WordPress started in 2003 with a tiny bit of code that was designed to create an elegant, well-built personal publishing system. Although WordPress only had a handful of users its first two years, in 2005 it introduced its first themes and was downloaded over 900,000 times that year alone. 

WordPress downloads continued to increase to 1,545,703 in 2006 and 3,816,965 in 2007. It’s now the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world and is used for millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. In fact, there are over 15 million WordPress blogs, or sites, on the internet today; that includes 6 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com and another 9 million active installations of the WordPress.org software.

WordPress.com and WordPress.org are very similar in function and appearance, but have some key differences. The main difference between the two is that WordPress.com is hosted by WordPress and WordPress.org isn’t.

WordPress.com allows you to quickly and easily create a simple blog using the WordPress domain name. For example, if you wanted to blog about parrots, your domain could be www.parrotworld.wordpress.com. This is an excellent way to create a fun, personal blog about a topic you are interested in, or as a way to keep family members updated on your life. 

However, WordPress.com does not allow any affiliate links to be used on its platform; so to profit from affiliate marketing, you need to download WordPress.org to a hosting provider like BlueHost or DreamHost. Accessing and downloading WordPress.org is free, but you need to pay a nominal amount for the third-party hosting service. 

To enhance functionality and scope, WordPress added a Multi-User feature. By utilizing WordPress, you can moderate more than one blog from the same dashboard. This saves business owners a lot of time and effort.