May 2017 – Mature Finance

Getting Started With Blogging

So you have an idea for the topic of your blog whats next.

Well first you need to decide if you are going to have custom domain. To find out more read our article here on custom domains.

WordPress Hosts

Once you have a custom domain if you decided to buy one you will need to find a WordPress host. A WordPress host is a company who are going to host your blog for you, there are many advantages and disadvantages that different hosts offer. Read our post here.

Writing Your First Post

Writing your first post can be hard, it can be difficult to know what to write about and newbies often find it tough to get started. Read our guide here to help you get started.

Attracting Visitors

Once you have some content on your site you need to start getting visitors, there are many different ways of getting visitors to your site. Read our article here to find out more about how you can attract visitors to your site.

Monetising Your Blog

Monetising your blog is an important task, there are many different ways to generate money from your blog. Read our guide here on the different methods available to you.

Custom Domains

Custom Domains

A custom domain would be for example www.yourname.com rather than www.wordpress.yourname.com.

Custom domains give your site more authenticity and make them stand out from other sites. You will also rank higher in search engines if you have a custom domain.

Custom domains do come at a cost though, however this is normally a small fee and is worth it for the difference it will make to your blog.

Once you have decide if you are going to get a custom domain you need to decide what your going to call your blog so that you can get a matching domain name.

Try to keep the name of your blog short, simple and catchy. Then pick a domain name based on that. Lets say your going to have a blog about fishing, you would not want to call your blog plenty of fish as there is already a dating site called this which could cause legal issues and will also make it more difficult to get traffic to your site. So you could go with something like “ontherod” you could then get the domain ontherod.co.uk.

How to get a custom domain

In order to get a custom domain you go to a domain registrar. Currently reg123.co.uk are offering 15% off .co.uk domains here.

You can also buy a domain name from 1&1 who also offer dedicated WordPress hosting so it could be worth looking to see if one of their package deals works for you.

You can get a custom domain and view 1&1’s other services here.

Managing Debt

Debt is very common these days, but knowledge of different ways to manage debt are not so common. We will explain in this article a number of ways to help manage debt and improve your financial standing.

Interest Rates

The most important part when it comes to managing debt is the interest rates. The interest rate is how much money you are paying to owe that money.

The first thing to do is check the interest rate of your debt/s, if you have multiple debts sort these in order of the interest rate from highest to lowest.

Then the next thing to do is to see if the highest interest rate debt can be moved to a lower interest rate.

For example if you have a credit card debt that has an interest rate of 20% APR you may be able to get a 0% balance transfer credit card and transfer the balance to this.

Once all the debts that can be moved to lower interest rates have been moved. The next step is to manage the payment amounts paid to each lender.

Multiple Debts

In the case of multiple debts it’s always cheeper long term to make the minimum payments on the lower interest debts and pay more of the higher interest debts.

For example if you have two credit cards and one has a rate of 15% and the other has a rate of 5%, it would be better to make the minimum payment on the 5% credit card and make extra payments to pay off as much as you can of the higher rate credit card until the balance is cleared.

It may seam to make sense to clear off the lower debt and then pay more on the higher debt but this will cost more in the long run.

Consolidation Loans

There are also debt consolidation loans available. These can be useful as they allow multiple debts to be combined into one simple monthly payment. However they could end up being more expensive long term.