So many “newbie” internet marketers struggle with the logistics of designing their first sites. Learning to code tables, cSS, Adsense, affiliate code positioning and the associated heavy lifting learning curve in executing all of this in an aesthetically appealing way is robbing them of Their most precious resource: Time. I know this only because I wasted just about the first year of my online marketing experience on trying to design the perfect looking site. And with a constant stream of great sales and marketing messages brimming in my brain – I instead opted on perfecting the art of the *float* and *divs* and making for fancy rollover effects with my navigational links..:-) All of which made me a total of about zero dollars – which roughly translates into a piss poor ROI on time and effort spent launching my internet marketing empire! In the end I became pretty good at making pretty pages. And guess what – other than the inherent value in learning something new, it was – by and large, a complete and utter waste of time and energy.

And if you are just starting out and jogging down the very same path – it will be even more so for you. Why? Welcome to the wonderful world of WordPress! If you don’t already know, WordPress is a completely free, open source blogging platform that you install ( in about 5 minutes if you are really slow ) on your server. ( If your server is running Cpanel and Fantastico – which it probably does, you just cut that 5 minute investment down to 45 seconds or less. ) And while in its native *out of the box* condition it will act as a fully functioning website that sheds the moniker of a blog quicker than Clark Kent drops cape in a Manhattan phone booth – it will, properly configured with a few free plug ins -run equally as efficiently as a full featured CMS solution as well. With over 1000 themes available, ( the *skins* or templates that render the design and aesthetics of the site )designing beautiful looking sites has never been more of a breeze. Did I mention it’s free? And it has been tested robustly by hundreds of thousands of users, and even if you haven’t been paying attention, it’s likely that many of your favorite blogs are running WordPress.

Here are a few of the many features, benefits and advantages of choosing WordPress for your first foray into the wild and wacky world of internet marketing. 1) Plugins: WordPress has an active, open source community of developers who are constantly bringing forth great pieces of complementary code to integrate with the software – polls, podpress, and a hodgepodge of other geek speak you need know nothing about to leverage efficiently on your site to impress your visitors and maximize your moxey! 2) Categories and Tagging: Built in categories and site structure simplify otherwise complex organizational headaches, giving your site the benefit of both a) keyword focused organization ( categories ) with the added benefit of b) simple “tagging” – allowing your blog posts to be discovered easily throughout the “Web 2.0? social network of like minded people. 3)SEO Power: Leveraging the multitude of technologies and efficiencies of WordPress, it is not uncommon for my posts to show up in the major Search Engines less than 24 hours after publishing.

There are a number of convalescing factors which help make this happen – from leveraging RSS properly (both your own native WordPress feed and the feeds of others) to proper *pinging* protocols, to using social networking bookmarking on each and every post you want to see in the SERPs. This single point is far beyond the scope of one article, but it is powerful stuff and well worth exploring further. And with the slow migration of all of the major search engines to * quality * results, the days of trying to game Google with cloaked urls, re-directs and smart pages are well behind us, and that is a good thing. WordPress is perfect for affiliate sites, video blogs, ecommerce blogs, community sites an just about any other “white hat” solution you can think of! So stop playing with those *floating* divs and get to work. WordPress is waiting!