When to turn your blog into a .com

Blogger Brian Andre` Kirton asks  “I was wondering when bloggers know when it was time to turn it into a .com that’s ‘the big question’!”

Brian It depends on the purpose of your blog and your financial resources, but I am assuming you want to monetize you blog and make money from it. I say if you can afford it, immediately.

The first thing to note is if you want to monetize your blog  you will need a hosting package from a third party, not the WordPress hosting pakage.  Godaddy offers cheap domains with hosting packages the yearly cost is roughly $80.00. It also offers single click installs of the WordPress Add-In.  Godaddy is hit an miss with its service and support. I have used them for years with out problems, then ran into an ftp error that took 3 months to resolve. Or you can use Blogger and instantly monetize it. I should note that blogger published posts don’t appear as high in a Google search as do the WordPress posts, I have mirrored sites on blogger and rarely do any of my post appear on a Google search, but my WordPress ones do, and they are normally in the top two pages. Ironic if you consider that Google owns blogger now.

You will then need then need to get advertising. I suggest starting out with Google-Ad-sense as it is free to setup or you can go down the route of selling advertising space directly. The direct route is more profitable as it is not a pay per click, but you will need a huge viewership in the 10’s of thousands to be able to sell direct advertising space.

When to turn it into a .com? Is still the question, If you are planning the monetizing route, and can afford to suffer an $80 per year loss, I would say immediately. Why? Because when you change blog URLs you will inevitably loose viewers and viewers are what makes you money. Think of it as a media based business model, profit is driven by viewers, you don’t want to waste all your time increasing viewership on say this platform when you could be building up your viewership on your .com. You must view your blog like any other media company, and at first all you are doing is looking for your blog to decrease the yearly cost of your blog, Then you look to turn a profit.

Hope that helps.

Tagged: Advertising Blogs, Blog Viewership, Blogging, Blogs, Increasing Blog Viewership, Make money fro blogging, Monetize you blog