«
»

Blogging advice – any tips for setting up a blog? How can I make money with a blog?

19th May 2010, 10:59 pm


Question:

Looking for advice from experienced and trustworthy bloggers such as yourself. Any tips off the top of your head?

Answer:

The key points off the top of my head:

If you want quick and easy and just want to get up and running, then do Blogger or WordPress. They provide you with everything you need, and it’s free and templated and modular.

If you want to make money at it, or want to ultra-customize, then consider paying for hosting yourself and manually installing the free WordPress back-end on your own domain. Gives you a ton more flexibility and WordPress plugins so you can make your site exactly the way you want it (within your own limitations and budget, obviously). You’ll also have control over the ads and stuff too, so again: you can make money at it.
If you’re going the money-making route, realize that:

  • It’s a long term commitment (we’re talking years), and you may not make much money at all. Despite the success stories, it’s not a guarantee and your actual income might be low.
  • You’re not going to make anything until after at least 6+ months and 100+ articles.
  • Even after it’s making money, you still need to add an article a week or so, otherwise the site will stagnate and traffic (and therefore money) will drop off.
  • The content you decide to write about is very relevant to your income – If your site is about an obscure educational topic, for example, you may not get a lot of interested advertisers or money. My tech review site DOES pull in a lot of advertisers, but the area is so competitive I have to have a LOT of articles and be doing this a while before I make anything significant.
  • You’ll have to be good at other forms of building site traffic (includes facebook, twitter and the New Media of the Moment, to posting your article’s links to places like Stumbleupon, various RSS aggregators, publishing via Feedburner, etc. If you want to learn technical detail about building a web presence, an excellent site is webmasterworld.com. That site is the Holy Grail for web professionals.

If you decide to host your own site, then expect to pay $5 to $15 per month for a small site hosting package (varies based on customer service and functionality). If you grow in traffic, or have a lot of visitors or host a lot of pictures or video, you may have to pay more. But that’s a good problem to have.

For comparison, my small sites cost me $8 per month. My higher-traffic ones are closer to $20-$30 per month. I could definitely get cheaper hosting, but my provider – FutureQuest – has excellent tech support and service, and I get a discount because I have so many sites. Also, assuming I set up my sites correctly, they have handled the rare but massive traffic spikes from slashdot.com, fark.com, stumbleupon.com and others.

Other articles related to this topic:

Category: Miscellaneous, WWW