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I posted previously how I wanted to introduce my brother to the world of online money making opportunities via the “Bum Marketing Method“. My brother has just returned back home after visiting with us last week. The first step was to warm him up to the idea of using a laptop computer and eventually accept it as a gift to take back home with him. The laptop is a Dell Vostro 1500 that I purchased on eBay and is a decent little laptop. I’ll post a full review of it here in a later post.

Prior to my brother’s arrival, I installed a few basic applications and created some bookmarks for sites that I thought might interest him. I also created a Live.com email account for him (apparently, MSN is expanding beyond HotMail). So the first step was to get him comfortable using the Dell laptop for very basic things such as sending and receiving email and Web browsing.

I forgot to mention that my brother was staying at my parents’ home and I had to convince my father to finally bite the bullet and get broadband cable installed. Fortunately, my brother’s visit was just the impetus he needed after hemming and hawing for almost a year about getting it put in.

It was then just a matter of buying a LinkSys wireless router and getting the laptop connected to the wireless network.

For the record, my brother isn’t completely unfamiliar with computers, but since he’s never personally owned one, computers aren’t an integral part of his life. Of course that may be sort of a blessing considering that just about every waking moment of mine sees me firmly planted in front of one.

During the week he was here visiting, I created a free WordPress blog to promote the band he works for. For any bar band worth its salt, not to have an online presence these days is pretty much unheard of, so he readily agreed to let me create a free blog for his. He did mention that they often receive incredulous stares when they tell people they don’t have a Web site for the band.

We worked together designing the basic layout and pages of the blog. He had mailed me some material on the band for my birthday a few months ago, which included a photo copy of a promo flyer, a band tank top, a CD, and a set list. I put my HP all-in-one printer to good use scanning in all these items to display on the blog.

I also used Micro Niche Finder to locate some long tail keywords to target.

I decided to go with WordPress’ free offering rather than Blogger. At least for the band site. I think I may opt for Blogger for a Bum Marketing site mainly because Adsense can be hosted on it. I didn’t see a need for Adsense on the band site and the WordPress themes are much nicer and WP has a friendlier management interface.

Here is a list of the limitations that I ran into with the free WordPress blog. There may be others that I didn’t run across yet and the ones below may have workarounds that I’m not aware of:

–Can’t host images or other files beyond a custom header image and an avatar for posts. Edit (05/01/08) - actually you receive 3G of storage with the free WP version and you can upload image, docs, and even Mp3 files to your account.

–No email accounts - obviously.

–No additional plugins may be installed beyond the default ones provided by WP. At least the Akismet anti-spam plugin is a default plugin for free blogs.

–No built-in support for tracking visitor stats, though it might be possible to add something like Statcounter if Javascript can be inserted into the every page and post, which would be a major pain. Edit (05/01/08) - upon more careful observation there is a “Blog Stats” tab in the admin panel that allows to you basic stats such as visitors, page views, and referrers.

–No ability to hack the theme and the only customization I can see is setting the sidebar widgets.

–The free version randomly inserts Snapshots advertising links. This is probably the most annoying limitation of the free version.

So as you can see, a free WordPress blog is pretty limited. However, if you are on a shoe string budget as well as severely challenged technically, then it will do in a pinch.

You can view the blog we created here: Minnesota Bar Bands

Just giving the Bro a little link juice…

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