If there's one true piece of advice I could offer to any blogger, it would be to choose your blogging platform carefully.  There are several viable options out there, but I have to say wholeheartedly, that I would recommend using WordPress.  When I first began blogging one year ago, I started out using Blogger.  I mean, it was free and very easy to use...perfect, right?  Not until just three weeks after I began, Blogger shut me down...without warning, and without reason.  All of my followers, my posts, EVERYTHING was gone.  What sounds like a horrendous experience, actually turned out to be one of the most fortuitous, for I ran to WordPress and to my own self-hosted site.  Blogger eventually reinstated my blog, but by that time, I was already happily blogging on WordPress.

If you are just starting out in the blogosphere, I would recommend putting a lot of time and thought into the theme you choose and make sure you are running a self-hosted site on WordPress.  One of the awesome features of WordPress is the myriad of FREE plugins available, which can do almost anything under the sun.  I wanted to include my list of absolute favorite WordPress plugins, which I think every blogger should check out.  Without further ado, here they are:

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Today's "Tackle It Tuesday" theme is going to address how to make your blog load faster as well as give you many more search engine links.  I'm fairly new to this whole blogging hobby, but I have been dealing with HTML code, in an amateurish way, for quite a while.

I'm a big believer in making any website or blog more streamlined, because there's nothing worse than waiting for what seems like an eternity, for a page to load.  I myself have left many people's blogs and have never returned, for just this reason.  Everyone's time is valuable and what could be slowing your site WAY DOWN is the abundant use of graphics.

I personally enjoy visiting Website Grader (http://websitegrader.com/) to fully analyze my blog for free.  Simply type in your blog address as well as your e-mail address, and Website Grader does the rest.  It will give you an in-depth report on a full scope of issues and even give you a numeric "grade" between 1 and 100.  My grade is currently a 75.  When I first started, it was a 62.  Here's what I did on "Tackle It Tuesday" to raise my score:

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