An Insider’s Guide to Lifestyle Blogging

All over the internet there are thousands of blogs devoted to fashion, beauty, lifestyle and everything in between. The message is clear — there’s never been a better time to be a blogger.

But what makes a blog stand out from the pack? We have the inside scoop to help take your blog to the next level, from the people who know the best — other bloggers.

Be consistent. A posting schedule will help your readers know when to check your blog. More than half of bloggers [surveyed] post on a weekly basis, 10.3 hours per week average time spent blogging.

Choose quality over quantity

One post you’re passionate about is worth a dozen that don’t matter. Your content is the heart of what you do so take the time to make it special — even simple ideas can be memorable when you add your own perspective. Remember: inspiration is everywhere when you know where to look. In the world of blogging 64% are inspired by daily life, 16% are inspired by magazines/websites and 20% are inspired by seasonal trends.

Create don’t curate

Instead of just reviewing a new trend, show how you would wear it. Putting your own spin on something can help your content stand out — especially when other blogger cover the same thing.

Keep a journal of ideas

Inspiration can strike anywhere. Carry a notebook with you on the go to write down any ideas that come to you — perfect for dry spells!

Visuals bring your blog to life

Use pictures to help tell your story. Got a smartphone? 60% of bloggers use their smartphone cameras to take photos.

Taking great pictures is not all about fancy equipment. Smart editing, thoughtful composition and good old fashioned daylight can help make your photos look more professional when you’re first starting out.

Build a community

Getting to know your readers and other like-minded bloggers will help your blog start to grow.

Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there — connecting with others makes the process all the more rewarding.

Best social network to connect with blog readers..... Twitter 43%, Facebook 30%, Instagram 23% and Google+ 3%.

Host a giveway

A fun way to drum up interest or thank your readers is by hosting a giveaway of some of your favourite things.

Ask for opinions

Chances are your readers are just as savvy as you are. Why not let them help you decide how to wear a trend or offer ideas for new posts?

Plan a meet up

A causal meet up is a great to meet readers and other bloggers. Plan something around an industry event or better yet, host a picnic in the park!

 

Based on an independent survey of fashion, beauty and lifestyle bloggers.

What You Ought To Know to Choose the Perfect WordPress Hosting

One of the best ways to set up a professional looking blog is through the use of WordPress. The hosting of WordPress is essentially a great platform for publishing which is chosen through the most of people because it provides a publishing knowledge that is satisfying, interesting, and simple. It is mainly frequently utilized as an application of blog publishing that is powered via PHP and MySQL. Appropriate to its user responsive benefits, WordPress has developed into very well liked with webmasters and bloggers. Nowadays, it is the very popular System for the Content Management (CMS).

To get started with a WordPress website, you will need a domain name and a web hosting service first. After those are set up, there are various guides that can take you through the process of getting WordPress set up through your hosting service. The most important aspect of using WordPress is finding the right hosting service. Here are some things to keep in mind as you seek the best one for your website.

The first thing you should be thinking about is the uptime. More uptime means that more people are able to view your website, increasing your popularity or making you more money if that is your main goal. Most cheap web hosting services offer poor uptime, and your website can even be down for extended periods of time. This spells out certain death in the online world, and you want to prevent this from happening at all costs. Look for hosting services that offer at least 99% uptime, and 100% uptime if you can find one that offers it.

Next, you want to ensure that the hosting service is compatible with WordPress, because not all of them are. It is one of the largest platforms for blogging in the world, but it requires a lot of memory to operate efficiently. Make sure you ask if it is supported before you choose to go with a certain service.

Try to find a server that offers live chat support for any issues you may have. WordPress is very prone to bad script and frequent downtime, so a server with live chat support will be able to give you the quickest answers and get you back up and running again in no time.

 

Buying a Facts When Choosing WordPress Hosting

Typically, people who create blogs and straightforward websites are not very familiar with the technical elements of running an internet site .. Consequently, these persons are more inclined to start using a CMS or website CMS in order to maintain their internet presence. WordPress can be a first-rate CMS platform. It can be database-driven and includes a large range of extensions, plugins, and internet applications. It is also exceptionally interactive and provides for customization which responds to client requirements for example domain specs, bandwidth needs, and privacy and security.

Given it has numerous uncomplicated functions, WordPress makes making a web or blogsite so much easier for your one that isn’t a web expert. With countless exciting improvements, a WordPress product demands hosting which is powerful and dependable. It takes exactly the best, top-notch WordPress hosting. Accordingly, a hosting arrangement with WordPress is ideal for anyone that desires to run a blog or website with no worries. To ensure you hold the best hosting for your WordPress site, there are many stuff you should know.

Precisely What are Your Preferences?

Before you even begin to consider hosting with WordPress, you have to know what your hosting requirements are. In case you are unsure regarding your own personal technical needs, it’s going to be most challenging that you should find out the best host. Some of the aspects of concern range from the quantity of bandwidth your internet site will require, the available storage room, the server specifications, and the average yearly downtime. These are just some of the requirements that might affect the selection of WordPress hosting. When you have designed a thorough report on all of your needs, then you can certainly begin the quest for your ideal host.

Would be the Newest Versions of WordPress On the market?

In an ideal world, the WordPress service provider you choose is going to be providing you the latest versions of WordPress. In the world of software, the modern versions are always better simply because they contain product enrichments which enhance faults, strengthen old features, and release new tools. As such, the WordPress upgrades make sure your web or blogsite is definitely capable of at its peak general performance while remaining appealing.

Have You Tested the Hosting Reviews?

Reviews are getting to be extremely important within the everyday life of all people. They normally use these phones decide what cars to acquire and what places to visit. These days where it seems like like you will find there’s new web hosting service sprouting up every 5 minutes, comments are crucial in distinguishing between those that are sub-par the ones which exceed expectations. Familiarizing yourself with hosting reviews could make it much easier that you should get the WordPress hosting service that may meet all your requirements.

Don’t Neglect the Attributes of Hosting with WordPress

The most important benefit of hosting with WordPress will be the convenience you obtain from knowing your blog or website is protected and fully functioning twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week. Because WordPress hosting works along with cloud servers, you’ll always have speedy use of your sites. Just as importantly, the gigantic storage space you are allotted with this particular hosting ensures you can store the maximum amount of content and knowledge as you wish.

There has never been an issue as to whether or otherwise not you should host your site with WordPress. Hardly any other hosting will be as uncomplicated and efficient simply because this CMS. In case you sleep better in the evening knowing your website is always accessible and working correctly, what you need to do might be select the best WordPress hosting.

Tumblr for Creatives

Artists are not exactly famed for having money. Most spend their cash on supplies and multi-packs of noodles. Luxuries like new clothes, fancy mobiles and delicious ice cream have become distant, nostalgic memories. It’s not a great situation to be in but it’s been the case for years and years (unless you’re one of the lucky few with rich parents willing to finance every project you ever conceive no matter how awful). Unfortunately nowadays a website is essential for artists who want a good chance of getting their work noticed. This can be expensive and also very complicated if you have no training in web design. Luckily, in 2007, Tumblr emerged from the depths of the internet to save the day.

Tumblr is in essence a free blogging platform. There are of course plenty of these in existence already. The problem with these other platforms is that without some decent coding knowledge it is difficult to stop them looking like a blog. You need a page that actually looks like a proper website and with Tumblr you can do that with ease.

Tumblr has a collection of themes freely available that look fantastic. They’re also easily editable so you can put your own stamp on it. It’s a simple process to change fonts, pictures, menus, links and anything else. Obviously for more complicated adjustments you’ll need to have a bit more knowledge. Well, that isn’t strictly true. The Tumblr community are a generous bunch and there are plenty of tutorials and bits of codes about so you can change your site however you want.

So once you’ve got your sparkly new page all set-up you’re going to want people to see it. This is another excellent aspect of Tumblr and that is the how incredibly easy it is to share your work directly to those who will be interested. The first way is to tag everything you post properly and extensively. Say you’re uploading your latest photography series on your pet cat. Mention everything about it in the tags including cats, photography, photo, animal, pet, series etc etc. Then get more specific as in if the cat looks cute mention that in the tags.

On other blogs, this wouldn’t do much to help you. Tumblr has the option to search tags and people will do this all the time to find things they want. So if they searched “cute cat photo” your picture will pop up and then the searcher can like it or, preferably, reblog it to all their followers. Beware though, don’t tag things erroneously, people on Tumblr get very upset by this and they will let you know in a tirade of anonymous messages.

You can also search these tags yourself to search out communities of people interested in the same stuff as you. Start following people and soon enough you’ll have your own followers. Post lots of decent stuff and you’ll get more and more and the amount of exposure your work gets will massively increase.

There are plenty more features too. One of the best being that it is very simple for people to contact you directly about what you’ve created. It gives it all a very personal feel. The reblogging feature is also very powerful. If the right people share your stuff, you could find your post reaching tens of thousands of people and all at zero cost to yourself. Tumblr is only getting more popular so get started as soon as possible. Don’t miss your chance.

Is Tumblr a Good Blogging Platform?

Tumblr is a relatively new microblogging platform with fast increasing popularity. The main reason for that can be explained in a single word: simplicity. The most used software for creating and managing a blog in recent years is, undoubtedly, WordPress. But it quickly expanded its functionality beyond the needs of the regular blogger and currently is a full-featured CMS (content management system). While in the beginning those were exciting additions, it soon became an increasingly difficult and confusing software. Bloggers simply didn’t need all that power and flexibility. Ten and more template files, needed to render and display blog pages, are certainly more than needed.

And then Tumblr appears on the scene, offering an easy and straightforward way to create an attractive (due to the huge pool of ready Tumblr themes ) and easy to use blog. It also utilizes the terms "microblog" and "tumblelog" as modern methods to share text, quotes, photos, useful links, music, and video in an extremely fast and efficient way. The time of those classical long articles is over. Users can use their mobile phones to post new content to their tumblelogs with minimal efforts.

As an addition, Tumblr is an absolutely free web service with little restrictions. Users don’t need to buy domains (it’s optional actually) and hosting or install or manage any kind of software. They just need to register and pick a suitable theme. You could think that since Tumblr is a relatively new service, there won’t be much variety of cool-looking and functional Tumblr themes. You couldn’t be further from the truth! Tumblr was quickly embraced by the most modern and progressive web designers and developers, who discovered the simplicity and elegance of the platform and produced an impressive number of Tumblr themes — both free and premium.

The official Tumblr Theme Garden offers thousands of great user-submitted themes and there are additional places you can find your theme if those aren't enough. Every Tumblr theme is automatically optimized for displaying on mobile browsers. All theme assets — images, CSS and JavaScript files, are stored on the Tumblr servers — users don’t need to upload and link them externally.

Today Tumblr has more than 200 million users and around 125000 new users sign up every day. It’s even used by celebrities such as Katy Perry, John Mayer, and a number of other famous bloggers, artists and developers.

Pros :

• Publishing on Tumblr is as easy as choosing the post-type (image, video, text, or link) and hitting publish.
• Tumblr’s Control Panel makes it extremely easy to manage multiple blogs.
• Large variety of stunning themes.
• Mobile friendly interface; dedicated mobile apps.
• Ability to publish posts on the fly through SMS, email or audio message.

Cons :

• Highly visual design does not encourage text-heavy blogging.
• Lack of comprehensive CDN, caching, or anti-virus plugins.
• Emphasis on sharing devalues original content, particular textual content.

Recommended For

• Casual bloggers who want something between Twitter and WordPress.
• Businesses trying to expand their brand through visual content.

There is no question that Tumblr has become the new way of blogging. Over 7 million Bands, musicians and individuals alike from around the globe are choosing Tumblr thanks to its super easy interface, fantastic customization options and social networking hookups. Tumblr is a great way of creating a new blog with a powerful CMS.

Which One is Better Self-Hosted WordPress or Blogger?

We are often asked by new users why they should use self-hosted WordPress.org instead of a free blogging service like WordPress.com or Blogger?

“Is self-hosted WordPress really better than Blogger?” the answer, of course “Yes.” But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really find best.

Important: Please note that we are talking about self-hosted WordPress and Blogger, not Free WordPress and Blogger. Please see our guide on the difference between free WordPress.com vs self-hosted WordPress.org blog.

Here’s the comparison scale:

Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing WordPress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your WordPress platform.

Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With WordPress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your WordPress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can be a pain in the ass. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With WordPress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating. With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With WordPress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend WordPress to far beyond just a blogging platform.

The talk today is about using WordPress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS.

Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: “Google Owns Your Content.”

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With WordPress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of WordPress (not WordPress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both WordPress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with WordPress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that WordPress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With WordPress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using WordPress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though — when you go WordPress, you don’t go back.

This infographic captures the comparison between two blogging platforms: Self-Hosted Wordpress and Blogger.

Which Blogging Platform is the Best? Blogger or WordPress.com?

If you are new to blogging, or perhaps even thinking about starting a new blog you may have questioned yourself at one time or another on what to blog about, that alone is a huge question for one to ask. Starting a blog can either be a lot of work, can take a lot of planning and be a challenge, it really comes down to what you want out of the blog in the end.

To help you come up with a good decision in the end, you need to know the essential things that make these two platforms big rivals in the world of blogging. So this time, you will learn the different features and characteristics of each. After you have known these things, only then you can cast a decision that is well-educated and will not cause you any trouble or regrets the moment you have picked the one which you think as the right one for yourself.

Let’s start by comparing just a few features of each platform:

Blogger Platform Features

• Offers a very easy out of the box to use admin panel to update posts, add video, pictures and a wide array of content. Very good for those who are starting their first blog and want to start writing right away.

• This platform offers a space amounting to 1 GB for your free hosting schemes.

• Your blogs are usually maintained at the blogger site or Google web servers.

• It gives you the ability to personalize the different templates that you want to use on your blogs. This offer also provides you with a limited flexibility.

• It provides you an easy time to get yourself started with it.

• It also offers you with the opportunity to upload and save different types of image and video files.

Be sure to check out the Blogger ‘limits’ here.

Wordpress.com Platform Features

• Out of the box wordpress is semi-easy to use, there are definitely a lot of options over to the left to choose from, this can sometimes confuse those who are new to this blogging platform or haven’t had a lot of experience with making a website, however with just a few minutes is fairy easy to figure everything out.

• This platform provides you with the free hosting capability to store at a space as much as 3 GB.

• The content that you have made will be maintained at the WordPress web servers.

• It also provides you with the ability to customize your templates and this can be availed at a limited flexibility.

• This platform provides you with the best opportunity to get started and it is also considered as a platform that is user-friendly.

• Provides you with the ability to store image files, video files, and other types of file formats.

Be sure to know the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org here.

Cost

When it comes to the cost, which one do you choose: WordPress.com or Blogger? This time, you will know that both platforms can be available for free. However, WordPress can be upgraded and get more satisfactory results each time you make upgrades. Say for instance, WordPress can be upgraded at a rate of $19.97 per year for 5 GB space to $89.97 per year for 25 GB space.

Flexibility

Since WordPress is a kind of software that is open source, this simply means that bloggers will have the best time customizing their blogs. Compared to Blogger, WordPress is capable of uploading different files in PDF, Word, power Point, and many others.

Basing from the facts mentioned above, it is more likely that anyone who reads this will surely pick WordPress as a better choice. So if you’re on your way to go blogging on the internet, WordPress is the best way to go.

Widgets and Plugins

Blogger and WordPress both use widgets or plugins, these are considered add-ons in a way. Plugins can add a lot of functionality to your site anything from SEO, social buttons, latest posts and much, much more. Creating a discussion through blogging platforms will help you gain more readers, using the right plugins can improve your sites usability, navigation and increase visitors.

When comparing plugins, WordPress definitely has a lot to choose from, in this case if you are looking to configure a lot of options WordPress is the best blogging platform for you.

Customizing Themes

Blogger templates (themes) that can be customized without any hassle. You can edit the HTML and CSS directly. But there are limited number of blogger templates available.

There are extremely high numbers of free WordPress themes available over the internet. Using the WordPress.com version of WordPress you can not fully customize the template, you can only customize the options available to you or switch to a new template.

Domain Names

Blogger user can transfer your domain for free or you can buy one through the BlogSpot interface. And, once again free blogs are created as sub-domains with URLs like yourname.blogspot.com.

WordPress.com user has to to pay some amount in order to transfer an existing domain in case of the paid service, but of course you can create free blogs on WordPress.com in form of a sub-domain like yourname.wordpress.com.

Final Words

Really to conclude it all comes down to personal preference, if you are new to blogging I recommend starting with blogger, if you want to move it up a notch and see what else you can do and expand your options you should definitely check out WordPress.

Free WordPress.com V/S Self-Hosted WordPress.org

WordPress is such a huge platform that myths and questions always surrounded this community. One question that haunts every WordPress lover is whether to start a free WordPress blog or hosting your own WordPress blog? You must be confused that what are the difference between these two, further is the explanation.

Obtaining a Free WordPress blog is a cake walk as you just need to sign up in WordPress.com and you are ready to start your own blog, whereas a self hosted WordPress blog would be installed on domain of your website and you can manage your blogs using this WordPress software.

Lets look at the pros and cons of both of these platforms:

A Free Wordpress.com Blog

Pros :

• No setup cost as this platform is free.

• No maintenance cost as WordPress regularly upgrades the security, backups and fixes bug in the software.

• If the blog is hosted on WordPress.com, it becomes a part of Wordpress community which can lead to increase in traffic.

• It’s free for upto 3GB of space. After that you will have to pay for space ($19.95 per year for 5GB) or ($289.97 per year for 100GB).

Cons :

• They place ads on all free websites. Did you really think it was free without a catch? If you don’t want your users to see ads, then you can pay them $29.97 per year to keep your site ad-free.

• You are NOT allowed to sell ads on your site unless you receive 25,000 pageviews per month. In which case, you have to apply to try their feature called Ad control. The approval process doesn’t cost you any money, but you have to split your revenues 50/50 with them *Ouch*

• You can’t use any other plugins other than WordPress own plugins. Yup WordPress is well known for it’s flexibility due to the plugins. WordPress.com does not allow you to use plugins! If you want to use plugins, then you have to move to their VIP program which starts at $3750 per month. No joke.

• You cannot use custom themes. Yup, you have to be stuck with their choice of themes which is being used on hundreds of millions of sites. They do offer a “design upgrade” which should really be called CSS upgrade for $30 per year. Meaning, you can change the color of your site. But if you want to add something really custom, you cannot.

• You are restricted to their analytics. You cannot use custom analytics software because you cannot add custom codes.

• They can delete your site at anytime if they think it violates their Terms of Service.

• They will change your theme without your permission if the founder doesn’t like the theme developer (yup it happened).

• Even if you pay for their upgrades, you still have to tell others that your site is powered on WordPress.com

A Self Hosted Wordpress.org Blog

Pros :

• It’s free and super easy to use.

• You own your data. You are in full control. Your site will NOT be turned off because someone decides that it is against their terms of service (as long as you are not doing something illegal). You are in control.

• Large numbers of plugins from developers around the globe.

• You can upload your custom themes and third party themes for your blogs. Customized themes give your blog a different look and feel altogether.

• You can make money from it by using your own ads, and doing things your way.

• Custom Analytics and Tracking

• You have full control on your website. Wordpress.org gives you full control to manage your website and even when you violate any terms and conditions your website won’t shut down.

• You can monetize your blog and website by placing ads and adsense.

Cons :

• To start your website one has to purchase domain name and hosting that costs a nominal fee.

• Like any other website, you need a good web hosting. This bits cost you money somewhere from around $3 – $7 per month (as your site grows, your hosting costs will too). But then you would be making enough money to cover the costs.

• You have to update the blog and software yourself but that is not a tedious task.

• You have to maintain your blog unlike in WordPress.com which includes spam control, security and backup on regular basis.

In our opinion, if you want to monetize your blog and want to earn money from it then self hosted WordPress blog is the right platform for you but if you want to increase your traffic and recognition in the WordPress community free WordPress blog will better suits your needs.

These are some of the advantages and disadvantages of both the platforms to create your own WordPress blog, Now it is up to you which platforms will better suits your requirements and needs.

Still not convinced?

Image: WPMU DEV

Top 5 Reasons Why People Use Blogger

I’m sure that those who have been using the Internet for a while are familiar with or have come across the free blog platform – Blogger. To put it simply, Blogger is a blog-publishing platform, hosted by Google that allows you to create a blog and maintain it without any charges. All blogs registered under Blogger will be hosted by Google’s servers at the blogspot.com subdomain.

Besides Blogger, there are many free blog providers available such as WordPress.com, Xanga, Tumblr and etc, which all have their boons and banes. But one thing that they have in common is that they allow you to start a blog for free, and play around with the layout and customize it to make it personal, informational, or commercial as well as let you keep track of your followers.

Though Blogger is one of the most popular blog publishing tools around, it has its limitations. Firstly, it is a rarity for professional blogs to be hosted on Blogspot domains. Hence, to some people, some Blogspot blogs may be deemed unprofessional. Many spamblogs also originate from Blogger, as it is the most common and esay to use blogging platform. Compared to other hosting providers, there are less original themes and widgets provided by Blogger. You also can’t sell your domain in the future, as your site is hosted on a subdomain (blogspot.com).

Why many still use it? The top 5 reasons

Apart from all the limitations Blogger has, it is still loved and being used by many bloggers. Blogger is still able to anchor its status as a popular blog hosting platform as many still use it. Why is it so?

It is owned by Google

Google is the leading search engine on the Internet. Since Blogger is owned by Google, when people search for the keyword ‘blog’ or ‘free blog’, the first site to pop out in the search results is Blogger, hence many start their first blog through Blogger!

Easy to use

It is generally regarded that Blogger is the most user-friendly blogging platform. There are many who have returned to the embrace of this blogging tool after trying out other ones. Great for beginners and good enough for the average blogger, it is no wonder that Blogger blogs are still very popular. Its user-friendly interface, widgets and theme designer are also great for easy publishing and customization of your blog, hence, well welcomed by novice and experienced bloggers.

Use AdSense and other Advertising options

If you intend to monetize your blog, the easiest way is through Blogger. As Blogger’s owner – Google, also owns AdSense, Blogger is integrated so that you can monetize your blog by putting ads into your Blogger blog easily. For registrations with Google AdSense, higher priority is also given to blogs hosted on the subdomain blogspot.com, so, it is easy for you to earn some revenue while blogging.

Personalised Domain on Blogger

Some bloggers who are more ambitious usually will think of registering their custom domain, i.e. use a .com domain name. When it comes to blogging under your own domain, Blogger offers you a better deal compared to other blog hosting platforms. When you hook your domain to your Blogger blog, you will not be subjected to any charges, while WordPress.com charges you $12 for each domain you incorporate. If you happen to have many domains, this may cost you a lot of money. Hence, comparatively, Blogger seems to offer a better option!

More Traffic on Blogger

Last but not least, Blogger blog can be established and gain popularity faster compared to blogs hosted on other platforms. Why is this so? When you visit any Blogger blog, you will see a navigation bar at the top of the page, so, you will be able to visit random Blogger blogs easily. In the same way, random visitors will also come across your blog at any time! Hence, apart from your own friends and online acquaintances, you may also receive visits from people from the other parts of the world. If your content is unique, interesting or informative, they may even bookmark it, increasing your potential traffic.

A few final words

Though I myself have tried blogging on other platforms such as WordPress.com and Tumblr, I found that Blogger is still the most appealing, with its easy to use and user-friendly features. Despite the limitations, you can do a lot by playing around with the widgets and themes, to get your own personalized blog with your own unique twist. For individuals or companies with custom domains, you would not have to worry about extra charges when you hook them up with your blog. Hence, let’s all start blogging on Blogger.com!

5 More Reasons to Love WordPress

Yep you read the post title right, “5 More Reasons to love WordPress” the keyword being more because who out there doesn’t love this wonderful platform. WordPress was originally released in 2003 as a blogging platform, at the time blogging wasn’t entirely popular but was starting to become a hobby as the internet was on the verge of its grown spurt. Today we are going to take a look at how far WordPress has come and why it is the best platform to not only run a blog on, but an entire website as well.

5. WordPress is Easy to Use!

Out of several CMS (Content Management Systems) I have dealt with I must say by far WordPress is the easiest to install, configure and get up and running, not to mention pick a theme for, it took me less than 30 minutes to get it up and running and have my first post online! WordPress is perfect for bloggers, but it can be themed to run the perfect website that can be literally setup in just a few minutes of your time!

4. Plenty of Plugins!

Plugins.. They are great, in fact without plugins there would be a lot of functionality not available for WordPress... Extra functionality I must mention! Plugins can transform the typical WordPress blog into a fully functional website loaded with features, with over 60 million downloads to date there are plenty of authors publishing plug-ins from contact forms to sharing buttons and much much more!

3. Themes

Not only are there a plethora of plug-ins to choose from but WordPress has a large directory of themes to choose from, you can find premium themes which are paid or you can find a lot of free themes which still look great, even from there you can customize colors, images and other settings. WordPress has the perfect themes for every webmaster/blogger.

2. Easy admin/backend panel

Are you a novice webmaster or new to creating a website? You don’t need to know a whole lot with WordPress, the goal with WordPress is to get the typical user up and blogging/writing in less than an hour, you don’t have to be an expert to have your own website and start sharing the valuable information you know! Simply login, create a new post and publish it when you’re done... It’s really just that easy!

1. Search Engine Friendly!

WordPress is by far the most SEO optimized platform/CMS available. Out of the box WordPress uses the ?p="post number" urls, this can be changed in the admin menu under settings in just a matter of seconds. There are also plugins you can download for SEO as well as a Google Sitemap plugin which will definitely improve your SEO... WordPress generally ranks higher than websites that aren’t running this wonderful platform.. and after all isn’t more traffic a good thing?

Overview:

You don’t just have to be starting a blog to use WordPress, many websites are using this great CMS even as far as completing recoding the backend  to completely customize there site. WordPress has always been free (opensource) software since its original release. I have tried other CMS such as Joomla, Drupal and Concrete5, they unfortunately just don’t compare to how smooth WordPress operates, not to mention the support behind WordPress is incredible you can find answers for just about any question you have in the forums, and if you have a question that hasn’t already been asked you can simply ask yourself and you will receive answers! Many popular tech sites like Mashable, Techcrunch use WordPress to mange their stuff.

Why is WordPress Free and Its Facts and Secrets

It is always a well-known fact that WordPress is an open source that comes at zero cost for your website and blog needs. Here, open source is all about the kind of freedom you will get through it like you are free to modify, free to build upon, and free to redistribute too. Many people definitely get a doubt here as, why they are offering it free and why there is no price tag attached to this software. Here, few things one should know is being open source is not all about its free usage and it involves valuable contribution from the talent pool of the community too. It will allow and accept contribution from everyone in this world and uses their contribution for improvising the product successfully. Here, major inside activity will take place in the form of support to the core development team of this project in many ways through reporting bugs, through contributing patches and through suggesting additions. This is resulting into improved versions for the WordPress one after one.

The profitability factor for this open source software comes through offering additional products and service packages for the users. The free open source WordPress software comes with restricted features and people wanted to avail the useful features for enhancing their website performance will buy it through making payments. This will result into an upgrade for your free web site or blog with additional useful features. Mainly, the CSS modifications availed through upgrade with payment will create powerful working environment for your website or blog.

There is little more inside activity should be mentioned here. This WordPress is definitely a open source software that is available for all openly on the net. You might have heard of plugins for WordPress. These plugins are customized additions for your website to perform some special activities for your site or blog. Every year, many developers are coming up with many useful and helpful plugins for WordPress and selling them to the WordPress users. This business is currently grown to multi-million dollars every year throughout the world. People regularly buy many types of commercial plugins, themes, and many more. Take for example StudioPress, which is making every year multi-million dollars through selling WordPress themes.

There is one more thing requires special mentioning here. WordPress is definitely comes at free, but remember that it is not copyright free. It is allowed to use, but not allowed to contribute. This is a kind of open source software that allows free usage, free modification, and free redistribution of code. Here, the catch is that modification can be done to the software but not to entire code. As long as the software being used for your site or blog can be availed totally at free. People looking for simple website or blog can go with this open source, but remember that spending will be needed while you want to make your site further more dynamic and efficient with special themes and plugins.

3 Arguments for Disabling Blog Comments

Are blog comments something you look forward to moderating or do you feel they are holding you back from more important tasks? Blog commenting has long been considered a way to allow your readers to take a more active ‘role’ in the growth and development of your site! For the site administrator however this means they must also take the time to review and respond to each comment left! Is the time invested in reviewing your readers remarks and responses to what you’ve posted better put to use in some other area?

Here are 3 valid arguments as to why you may want to consider disallowing people from leaving comments on your blog!

Harmful Spam

Damn spam! We get that crap in our mail, email, telemarketing calls and yes, even blog commenting has been known to display evidence of spam, gasp! Now that Google has ‘proclaimed’ spammy commenting or delinquent links find therein, will cost bloggers, spam has become even more repulsive! Now suppose for a moment you didn’t even allow your readers to comment, good bad or otherwise, or a way to do so anyway, than of course the litter called spam wouldn’t be a concern to you would it? Additionally now that you don’t have to invest the effort to sniff out spam in each and every comment, there is nothing holding you back from getting an early start on your next blog post!

Time Consuming

One thing most bloggers have in common is they are always pressed for time! Developing content takes time just to find a topic you can focus on and than don’t get me started on the research! The point here is this, if your readers were asked to decide between being able to leave a comment or having fresh content to view, they likely will choose the latter! Unfortunately blog commenting has an ‘evil’ side and that is it’s high maintenance and time consuming, at least for the blogger!

Writing Defensively

Let’s face it, once you have people commenting on your blog, you tend to post updates that ‘please’ these very same visitors! While this may appear to be a good thing, it does keep you from being a bit more daring, creative or edgy when creating something new for your readers and sadly, this is what they want! Let’s face facts, standing out or taking a stance can definitely give you a edge as a blogger, but allowing your readers to influence what you think or create limits you as well as your success!

Although blog comments left by your readers can be helpful and encouraging to your writing efforts, the time they take to ‘monitor’ may be holding you back! As discussed above there are some very compelling reasons for you to consider not allowing blog commenting on your site! When you consider your readers are in search of fresh content relevant to their interests, perhaps your time is better spent developing more of what they want! For this reason and the others reviewed above it would seem allowing people to leave remarks holds the potential to introduce more bad than good to your platform! Just a thought!

Should You Blog, 15 Reasons Say Yes!

Should you blog? That may be a question you’ve had but haven’t acted upon in part due to possible technical challenges or a shopping list of other reasons! Well the fact is these platforms are relatively easy to maintain so technical challenges are NOT an issue! Perhaps you’re simply not motivated enough to start blogging therefore I’m presenting 15 reasons below that may change that!

Passion Outlet

Having a passion about something is a wonderful feeling but being able to share it with like-minded others is even better! Once you start blogging about your passion you’ve now open the doors to an audience that spans the globe! There’s no telling how many interested readers you can attract and their comments will only ‘enlighten’ you on the subject as your entries do for them!

The Ease

Blogs are very easy to maintain and rarely offer any technical challenges that any novice to the internet can’t overcome! If you can use micro-soft or open office to compose a document, then you can blog!

The Cost

Except for the cost of a domain name and website hosting, which can be had for under $10 a month, you can start blogging free of charge!

It’s Good For Business

Both individuals as well as large organizations use these platforms for business purposes! Being blogs are so easy to maintain and at such a minimal cost, leveraging their flexibility and effectiveness to make money makes cents!

You Learn to Write

As a blogger you will be writing quite a bit and the good thing about this is the more you write the easier it becomes! Writing is a ‘skill’ you can improve upon with practice and most bloggers get plenty of this by keeping their sites regularly updated!

You Learn to Listen

Once you start blogging you’ll quickly learn the importance of using comments left by visitors to improve your writing and your site! Blogs are meant to offer reading material visitors enjoy viewing and the best way to determine this is to ‘listen’ closely to what their comments are saying!

You Learn to Communicate

Learning to write starts with learning to communicate your thoughts! Much like writing, the more you ‘translate’ your thoughts and/or feelings into words the easier it becomes!

Share Your Experience

Everybody has got something they can share that will benefit others! Most bloggers tend to offer their insight or experience when composing updates as do readers when they leave comments! In both cases everybody ‘wins’ in terms of being ‘exposed’ to thoughts or ideas they may not have otherwise considered!

Global Audience

Whether you start blogging for business or personal reasons one thing is for sure, the global internet audience will definitely enhance your efforts! Business bloggers now have a much larger ‘sales’ base they can work with and those who write for personal reasons can build a much larger following as well!

Better Time Management

Although blogs are easy to maintain, creating the content for them does take time! Here too with practice and experience most bloggers learn how to make the best use of the time available to them!

Better Research Skills

As just mentioned above, you’ll be creating content quite a bit once you start blogging which will often require research on your part! Remember skills are not the same as talents insofar as you can improve skills with practice whereas a ‘talent’ is typically something many are born with! Through sheer repetition alone you’ll quickly determine strategies and sources that work best for you when developing content as a blogger!

Gives You a Platform

It has been mentioned previously that many start blogging due to a personal passion or business purposes! Well blogs offer you the platform from which to conduct business or to share and exchange ideas with others! The fact that these platforms are easy to maintain only serves to ‘sweeten’ the deal for bloggers no matter what their motivations!

Reach Goals Easier

No kidding by sharing your goals with readers and charting your progress with them helps keep you motivated! By ‘publicly’ stating your goals and/or intentions you’ve now created a ‘forum’ of support as well as a source that will hold you accountable if you decide to slack off or even abandon the cause! It’s amazing how motivated people can be when they’re being watched by others!

Hell, You Make Friends!

Sharing your interest with like-minded others and allowing them to share their thoughts creates a bond on different levels! Mutual interest, casual banter and even admiration for shared thoughts, insights and/or knowledge can easily lead to a friendly relationship! Is that all that bad?

It’s Just Plain Fun

Once you get comfortable with blogging and you see your followers increasing it gives you a great feeling of satisfaction! Now the ‘tension’ tends to decrease due to the results you’re seeing and your growing familiarity with what to do!

If you’re still wondering why should you blog hopefully some of the reasons discussed above will get you started! Not only are blogs easy to maintain but they offer little in terms of technical challenges as well! Although any of the reasons listed above should be strong enough for you to start blogging, the one final obstacle you may face is a lack of motivation! If motivation is a problem for you then start blogging and share your difficulties about getting motivated with your readers! Remember, as discussed above, others can help to motivate you provided you share with them your thoughts and goals! Ultimately the first step is up to you to take, so start blogging to experience some or all of the benefits presented here today!

Editor’s note: TJ Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina. For more tips about why should you blog and to also receive a free instructional manual that teaches valuable niche research techniques for your online marketing needs simply visit blogbrawn.com.

10 Common Blog Writing Mistakes [INFOGRAPHIC]

This is an infographic on the top 10 common blog writing mistakes. Blogging is a rewarding activity for people who love to write down what they feel, experience or think.

Infographic brought to you by GrammarCheck team.

Embed This Infographic On Your Site (copy code below):
<div style="clear: both;"><a href="http://www.milanaryal.com/2014/03/blog-writing-mistakes-infographic.html"><img src="http://googledrive.com/host/0B6ktZzNhkH6JMmd2a29fMGoxRWc/blog-writing-mistakes-infographic.jpg" style="max-width: 100%;" alt="" /></a></div>Via: <a href="http://www.milanaryal.com/">Milan Aryal</a>

Creating a Blog From Scratch – 7 Fast and Easy Steps to Start Blogging

Creating a blog from scratch? How you can setup your blog and start making money? This is the 7 easy and fast steps to start blogging and make money from it.

Blog are online journals. They are used as short form of web logs which means a list of writings on the Internet. When all the writing is combined together to give it a look like a small website it is called a blog. A blog can be comprised of news, articles, personal diary. Below are the 7 steps to start creating a blog from scratch.

See also: From Blog to Business: 5 Success Stories

1) Choose your blog niches

First thing you should do is to search on the topic you interested or have experienced in such as blogging such as dog training, golf swing etc.

2) Buy a domain name

Then go to domain marketplace such as GoDaddy or Namecheap, choose the relevant domain name related to your blog example if you interested in blogging on drawing I suggest that you buy domain name such as “drawingapicture.com, drawingforfun.com, howtodrawing.com”. The cost for buying a .com name is around $10–$40 depend on the domain marketplace.

3) Open a hosting account

Then you need to link the blog together with its hosting account. You can open a hosting account for just around $10 monthly and it can be used for multiple domain names.

4) Choose blog platform

Creating a blog from scratch is easy, choose a blog platform or interface that you find easy and nice for you. I recommend you to use either WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr. For me WordPress is much more better because it is search engine friendly.

5) Search a theme

If you want your blog to look more great, you can find a theme or template that is relevant to your blog content. There are free and also paid theme, for me I suggest if you want to manage your blog easily use the paid one, but if just want to test the waters you can use the free one. If you need to do a custom theme you can also find it and the service will cost you around $50 – $80 depending on the web designer.

6) Publish your blog

Then make sure you create content that is relevant to your blog, let say if you’re in dog training you can publish about dog training, dog food, dog health and etc. Please do not mix up your blog with irrelevant content let say you’re blogging about golf and your content is about how to diet, how to sleep well, hoe to make money. This is not relevant and the reader will go away from your blog!

7) Monetize your blog

How you can make money with your blog is to add some affiliate link from CPA Program, PPS Program, you can also promote an eBook on your blog. Other way that you can make money from  is to set up a page that consist an ecommerce store, many of the bloggers will use amazon associates and include it in their own blog. It is free to set up an amazon.com.

Creating a blog from scratch is not hard if you follow the steps that I mention above. These are the steps that is still used until today that make all the bloggers success in blogging.

10 Amazing Blogging Tips to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog

These 10 things — done daily are proven to increase traffic to your blog. The most important step is offering Value, people are intelligent and deserve to learn and be educated — knowledge is best when shared! Video Blogging is also touched upon here as well as great places to share your blog post once you’ve written it.

Here are 10 Blogging Tips to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog

1. VALUE: Blogging is about sharing information and delivering value to those who read it. Speak about topics that you have a high level of knowledge about or something you are very passionate about. Don’t hold back your knowledge, this is your opportunity to share goodness with the world and sharing freely is good for the heart.

2. TITLE: Your title and description let people know that they have found what they are looking for. So for example if you were looking for Blogging Tips to drive more traffic to your blog, you would know by the title and the first few lines of this blog that you were in the right place! Feel free to be creative in your titles, they are what catch the reader to your blog.

NOTE: Remember you only have about 5 seconds before someone hits the Back Button, so make those seconds count.

3. HEADER & STRUCTURE: Your header or H1 tag are incredibly important as they represent the title within your blog — you can have a long header describing your title a bit more and remember this is used by search engines and displayed within the search. You only need 1 H1 sentence however it’s good to have a few H2 & even H3 Headers in your blog depending on how long it is and what information you need to stand out. These headers act as guidelines on how to read and interpret your information. Try and avoid a big long typed page that truly only looks good when your publishing a printed book — on the internet, you can be so much more creative in how you display information to capture attention, direct attention and create a sense of intelligence and ease. Play with Lists and Images to create a style that is comfortable to read.

4. LENGTH: Try and keep your blogs to about 500–700 Words — use lots of spaces and really maximize on your lists. It’s very difficult to be captivated by a whole page of letters with no creative display of material.

5. KEYWORD TOOL: Using tools like Keyword Tool in Google will help you understand what people are searching for and therefore you can customize your title and material using this knowledge. If no one is searching for Blogging Tips that it might be a good idea to pick a different topic or title. Here is an image of the Keyword Tool when Blogging Tips was used. As you can see 18,100 people globally typed those exact words into the Google Search Engine and 6,600 in the US alone. You will also notice that the words ‘tips on blogging’ was searched for the same amount of time.

6. TAGS: Tags provide a useful way for you to tell readers quickly what your post is about. These amazing little words also help the search engines to do the same. Remember the main job of search engines is to be smart and return relevant websites to you based on what you search. So your a team and these little tags help you tell the engines what words should be associated with your blog.

7. VIDEO: Add video to your blogs for many reasons — YouTube is one of the most popular search engines today, video allows people to connect with you and understand your message better and video also broadens your market reach. All you need is a simple video camera, iPhone or Webcam to get started and your good to go. To start with you’ll want to keep your videos to the 7–9 minute range.

Blogging Tip – Video: When making video’s keep in mind the following things: Captivate, Educate and Direct.

8. IMAGES: Include images because they are powerful and they really help you break up your information into bite sit bits :-) Images help you articulate your message in a way that words cannot...

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

9. CALL TO ACTION: When writing a blog to educate people on the product you have that could teach them all these 10 steps in an easy learning module that has proven to make people money - you need to tell them what the next steps are. So in this case, you are looking for blogging tips for whatever reason however if you are looking for blogging tips because you are looking for ways to drive more traffic to your site, to be more compelling in your writing or to improve your SEO than your next step is to check out the links at the bottom of the hub!

10. TELL PEOPLE: It is great to write a blog however you need to tell people that you have just posted one. If you have many subscribers and regular audience than that’s great however if you don’t you need to use a few strategies to get your message out there. Here are a few to get you started.

• Facebook - create a Facebook PAGE and invite all your friends to LIKE your page - every time you post a blog, put it on your Facebook PAGE
• Twitter - This is a great tool as well; however much smaller than your blog or Facebook, write a creative sentence that summarizes your blog and Tweet it with a link
• Submit your blog post as a article to Ezine Articles
• Forum Post: search around for forum’s on the topic of your blog post and post a piece of your blog with a link.
• Document Sharing – convert your blog post into a PDF using zinepal.com and upload it to any of the following document sharing websites: docstoc.com / box.net / slideshare.net

About the Author
Isaiaha Sousa is an artist who loves the internet. Using these amazing tools from Empower Network I’ve learnt how to make a living online! Join me and get ready to have the best life you can imagine.

From Blog to Business: 5 Success Stories

From advertisements, sponsorships and brand collaborations to endorsement opportunities and even book deals — the world of blogging has turned hobbies into full-time careers.

Here are five females who have turned their blogs into profitable, fulltime businesses.

See also: 10 Common Blog Writing Mistakes [INFOGRAPHIC]

Jenni Radosevich: I Spy DIY

After college, Jenni Radosevich relocated to New York and landed an internship with InStyle magazine. During her time at the publication, she pitched her editors the idea of a monthly style column and was given a shot at it. This allowed Radosevich and start her blog. During the same year, a publishing company approached her to write a book, I SPY DIY Style and two years later, she had quit her job to focus full-time on blogging. She has been paid through her blog for brand partnership, advertisement, DIY services and more.

“Make sure you find a niche,” she advises. “With a million blogs out there, you really need to differentiate yourself.”

Kathie Wiehanne: BluChic

Starting a blog comes with an expense and sometimes that is creating a beautiful website. When getting started, people either choose to have a customised site or use a pre-made template or theme. BluChic creates WordPress themes and designed-to-match marketing kits.

“It’s my passion to help bloggers have an affordable website that fits in their business niche,” says Wiehanne. She adds that a common hurdle bloggers face is ‘wearing so many hats’, from running the blog, being the writer, editor, photographer, graphic designer and more.

Angle Laws: Concrete Loop

What started as an outlet for personal thoughts and interests has emerged into a top urban entertainment site. Angle Laws created Concrete Loop when she was still a college student.

“My confidence was low and I wanted a place to vent. I also noticed that there were no sites that catered to urban entertainment,” she says.

Describing herself as a ‘broke college student’, Laws used money she earned from her parttime job to help fund to help fund her blog. Two years into it, Rapper and Fashion Designer Kanye West endorsed her site — that recognition placed her on a national stage. Laws advises others to be authentic, create a plan and practice smart money management.

Andi Perullo de Ledesma: My Beautiful Adventures

What began as a way to share her travelling adventures with friends and family has turned into a full-time career for Photojournalist, Andi Perullo. She grew her blog — focused on luxury and adventure travel — into a full-time career within its first year. She says that she was ‘inspired to keep going’ after generating some income and minor-level sponsorship within three months of the launch.

She rarely pays for accommodations when travelling, as most hotels welcome the opportunity for her to review them. In addition to blogging twice a week, Perullo credits social media for growing her online presence, adding, “There is no easier way to draw traffic to your blog than through social media.”

Blair Culwell: Leap Marketing & Design and The Fox and She

Blair Culwell, who has designed over 100 custom blogs, says, “Having a professional design gives you instant credibility, as the web is such a visual medium.”

Culwell originally began blogging in college as part of a school assignment and later continued it as a hobby. As a design professional, Culwell recommends taking a basic class to learn Photoshop or any design programme.

“If you’re looking to take blogging seriously, then invest some money into it,” she says. She advises newbies and those looking to grow their presence to ‘make connections’ and ‘find your niche’. — USA Today

Instagram Versus Vine

Make short form video work for you

By Ken Subedi, Kathmandu

Instagram launched a glorious feature called video to be edited with image stabilisation. What does this step mean for Vine? The competion gives users adequato excitement wheather you are a Vine freak or Instagram loyalist. Instagram attracts people who document their feet, coffees and pets, whereas Vine has been pleasing users who are pleased by the objections made in the app.

Instagram’s video offering is just as good as its photo offering due to its photo offering due to its filters, longer video lemgth, stability technology and already ingrained user behaviour. Vine videos are nearly 6.5 seconds long. Twitter specific Vine determines that its length is perfect for video consumption and also makes the creator to think out of the box so as to tell the story concisely. Instagram video lasts for 15 seconds, which could feel lengthr for the viewer but for the creator it can be spacious.

There are many similarities in both platforms, like allowing to shoot multiple, disjoint clips, and string them together. Instagram lets users delete the last clip they shot in a series to recover the bad take. You can remove the most recent clip taken. However, Vine does not let you edit at all. Both Instagram and Vine will not let you take video from your camera roll. Both demand that you shoot Vine-able or Instagramable video through their own respective apps. However, Vined or Instagramed clips will be instantly saved to the camera roll for later camera and let you switch back and forth between front- and rear-facing cameras while taking snaps.

Instagram’s cinema feature helps to stablise video shot within the app. Vine does not have such feature. In case of sharing options, Instagram tops Vine. Vine lets you share to Vine, Facebook (FB), and Twitter whereas Instagram lets you share videos to FB, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, foursquare and even through e-mail. As Twitter’s video service, Vine has Twitter’s full card support allowing Vines display right in your Twitter stream. Geo-tagging of locations can be done in both apps but it is only Instagram that offers a photomap that lets you surf users’ photos based on location.

Both Vine and Instagram will auto play videos but Instagram will auto play videos but Instagram makes you two-second buffer wait before it plays. Vine is more rapid, maybe due to its short length. There is no option for silencing video in both the apps.

The author is the technical writer at www.thinkdigitalworld.com and Living with ICT. He can be reached at kengb1@gmail.com.