Squarespace is an easy and inexpensive blogging platform.
As an internet marketer, you need a hub, a center of value, created for internet cruisers looking for what you and your business have to offer.Don’t get sidetracked by arguments about whether you should build a blog or a website. Use Squarespace to build your central information hub and get the advantages of both—without the potential costs and technical headaches. Attract prospects to your business. Help people who are interested in what you have to offer find you and your business.
As a beginner, you could figure it out yourself, pay a designer or use a website builder provided by a hosting service. Figuring it out could cost significant learning time. Paying a designer will cost significant money upfront and when you want to make changes. Using a website builder adds huge limitations when you want to find or change a template, add a blog or other features.
Squarespace is a great internet marketing tool because it's a new generation content development and management system that allows you to choose the features you add as modules. It’s easy to choose to add a new section, a journal page (for blogging), a web page, a gallery or a forum. Click here to see a list of Squarespace features.
Squarespace for Beginners: Cost Effective and Easy
Squarespace offers a free trial, no credit card needed, for 14 days. If you spend a couple of hours every day for a week working with it, your new business hub will be set up and ready to show off before your trial period is over. It will cost you about what it would cost you to host a static web site, from $7 to $25 a month but you won’t have to be a trained geek with knowledge of html or css—and you won’t have to hire one either.
Alternatively, you could build a website (or maybe you already have one). They are relatively hard to build, almost always expensive to build and host, and difficult to get search engines to fall in love with so that you get traffic.
There are other blogging platform options: Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad -- that are relatively easy to set up, easily updatable and free or inexpensive (at least at an initial getting started level). However, I find them very hard to customize and get them to look the way I want them to look and function the way I want them to function.
So, although they may be free, I’ve spent a significant amount of time experimenting with web and blog development that could have been better spent doing what I do well instead of fooling around with technical issues that I sometimes end up paying someone else to solve for me anyway (usually after making a complete mess of my project). My mistake.
Creative and sometimes fun, yes. Practical and good business sense, no.
Don’t make that blunder. Use the right tools from the beginning and get your web of content off to a running start.
Squarespace Advantages
Easy for beginners. In a matter of hours you can have your first well-designed website up and running with a landing page, blog, photos, videos.
Powerful enough for experts. See the features list and take it for a test drive to see why you might choose to move your other sites to Squarespace.
Well-designed pages. You can choose from a lot of templates (but not so many you’ll get dizzy or sidetracked) and you can customize them like a pro without learning a new language or programming skills.
Great support. Squarespace offers clear and dedicated support both online and through their technical support team. Don’t hesitate to call on support to help you through any difficulties you encounter.
Search engine optimization. You would pay big bucks anywhere else for what is built into Squarespace to get noticed by the search engines and into position for capturing traffic to your new web of content.
Hosting. I choose having my web pages and blog pages hosted so I don’t have the headaches that come with supporting hosting. I choose Squarespace hosting because their servers are dedicated to hosting Squarespace, nothing else.
Cost. Squarespace isn’t free but it does have a unique combination of simplicity and function for a reasonable price. It’s a great value in terms of reliability and design.
Traffic statistics. Many blog platforms would require a third-party plug-in to give you traffic statistics. If you don’t know what a third party plug-in is, join a very large club. If you do, you understand what a boon this feature is—and what a great value. As a business owner, you want this data, trust me.
Squarespace: Getting Started
Power into your creation of a web of content that attracts visitors by using Squarespace to build the heart of your web content system.
Get one-on-one help from a Renegade Super Guide. Don’t let speed bumps or road blocks stop your progress. Stay in confident action with any support you need. We’re here and we are people who have powered through this learning curve successfully.
SquareSpace, "The Secret Behind Exceptional Web Sites"
Squarespace in one of those Internet marketing tools providing options for every marketer to make a blog to focus their marketing one.
Squarespace is a great place to begin your content submission. It's a blogging platform with many more qualities than your free versions. It only costs betwen 8 and 15 dollars a month, depending on the package you decide on. You can always start with the smallest package and upgrade later if you choose. Let me give you an over all picture of some of the qualities of Squarespace, in their words.
1. Build your site.
Squarespace breaks the parts of your site down into bricks. Snap these together to make the site you want.
2. Choose your style.
Squarespace only provides designs from name-brand designers, giving you only what you want
3. Relax.
Remember that $5,000 you were going to spend to hire a web designer? Keep it.
The Platform: Reliability from the Beginning
You're looking at a Squarespace website.
Check out this web site. It's a Squarespace website. We run our business website off of the same exact systems, using the same exact accounts that we sell to our customers. That means if your site is down, so is ours. Since we run a profitable and well performing business, it better not be down for long.
Nothing to set up, nothing to tweak, nothing to install, nothing to scale, nothing to optimize (SEO).
Squarespace is a completely managed system. We take care of all the tricky details in setting up your site, which means that there is no software to install, nothing to upgrade and that your site will stay online through the most massive traffic storms. Further, we've already used every trick in the book to ensure your site gets picked up by search engines. New features are constantly deployed so that your site is always up to date.
True cloud hosting.
Running a huge site? Getting featured on Digg and Slashdot all the time? You need Squarespace. All sites are hosted on all of our web servers -- which means you never have to worry about a single server failing. The traffic generated from being on the front page of Digg is nothing compared to what the thousands of sites hosted on Squarespace see in a single day. A normal day for the architecture serving your Squarespace site is serving tens of millions of hits. Compare this to the crippling effect this would have on your slice of resources on a shared web host — you wouldn't stay online long enough to receive the traffic from your press.
We have real people monitoring your website 24 hours a day.
Squarespace monitors hundreds of functional aspects of our system automatically every 20 seconds. We eliminate the cost of setting up your own monitors and we take the worry out of your site going down. Squarespace automates the next human resolution step when we've got a hardware failure, and our engineers are on call 24x7 to handle any issue that may arise.
Anti spam system.
Every Squarespace site comes equipped with a network-aware anti-spam system that prevents spam from ever reaching your Squarespace site. Because of our unique access to tens of thousands of hosted sites, Squarespace collects a massive amount of real-time spam data which is used in our spam blocking process -- a process developed over half a decade of experience, and one that is impossible for the independent site owner to replicate without plugins.
Tier 1 data center, world class infrastructure.
On the web, some bandwidth is cheap, and some is expensive — the cost difference comes down to reliability. Some web hosts who run single servers connected to unreliable providers can offer very large bandwidth at dirt cheap prices. Our infrastructure is the complete opposite. At Squarespace, our service is world class, so our partners are world class too.
We don't run our own data center — we aren't experts at that. We're experts at software. We rely on real data-center experts —Peer1 Networks — for our connectivity and power sources. It isn't cheap — the bandwidth at a world class data center costs more than commodity grade co-location facilities that are prone to power and network failures. How good is Peer1? They not only remained online during the NYC blackout a few years ago — but were nice enough to lend their power to some neighbors in need.
The Site Builder: Everything in One Place
Like building blocks for the web. With our 20+ core modules, you can snap your site together in seconds.
Pages and features in Squarespace are broken into blocks that you snap together to make your site. This takes out all the plug-in hacking and complicated integration most systems require and lets you get right down to business. Building a photo gallery into your website is as easy as choosing the photo gallery module (block) and adding it to your navigation. All you have to do is add your pictures. All the technical stuff is handled behind the scenes for you by Squarespace.
Drag and drop control.
Moving pages around your site is as easy as dragging and dropping them. Need a drop down menu in your top navigation? Just drop a folder of links in the top bar and Squarespace creates the drop down menu for you. It isn't just navigation that you can drag and drop either, entire sections of content can be moved between columns with ease.
Rapid on-site editing.Want to add content? Perhaps edit something you already wrote? Want to trash something all together? No problem. Our rapid on-site content editing tool will assist you every step of the way. Your content can be manipulated on your site with no third party tools required.
Complete ownership: Your Domain. Your ads. Your branding. Your profit.
When you sign-up for Squarespace, there is no hidden agenda. It is 100% your site and your content. There is no way for anyone to know you are using Squarespace. Use your own domain name for the complete self-branded experience. When you are a paying customer (as is everyone else on our system) you get treated like a member of an elite group and ads and shady business don't fit in that equation.
One single platform, infinite possibilities.
The great thing about Squarespace is that everything you need is in one spot. You don't need to scrape the Internet for plug-ins to get the features you want on your site. Those features, and hundreds of other powerful options are built into every Squarespace account. No longer do you need a blogging service and a separate service for your portfolio site. Squarespace requires no third party software.
Design: Total Creative Control
Templates that aren't templated.
Squarespace sites come with 60+ professional designed style variants from brand name designers. Every style on Squarespace allows point and click control over every single element of the design. Each template contains a number of color and style variants, and each variant can be further refined and customized to ensure that your site looks completely unique. In other words, you have infinite possibilities when it comes to how your site looks.
Choose from over 14 templates and 60 professionally designed styles.
You're not stuck in a cookie cutter design.
The presentation of your site is independent of its content, allowing you to switch the style of your site without having to worry about your site "breaking". With our theme designer, you can create new looks for your site with a few simple clicks. Every element of your site is clickable and yours to change in real-time right before your eyes. You're no longer at the mercy of a web designer, you can do it yourself.
Squarespace can be anything you want it to be.
One, two, three column. Multiple top navigation variants. Drop down menus. Every single Squarespace design supports any column and navigation arrangement you can dream of. Pages can be moved between regions by dragging and dropping them.
Behind the pretty interface and glossy sliders lies a hardcore, developer friendly foundation. Skip all the WYSIWYG and dig right into the CSS for fine grained control over every element on the page. You'll be amazed at how fast you can deploy sites with Squarespace and you can even allow for clients to make small changes themselves.
Control: Better Site Management
Real-time visitor analytics, pagerank tracking, and more - all in one place
Total control: update any part of your site, at any time, right from the front of your site. No developer help required. No waiting.
Who better to manage your site than you? We built our comprehensive platform so bloggers and business owners alike would be equipped with not only the ability to have an attractive site, but to understand what's going on with visitor behavior. We lay out all the numbers you want to see in an attractive useful way. What does this mean for you? Don't worry about plugging in third party analytics tools or being an analytics guru. Your site automatically comes with this information ready to be discovered, all you have to do it click a button, and you're off on your way to knowing your visitor behavior.
No software to manage, no software to update, no plug-ins to patch, no server that can crash.
When we mentioned that you don't need anything but Squarespace, we meant it. You have full control over everything from journal posting to creating a whole new look. After having control of your own site, we bet you'll never go back to paying someone to do it ever again.
Help: Personalized, Unparalleled Support
Rapid, non-outsourced, human support.
Our experienced support staff is on call to handle any concern or question you may have. Issues are always escalated to engineers quickly, and platform engineers are constantly monitoring the support system to ensure perfection. In other words, we respect our customers and listen when they speak.
In-depth user manual and FAQ.
Have questions? We have the answers. Our extensive Help Manual and FAQ section is constantly updated so you have access to relevant, concise answers from our staff. More than words on a page, we have an ever growing collection of video tutorials to help you along the way as well. Explore the User Manual.
Real-time site build videos.
We have found that people tend to learn Squarespace best by watching it in action. Knowing that, we have created videos of taking a design all the way from concept to a finished live site, showing you every step in between. Watch them now.
Developer forums.
Just because Squarespace is ridiculously easy doesn't mean it isn't powerful. Underneath the pretty exterior is a full-blown CMS with all the tricks and features you would expect from any top of the line system. Fine grained CSS control, injectable code regions and a valid XHTML framework are just the tip of the iceberg. We have a healthy, growing community of Squarespace developers sharing code and tips every day. Take a look.
Advanced: Developer Friendly System
Developer Dashboard: Manage multiple accounts.
With the new Developer Dashboard, managing multiple accounts becomes extremely easy. Login, upgrade, downgrade and manage all your Squarespace sites from one master account. There is even a tiered discount for multiple accounts.
Developer templates with 100% CSS control.
As a developer you have control over every element in the system via CSS and Javascript. You can write custom CSS to style the site any way you want, then pass it off to your client who can then work within the WYSIWYG interface. No more FTPing files and waiting for uploads. Write your CSS, save it, and see it applied to your site - all within Squarespace.
Spend time on your client designs, not on their site setup.
Squarespace will save you an immense amount of time. Our platform, templates, and code are all solid and tested, saving you time. With Squarespace you are already 50% done when you start, helping you make more money on each site you build.
Reliable platform means no hosting to worry about.
With a superior infrastructure and 24/7 management, you can bet Squarespace is reliable. Give peace of mind to your clients and that will be one less thing you both have to worry about. No setting up hosting, configuring files, managing uptime etc., we handle all of that for you. You get to focus on the things a developer should be doing: developing.
Hand off small updates to your clients.
Squarespace makes the advanced easy. We allow people of all skill levels to control and update their websites. Squarespace is intuitive enough that your clients can make all the little changes and updates that need to be made to their site. Try it free.
This article was written by Michelle Moseley. Michelle is an Internet Attraction Marketer and she loves helping others learn how to correctly market any business online. With the help of The Renegade University, Michelle is available to assist you as you bring your business online.
Contact Michelle if she can help you with your marketing.
Wordpress is one of the best internet marketing tools around... a free blog hosting site. There are many choices when it comes to blog hosting sites. In this article I am going to explain as much as I can about this one.
It takes seconds to get set up and costs nothing
You can get a blog started in less time than it takes you to read this sentence. All you need is an email address. You’ll get your own WordPress.com address (like you.wordpress.com), a selection of great free and customizable designs for your blog (we call them themes), 3 gigabytes of file storage (that’s about 2,500 pictures!) and all the other great features listed here. You can blog as much as you want for free, your blog can be public to the world or private for just your friends, and our premium features are completely optional.
Get started with a Free Renegade Professional test drive at Renegade University, and learn more about how a WordPress blog can be your powerhouse attraction marketing platform.
Dozens of gorgeous themes
You can change the look of your blog with over 60 attractive themes ranging from professional to fun to crazy, and you can switch themes instantly with just a click of a button. Each theme allows you to customize your sidebar using widgets, and several themes let you upload your own photo or image for the header bar. We add themes regularly based on user requests. If you’re a CSS pro, you can also customize your CSS code.
Integrated stats system
One of the most popular features is the stats system. It’s designed to give you up-to-the-minute stats on how many people are visiting your blog, where they’re coming from, which posts are most popular, and which search engine terms are sending people to your blog. It’s also available as a plug-in for self-hosted WordPress.
A great tool for writing
It’s easy to create great posts with WordPress.com. Uploading photos is easy, as is using services like Flickr or Photobucket. You can embed videos from YouTube or Google. And they know how frustrating it is to lose hours of work, so when you’re writing they continuously save your post, just in case.
Let’s get those 15 minutes
When you write a post and add relevant tags, WordPress automatically add them to their global tag system and tag surfer, driving new traffic as other people interested in the same topics as you will find your post and leave comments on your blog. You’ll be at the top of their Blogs of the Day in no time.
We kill spam dead
WordPress.com uses Akismet, the world’s best comment and trackback spam technology. It blocks spammers from leaving comments on your blog. We also shut down spam blogs that try to sneak onto WordPress.com (so your blog won’t be in the same community as some Viagra-touting site).
Great help if you need it
If you have questions about using or extending your blog, WordPress has got some of the most responsive support around. They have friendly fellow users in the forums and on their support team who will help you out. There is great documentation, a support contact form, and the forums are active 24 hours a day.
Like a rock
WordPress runs hundreds of servers in three datacenters (Dallas, San Francisco, San Antonio) with instant copies of all your data and uploads in each. This allows them to serve your blog very quickly, and also if something catastrophic were to happen, like California falling into the ocean or Dallas being hit by a meteor, your blog would be okay.
You’re in good company
You’d be surprised who’s blogging on WordPress.com. WordPress hosts CNN’s Political Ticker; Dow Jones’ All Things D; Fox’s GretaWire; Time Inc’s The Page; People Magazine’s Style Watch; famous bloggers like Dan Lyons, Om Malik, Curt Schilling, and Robert Scoble; blogs for Flickr and Second Life; and many more.
Pick up where you left off
Importer, if you already have a blog and would like to move it over to WordPress.com, you can import your content from Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, TypePad, or an existing WordPress blog.
Over 50 languages
So far, WordPress has been able to offer native versions of WordPress.com in over 50 languages. Not just their home page—we’re doing Blogs of the Day, forums, and even tags in whatever language you prefer. If you’re a polyglot, you can help with the community translation process.
A great blogging community
WordPress.com is a community and conversations continue from one blog post to another and through the comments. Their tag surfer feature makes it easy for you to find like minded bloggers interested in the same topics as you and connect with them.
Multiple blogs and multiple authors
You can have as many blogs as you want! You’re only limited by your imagination. You can have group blogs with multiple authors who are allowed to post or contribute. This is great for topic blogs for things like books or politics, or just a blog for you and your friends in one place.
Privacy options, including members-only blogs
WordPress.com allows you to have a completely public blog, a blog which is public but not included in search engines or their public listings, or a private blog which only members can access. If you want a public blog, but only occasionally post something private, they have a per-post password option, too!
Sidebar widgets for Flickr, del.icio.us, Meebo, and more
You can add “widgets” to your sidebar and rearrange them without touching any HTML code or messing up your blog. Just drag and drop the sidebar widgets around, and instantly you can have fun stuff in your sidebar. They are adding new widgets all the time based on your feedback and requests.
Track replies to your comments
When you’re signed in and leave a comment on WordPress.com, they have a special page which notifies you of any followups to your comment so you can easily follow your conversations no matter what blog they’re on.
Not just a blog
WordPress.com has a feature called “pages” which allows you to easily create web pages. For example, you could add an “about me” page with your biography, and a link to that page would be automatically added to your sidebar. You can even create an entire web site using pages on WordPress.com, with a custom home page and your blog as one of the sub-pages.
No lock-in
You can leave WordPress.com any time you want and your content isn’t locked in. They provide a complete XML export of all your posts and comments.
Advertising
To support the service, they may occasionally show Google text ads on your blog, however they do this very rarely. You can remove ads from your blog for a low yearly fee. In the future you’ll be able to show your own ads and make money from your blog.
Digging it? Sign up for a blog with WordPress, or check out their awesome premium features.
Tutorials for Making WordPress a Breeze
WordPress.tv - http://www.wordpress.tv • Simple video tutorial site created by the team behind WordPress • Comprehensive videos on a variety of topics including installation, integration, publishing, themes, SEO, comments, widgets and much more
WordPress.org Support - http://wordpress.org/support/ • Features information straight from the source • How-to information and knowledgebase on just about every topic • Getting started resources, FAQs and an active discussion forum
SpeckyBoy.com - http://speckyboy.com/2008/03/08/ 63-essential-wordpress-hacks-tutorials-help-files-and-cheats/ • An expansive list of WordPress tutorials, hacks, and help files • Detailed descriptions of tricks to expand Wordpress’ functionality • Features a wide variety of common and uncommon WordPress tips WPCandy.com - http://wpcandy.com/articles/tutorials/the-wordpress-help-sheet.html • Comprehensive PDF help sheet with code snippets & template files • Available in several languages
WPCandy.com Advanced Tips - http://wpcandy.com/articles/ tutorials/the-advanced-wordpress-help-sheet.html • Advanced PDF help sheet with specific code snippets and what it’ll do for your site • Explanations are very clear and concise.
This post was submitted by Michelle Moseley. Michelle is a Internet Network Marketer, implementing the techniques taught at the Renegade Professional. Michelle is available for assistance if you need it. Just give her a call toll free. 1-800-363-4918 and leave a detailed message. Michelle will return your call.
Monday, June 22, 2009 at 06:35PM 
