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.

Blog Audience and Viewership

Toady I hit a milestone, 1000 visitors. I has been a year long journey to get there, hopefully it will not take that long to hit 2000 views.  My most popular post has been “Why Not to date me the male enfp“; however, simply adding one more subject has increased my number of views per day from an average of 6 to 25.In the grand scheme a things that is not a huge viewership but mathematically the percentage increase is astounding.

The subject that I decided to write about was blogging. Why did I decide to write about blogging? Because I am on a blog and the one thing every blogger is trying to do is increase their views per day so I knew I could draw a larger audience. Everyone has there own reason they want to increase their viewership, ranging from monitizing their blog to the feeling of success they get when they have a large number of readers and comments.

Some friendly tips on increasing your blog viewership.

1)Always post to your facebook account – Some of your friends will inevitably read your writings.

2)Follow people who follow you- This is the law of reciprocity, if you follow a blogger that is following you, you will get more views per day. Second it gives you more information, and in my case has sparked more than one idea for a blog post.

3) Write about topics you are interested in.

4) Use the appropriated tags – Nothing worse than getting lost in a search engine, the best way to check your tags is to do a Google search and see how high or low your posting is on the results page.

5)Post at the appropriated time of day for your audience. My original audience was the United States, but I have picked up a decent following over the pond as they say.  So if I want to reach my original target audience I post during the day, if I want to reach my over the pond audience I post late at night or early in the morning.

6)Track your audience, ask your audience for feedback and show appreciation for your audience, the nicer you are to them, the nicer they will be to you.

7)Have a purpose for you post. Don’t get discouraged as your viewership numbers spike from high to low, there are days that I receive 40+ visits and there are days that I receive 0 visits.

Good luck in your blogging, may the words be with you.