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Starting your own blog can be a great way to build your brand while developing a social network. It is the best medium to attract customers and visitors to share information, ideas and products. If you are good at something or have knowledge to share, blogging can be a great way to start your own business and build a brand around your area of expertise.

In order to build a successful blogging website, you need more than just the content. Good web hosting features are just as important because they give a better reading experience to your audience.

With that in mind, let’s look at some of the useful features offered by web development services that can add great value to your blogging skills.

Page Loading Time

Experts agree that page loading speed is the number one feature that blog writers need from their web hosting service provider. Internet users have become used to pages opening in a split second.

Browsing a blogging site that take longer than a second to load pages is frustrating and most people just give up. Your audience will immediately notice when your pages take a long time to open and they are more likely abandon the site then continue browsing.

Page loading times also affects search engine rankings. Google uses an algorithm to determine website ranking in its results. Websites with quicker page loading times are displayed higher in the search engine’s results.

Website Security

The security features on the website are also critical to running a reputable blog. Online hackers are always coming up with new ways to steal data or redirect website traffic for their own purposes. Make sure to find out from your web development service how secure the website will be against a variety of cyber threats.

There are several ways hackers can mess up your website if it is not secured appropriately.

  • They can take over control of your website, change content and steal data to blackmail you.
  • Hackers can also put in popups and links on your website that lead unsuspecting visitors to other dangerous websites.
  • If you have a payment system for products or services on your blogging website, hackers can hack it so that your customers’ payments get transferred into the hacker’s account instead of yours.
  • Hackers can also steal your visitor information including names, emails and other contact details that are generally submitted through any forms on your web pages.

Remember, the more visibility and traffic your website gets, the more it will attract hackers to test out your website’s defenses. Small businesses can do a lot to improve their website security, Talk to your website hosting company to find out what measures they have put in place for security. This will benefit you and your audience who trust that your website is safe enough to visit regularly.

Customer Service

Customer service standard of your website hosting service provider is also important. No matter how easy it is to set up the website on your own, you will eventually need help with some feature and need to contact the support team for the website hosting service.

If you have a difficult time getting in touch with their technical support team or don’t get the actual help you need, it can be a pretty good indication of what is to follow.

We suggest looking for a web hosting service that offers help 24/7. A web hosting service provider based in the LA, U.S. that only provides support during office hours is no good if you are running blog writing services in the UK. While it is easy to switch web hosting services these days, it is still an unnecessary headache that you should aim to avoid.

SEO Tools and Analytics

Fifteen years ago, SEO tools and traffic analysis wasn’t that important. If you had a well designed website with good content, that was all you needed to attract an audience to your blog writing services. That just isn’t good enough today. You also need to be good at SEO Tools and traffic analysis.

Designing your website and blogs in a way that is Search Engine Optimized (SEO) is necessary for getting an audience. The right web development service and hosting platform can give you tools that make this task a lot easier.

There are a host of guidelines that you can find online that are helpful in making a search engine friendly website. You can also hire a professional SEO advisory company to do it for you, but we advise against it until your business has really grown big enough to afford a professional.

Monetization and Ad Hosting

The end goal (or an important milestone) for most blog writers is to reach a point where their blogs attracts enough devoted followers that they can start making money from their blog writing services. There are several ways you can do this.

The first and most common method is through ads. Marketers want to display their products and services to potential buyers. If their buyers are on your website reading your blogs, marketers will find you and offer to put their ads on your website in exchange for an income.

A more advanced form of this monetization is recommendations and affiliate marketing. These are based on partnerships where bloggers get a commission for each sale generated through their recommendation or affiliate link. Affiliate marketing has built up a whole new industry although its role remains secondary to ads.

You can also build your own business around your blog. For example, if you love writing about plants, flower bouquets and gardening tools, you can set up your own gardening equipment or online nursery to sell products once you have a large audience of people interested in gardening.

There are as many businesses that came to online blogging to promote their wares as there are online bloggers that turned their blog writing services into an actual business that sells products and services online.

If your goal is to turn your blog into a money generating business, or it is something that you want to keep your options open for in the future, then you need to make sure that your web hosting provider offers the right features that makes it easy to accept online payments over time.

Data Backup

It is very important to have website backup for your blogging site. It takes months and years to build an amazing website. If your website crashes due to server or networking errors then you should be able to have backups in place that ensure your data is not lost.

The backup simply makes one or multiple copies of everything on your website that is kept on a server separate from the original website data. If the original data server crashes for any reason, the backup can be quickly put in place to keep the website online without disruptions.

Most web development services offer data backup as a free add-on to their service. Find out the website backup measures of your web hosting service provider and be aware of the steps you will need to take to ensure continuity in case of disruptions.

Putting It All Together

Successful blog writing involves more than just writing content regularly. While you don’t need to be a tech guru, you should be aware of some of the important features that your website will need in order to stand out from the rest of the crowd. We discussed six important features that your web development service must provide in order to have a good experience as a blogger.

Do you think we missed something? Let us know in the comments below!

Author Bio

Dave Brown is a Sr. Editor at Content Development Pros – a leading inbound marketing company that provides comprehensive content solutions, web design and development, SEO, and blog writing services to small and mid-sized businesses. With more than a decade of experience and over 60,000 completed projects to their credit, they enjoy the trust of hundreds of regular customers from all industries and parts of the world.