Wordpress.com & Wordpress.org: What is the difference? Why are there 2? Which one is right for you?

Key Takeaways

hey miles here miles becker.com this video is all about WordPress we're going to talk about the two different types of Wordpress so you can identify which one is for you so you can move forward confidently growing your business online if you're already using Wordpress or you tried WordPress before and found it to be really difficult please let me know in the comments I would love your feedback from people who are using Wordpress to build their funnels or tried and were unsuccessful so let me know what you think in the comments because if I need to teach a separate non-wordpress a little bit simpler solution to help you grow a business online I'm open to teaching that but I need to know I need your feedback so if you love WordPress let me know in the comments if you tried it and you got stuck in the tech and you got stuck in that learning curve and it was a huge roadblock let me know in the comments cool with that out of the way and with that said now I want to talk about the two types of Wordpress because this can be a little bit confusing to people who are getting started there's two main types of Wordpress wordpress.com and wordpress.org now wordpress.com is a hosted Solution that's pre-made for you that you can plug into and begin creating content on with essentially zero server side work now they being WordPress hosts this for you and generally you're going to operate it through a subdomain so it could be like miles. wordpress.com and you obviously can indeed mask it with your domain now this is not the type of Wordpress when I'm saying I recommend people use WordPress to grow their business I'm talking about the wordpress.org wordpress.org is a foundation it's an open-source software application that anyone can download can can rework can manipulate you can work with a code but the most important thing is we can all download it and install it to a web server this is called selfhosted WordPress and this is where you get the full ability to Leverage The Power of the different plugins the different themes and when you can start to create really fancy stuff with your WordPress sit such as sales funnels opt-in funnels popups uh membership sites Etc you can even build it out to be forums or even Ecommerce applications when you're on the wordpress.com the hosted version it's a lot more like blogger was back in the day or some of those kind of old school pre-made you can choose one or two templates you can write on it but that's about it wordpress.com is more or less an alternative to Tumblr or medium and that's all if you're looking to build a funnel if you're looking to gather leads and to create an opt-in page and ultimately sell products and grow a business online you are going to need to work with the wordpress.org version of Wordpress because that's self-hosted this is where you can install shopping carts you can install membership programs you can sell mult multiple different types of products you can charge people tax you can tie it into Merchant accounts so you can actually execute charges and essentially grow a full business so what's required to run a wordpress.org website well number one you need some basic website hosting and then number two you'll want to at least kind of get a custom theme you can definitely start and use the default theme but I do recommend the Thrive themes package it's a custom theme now I've got a video series um I call it the DIY sales fun funnel series and I show how to build a sales funnel on WordPress in a series of I believe seven or eight videos I'll make sure that pops up right above here so you can get access to those and we start at the very beginning how to register your domain name how to get your hosting set up with WordPress on that hosting I walk you through everything and from there you'd have WordPress installed and you can start to blog on it you could turn it into a kind of a brochure website for your brick-and mortar business you could turn it into a sales funnel or you could a little bit of each cool thing about a wordpress.org self-hosted site you can run as many funnels as you'd like from one domain so if you get a nice broad domain that matches the different kind of aspects or angles of your business you can run all of those different entrance points all of those different free giveaways and multiple different product offerings right there from one website total cost to do it yourself on a wordpress.org based self-hosted site um the hosting is going to cost you about $100 per year you can usually start paying monthly or quarterly and it's about 9 10 bucks a month if you go that route the theme family that I use and recommend is a little over $100 per year I believe um but you can also get that quarterly and at quarterly I think you're paying about 30 bucks a month um so the price goes up if you pay quarterly because you're you're making more installments over the course of a year you get a little price break if you go for the year um that's really the basics now if you're in a position where you're like you know what I love the idea I love I'm a writer I love writing and I just want to kind of start writing I don't want to deal with any of the tech and I just want to get going I want to get momentum on my side maybe you want to do a 90day challenge where you write one blog post a day for 90 days and treat it like a diary of sorts or a web log like the old school version of what a Blog once was when we just kind of wrote our thoughts down for the world wordpress.com is a great place to do that because it makes the process of creating content super simple you don't have to deal with the hosting you choose one of a few themes they're going to attempt to upsell you on items if you go the wordpress.com route you don't need to buy into any of those upsells I recommend ignoring them all and saying no to them all and just start writing really cool option is if you start writing and doing the content marketing on wordpress.com you can export that and then import it to your own wordpress.org website in the future so you can have a custom website made you can get all those kind of custom functionalities built out over time like installing the yast SEO plugin so you can maximize your reach on the search engines making an opt-in page so you can grow an email list creating a shopping cart or adding on a shopping cart so you can ultimately sell products or access to a members membership site or to selling services as well so there is a potential to start at the wordpress.com to write and write and get going but ultimately if you've been on my videos before in particular and you understand building a business online is all about converting cold traffic to leads and leads to customers through a simple marketing or sales funnel then you will need to be on the hosted version and you will need to make sure you get a theme family that allows you to build a funnel right a dedicated landing page a dedicated sales page with no other options around it and that's the Thrive themes family I'll have some links Below in the description that can help you get access to all those bits and pieces but I really do recommend that you check out that um the the DIY sales funnel video series if you haven't started building your site on WordPress yet CU I do show very very clearly like click here download this click here go there I really walk through the entire process start to finish with my goal being as helpful as possible now again if you've been through work if you've tried WordPress in the past or you're going through WordPress right now and you're feeling like the challenges of the tech are kind of overwhelming you and you're wondering if there's maybe a simpler platform to build a funnel or to build a basic website um that you can leverage so you can move on to Market marketing right making your YouTube videos doing your podcasting Etc uh let me know in the comments please because there are some additional options that I could potentially teach and there's one that I'm looking at that's kind of interesting to me um I'm not necessarily considering changing off of WordPress but I do have a a developer on my team who I leverage to do a lot of the work and I learned all of this myself with zero like background in computer technology um zero background in coding Etc so I am self-taught so I know it's it is possible to be self-taught and most people who are through the learning curve and have taught themselves they actually love WordPress once they get to a certain point but I'm just curious if there's a segment of my audience here who is getting stuck and on the other side of that coin if you're using Wordpress you made it through the learning curve you find it to be pretty easy and you're you're crushing it right now definitely let me know because I want both sides of that story in the comments so I can get a good idea of where you're at with your business online and whether WordPress is being of service to you or whether you're already using or considering another platform to me WordPress is by far the best in the world at what it does but there are some challenges with it such as server management and the potential of adding on all these plugins because it's like wow I can add a plugin to do everything and then you start getting plugins conflicting with each other and we can kind of create our own challenges make our WordPress sites heavy so they load slow um so it's not 100% intuitive and there is definitely a learning curve and that's it I hope this video has clarified for you the two different types of Wordpress that you can use I hope you understand now which WordPress version is best for you the dot if you just want to blog and write and that's you're kind of a writer at heart you want to keep a web log of things or the hosted version if you want to build funnels and you want to build a real business online that's definitely the self-hosted version and check out the DIY sales funnel video series if you search that in in YouTube or if you go to my channel listing then you can go look at the playlists on my channel and you'll see exactly I've got it pull on in a playlist there for you and I'll be putting out more videos for you moving forward again that feedback in the comments helps me a ton to make sure I am tailoring these videos in a way that's going to help you grow the business online that you desire ultimately and that's it for this video so thank you very much for your time get at me in the comments if you enjoyed the video give me a thumbs up share it do what you do engage how you want I do appreciate the engagement and I will connect with you on the next video Until then be well