TypePad, We Love You! Here's Why...

“Why do you recommend TypePad.com for blogging? What features make it better for professionals than the free platforms?”

We get asked this question frequently.

We believe most professionals have a lot to do simply running their businesses. Marketing should be as automated as possible, while maintaining a personal touch. Of course, blogging is a near perfect medium for communicating your message to a global audience in an informal, personal manner.

We don’t want any tasks interfering with this important marketing tactic. With Typepad as a blogging platform, all the back-end tech issues are taken care of for you. All you really have to do is focus on writing relevant content for your readers.

You don’t have to mess with coding, or plug-ins, or customizing it if you don’t want to. It’s all done for you, practically.

TypePad is easy to learn and you get responsive tech support.  Many free platforms do not have any support at all.
   
Even setting up a blog on Typepad isn’t complicated, although you do need to learn a few things. That’s why we wrote Build a Better Blog ebook.  Six Apart, the parent company of TypePad, is constantly adding new features; you don’t have to research what’s best, they provide it for you.
 

Many of the features, or widgets, are as easy to add as a click of a button.

They provide many ways to manage communication with your reader. Pinging, trackback and comment spam protection are integrated features – no installation necessary.

You can easily customize your blog with colors that complement your website or logo and also by adding a banner.

Your blog resides on the TypePad servers; you don’t have to be responsible for back ups or upgrading the software.

You have a separate domain name for your blog, thus providing “two fishing poles in the pond” that is the World Wide Web.

If you're not a techie and don't want to mess with HTML, php, CSS or any other programming language, then TypePad is a top-notch professional solution. 

The fee for an account is very small (as little as $4.95 per month) for the amount of flexibility, customization and support you get.
 
TypePad is designed with small business in mind.  It's perfect for commercial use such as promoting your business, products, services and books. Some of the free platforms, like Blogger and Wordpress.com discourage using their blogs for commercial purposes and will shut it down without warning if they feel you violate their terms of service. 

Blogger (Blogspot) blogs all have a banner at the top inviting readers to go to the next blog.  You never know where that will take YOUR visitor.  We've heard stories about customers clicking on that link and landing on blogs with pornography.

Comments

[VDO Vault]

The thing with wordpress.com is that it makes sense to use it if you have no idea if doing a blog is going to be a worthwhile venture for you rather than paying money (even tiny sums add up) for something that may or may not work for you.

If your blog blossoms bigtime or is going to be super mega mondo corporate or doing bigtime online commerce then you can pretty easily move a .com freebie blog over to a wordpress.org pay for your own hosting blog and get way more customization than you can imagine. Also you can choose amongst multiple hosts for wordpress.org blogs.

Oh and there are tons of 3rd party developers constantly making neat stuff for wordpress.org (some of which is 100% free)...the neatest best working things things show up at the freebie wordpress.com as well.

Just my 2 cents but I wouldn't go with a TypePad blog first...the money you save you could apply towards a blog squad course or two.

[Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad]

You are assuming that a business person has the skills required to install and operate a Wordpress blog. We have clients that don't, and even one who does, who still hires a consultant to help with his wordpress blog. Sure there are tons of 3rd party developers making neat stuff and you still have to figure out how to use the neat stuff on your blog. I'd rather have Typepad figure it out, and for $15/month, it's the best money I've ever paid to a web software company. Like our clients, I'd rather spend my time writing and making money rather than fiddling with my blog. But that's just me...

[Matt Dunaway]

Are there any drawbacks of using the "domain mapping" offered by TypePad versus having your own domain and blogging with Movable Type or WordPress? Specifically, if I use Typepad's domain mapping, will I hurt the page-rank of my domain I have mapped with Typepad?

[Kathy Sena]

Great post! I, too, use TypePad. Love it. I did decide to get a domain name through Go Daddy, and to use masking along with forwarding, so that readers will see only my domain name and not the original name for the blog, which had the word "typepad" in the URL. Just seemed a bit more professional.

I'm really pleased with how this worked out, and the tech support at Go Daddy has been stellar. I had some questions up front and their phone support was right on target. I highly recommend them.

[Jan]

I love this post...and the comments...and I love my Typepad. In the social blogosphere it seems like Blogger or free Wordpress.com is what most people use, and eventually they migrate over to a self-hosted Wordpress. I'm glad I went for Typepad from the very first beginning.

[SEO Perth]

Typepad is what I use in all my blog because of the same reasons stated in this post. I love its texture and simplicity plus the very important part is that it suites my needs. Thanks for sharing really love reading this post.

[SEO Perth]

I admit that I am a big WordPress fan but I am beginning to like TypePad, too.

[Carol]

I agree! Blogging platforms should also fit the needs of the blogger. I shouldn't be complicated to use unless he can work around it. It is so much like a mobile phone: you should choose one that you can utilize. Not a feature packed one where the features aren't used.