Every few days, I’ll be posting a “report card” on how my blog is coming along as a viable business. The idea is to give you a firsthand look at a new startup by a new blogger. I want you to learn from my mistakes, and more importantly—I want to show you first hand that it is completely possible for someone with a normal full-time job to make the leap to become a profitable blogger.
These first few days have taken a little more time than I expected, but not that much. I consider myself well above average in “computer proficiency”, but I have no prior experience developing websites, blogging, or otherwise building web-pages, so adjust your expected timelines accordingly if you have more or less experience.
1. Up front research. Being new to blogging and hosting my own website, I spent quite a bit of time up-front research all of my options and choosing solutions. First, I needed some blogging software. I also needed somewhere to host the site. After lots of research and some completely un-related time-wasting web-surfing (Tim Ferris would not be proud!) I decided to use Wordpress as my blogging software. For a hosting solution, I could have used Wordpress.com or another blog-centric hosting site for free. However, most of the pro bloggers out there recommend hosting your own site if there’s a potential for using the blog to generate revenue. I eventually settled on Bluehost to host my blog and register my domain. If you’re new to blogging, Problogger.net has an excellent series of articles to get you off the ground.
Cost in Hours: 15
Cost in $’s: $95.40 (for domain registration and 12 months of hosting up front–$7.95 / month)
2. Setting up the blogging software. Once I chose my blogging platform (www.wordpress.org), my hosting site (Bluehost.com), and registered my domain (www.zenzoomie.com), it was time to set things up. Bluehost.com’s site management tools made installing Wordpress a breeze (as easy as a couple of button clicks and filling in some basic information about myself and my website) once I familiarized myself with the Bluehost control panel and figured out that I had to click on “Fantastico” to automatically install the software. I spent another hour or so playing around in my newly installed Wordpress blog to learn some of the main features. Overall I found it to be very intuitive and user friendly. I’m a little disappointed in the number of default “themes” they have to customize the look of my blog (there are 3), but I’ll work on that once I get more familiar with the software and get the basic flow of my blog running smoothly.
As I’m writing this, I’ve learned that the version of Wordpress that I installed has already been replaced with a new version. I’ve added upgrading to my list of things to do this weekend (there are a couple of fairly serious looking security bugs in the current version I’m running—2.2).
Cost in hours: 2
Cost in $’s: $0.00
3. Establishing some initial revenue generating partnerships and affiliations. I was already pretty familiar with the way affiliate programs work on the web, although I didn’t belong to any. I started with the ones I know and love—Amazon.com Associate and Google Adsense. Although I plan to phase the use of affiliate programs in relatively slowly, I expected some processing time would be required to join these programs—and I was right. Amazon approved my application very quickly, but Google took around 4 days to approve me. Again, Problogger.net is a great resource for familiarizing yourself with the various options out there for generating revenue from your new blog.
Cost in hours: 1
Cost in $’s: $0.00
4. Writing my first articles. I enjoy writing (the main reason I chose blogging as my online business model), and the topics I’m writing about are things I’ve been thinking about for quite a while—so it’s fairly painless to come up with topics to write about. I’ve completed three articles plus this one, and have started working on several others.
As I write, I try to think about places where I could generate revenue based off of the content of my articles. My strategy is to only use affiliate programs for products that I use myself and would strongly recommend to others. Each of the affiliate programs I’ve signed provides tools that help me to generate custom hypertext links that I can add to my blog posts. For example, in my last post I mentioned Time Ferris’ book The 4-Hour Work Week, an inserted a custom hypertext link that includes my affiliate code if anyone clicks on the link and purchases the book through Amazon.com.
Cost in hours: 5
Cost in $’s: $0.00
Grand totals:
Total Hours Spent: 23
Total Cost in $’s: $95.40
Total Revenue: $0.00 (duh)
Other important Metrics:
Google and Microsoft Live Search still don’t appear to know I exist—four days after putting up a live domain. It looks like it’s time for me to get out on the web and start spreading the good word. I’ll do some research on how to best get a new website on the radar screen and will report results in my next report card.
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