Three parts of blogging
1. Writing, photographing, and creating content
2. Sharing, promoting, and interacting with content
3. Updating website, maintaining server and domain, and backing up content
There are a lot more parts, but those are the three main things blogging boils down to for me. And each of these three things takes up a lot of time. Juggling a full time job, a part time job, and my blog is lot for me. I can't do it all. So I focus on doing what I love and what I'm good at. I love creating blog content for Her Heartland Soul and fostering conversations with my readers. I also love sharing and promoting said content on social media. I'm a social media marketer. It's my job. :D What I don't love to do? Understanding what the heck is going on with the back-end of Her Heartland Soul. Up until recently, I had never backed up my site. I updated a plugin a few months ago and found myself completely locked out of my site. Her Heartland Soul was just gone. Thank goodness I was able to get it back. But it really underscored how much I was playing with fire. I was putting all this time and effort into creating years worth of content, growing my community and sharing that content with the world. All it would take for all that to go away is one mistake on my part, one hacker, one virus.
While blogging is not my full time job, I still treat it like a business. And all businesses have profits (hopefully!) and expenses. I recently decided to hire professionals to take over management of the back-end of Her Heartland Soul. I went with a business called AcceleratedWP and I could not recommend them more fully.
If you have a self-hosted blog, you know you have to pay a company to host your site. It's for them providing you your little virtual space in the world wide web. With a traditional host that's typically all you get; a place to store your website and a monthly backup if you're lucky. While this was perfectly fine for me when I started out, it's no longer enough for me as I'm working on growing my blog.
AcceleratedWP is the perfect hosting option for those looking to take their blogs to the next level, and those blogs that are already there.
It is a completely white glove hosting service.
Your site is backed up daily. It's protected 24/7 so you never have to worry about losing your content or being hacked. If something does happen, they take care of everything for you. (Unlike other backups that simply email you a Zip folder of all your content that you then have to figure out what the heck to do with.) WordPress and its plugins are updated for you. You're matched one-on-one with an AcceleratedWP professional who is your go-to-contact for questions and queries. I cannot tell you how amazing it is to have a technical question or concern about my website and just be able to email Joe (one of the managing partners) and get a super fast response. It is such a weight off my shoulders. All setup and mitigation is free and you are given a 30 day money back guarantee. If this was all AcceleratedWP did, they'd be pretty amazing. But on top of the 24/7 monitoring, optimizing, and trouble-shooting they do for your site, they also make it faster. Like, a lot faster. They edited everything from my pictures to my pages to my ads to load faster. Her Heartland Soul went from having an average load time of 6.21 seconds to 3.16 seconds. That's a 96.5% increase in speed! I want my readers to love visiting my site. I want it to be easy, enjoyable, and fun to visit and read my posts. The faster viewers can read my content and view my pictures, the better.
AcceleratedWP's services are more expensive than traditional web hosting services. This is because they do so much more than traditional web hosting. And that expense is worth it to me to have peace of mind concerning my content and my site. It was time for me to make a serious investment in Her Heartland Soul's future, because I see it going big places! :D
If you're interested in investing in your website, AcceleratedWP was generous enough to offer a special deal to Her Heartland Soul readers. Now through the end of the month sign up for a Standard or Professional plan and receive 15% off your monthly price. Simply enter the code HERHEARTHALLOWEEN2014 at checkout.
If you're looking to take your blog to the next level and stop worrying about the technical side of things I 100% recommend AcceleratedWP. They have gone above and beyond my expectations and have made incredible improvements to my site.
[Tweet "How I'm taking my blog to the next level @AcceleratedWP #blogging"]
Questions of the Day: Do you have 24/7 backup protection on your site? What have you invested in on your blog? What is your favorite part of the three parts of blogging?
*This post contains my AcceleratedWP affiliate link.
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