely you’ve heard of his invention. It’s been around for a few years. He’s perfected the blog (short for web log).

Publishing has changed a bit over the years. Maybe you’ve seen how bookstores have nearly replaced libraries. Now coffee shops keep bookstores alive. So pay attention to this blog trend. You need to know what kids and college students know here.

(Dialog shamelessly snipped and adapted from here to make this point.)

Do people, fliers, brochures and business cards promote your business? Your words, pictures, or even video in your sales message - it’s called content. Think for a moment: How would people respond to the same content, the same tired sales pitch from 50 years ago?

Marketing a business the right way means you change your content often. How often do you see something, or think of an idea, and you’d love to get the word out about it?

That’s where a Content Management System, or CMS (think blog) comes in. It’s one of the very best internet marketing tools. If you don’t run your own catalog with tons of products to buy, you probably don’t need a complicated, high-dollar CMS. The statistics above don’t lie. A simple blog can serve you really well - whether you’re a high-powered CEO or just starting your lemonade stand.

Once you get your blog set up, putting content on your site is as easy as sending email. This means you don’t have to know code (the complicated stuff geeks use to make web pages.)

Using a blog means it takes you far, far less time and money to get your ideas out to the public.

Okay, so lots of people use blogs. Why should you use Matt’s product? Lots of people will let you start your own blog on their site for free.

True, if you sign up with Blogger or TypePad, you can start your blog without ever having to pay a penny. You don’t have to buy your own dot com. Not a bad deal, right?

Wrong. Bad deal. Very bad. SEOBook and other experts say, “Do NOT do that!” Why?

Your blog is on someone else’s website. You have only limited features. Some don’t allow placing ads, and that’s a big source of money from your site. What if something happens to their website? What happens to you and your business? There’s no guarantee like there is when you have your own dot com.

Another important reason: It takes months or years to build an audience, as well as search engine trust. Google respects websites that have been around awhile. When you move your content from someone else’s website to your own, you’re starting this long process of gaining respect all over again.

Research says most serious business owners can get all the horsepower and reliability they need for their very own dot com and blog for less than $7 a month. (Many companies offer what’s called free web hosting, but I’ve never seen one that has the technologies you need for your blog: PHP and MySQL.)

Want to buy more than one dot com? No problem. With the web hosting company I use, each additional dot com costs only $10 a year.

When you buy your own dot com, you’ll see why this is such a good deal. You’re always thinking later of more and better names. No problem. Buy the name for only ten bucks.

Sure, when you get as big as YouTube, you’ll need to buy a bigger web hosting plan. But when you’re that big, you can afford it. Best of all, you’re not starting over. After all, you’re only switching plans, not your dot com name, which is the important thing to keep.

Matt’s WordPress.org is totally different - different even than Matt’s WordPress.com, which is on my same non-recommended list as TypePad and Blogger, for the reasons I mentioned above. WordPress.org has the real deal.

Choose from literally thousands of blog templates on the internet. Or make your own template. A huge online support community is ready to help. When you see what others have done with these templates, you’ll see there’s no creativity hampering here. Sure, it takes some technical know-how to set up WordPress, (they call it their famous 5-Minute Install), but the results will be well worth it to you.

There have been times I’ve started a WordPress blog, and within a day or so (I didn’t tell anyone about the blog yet)…I’ve had 20 people reading the blog and some even linking to it. How’s that for the power of marketing online with a blog? The number of readers snowballs because of something called Really Simple Syndication, or RSS. More on this later.

If you need help understanding how to install Wordpress or want complete help in installing it, contact me here.

There are a number of blog design features - including things you’ll want to add or activate on your WordPress blog that make all the difference in money or no money for you. Stay tuned for more WordPress How-To.

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