I’m celebrating this blog’s one year birthday! Back in my college apartment, I didn’t start pounding out posts with the end-game of doing it “full time” to make money. I think I had heard of people who blogged like that, but I thought they were super tech-y or employed by a big organization or something. Not a silly, albeit somewhat hard-working girl like me. Writing this post is in some ways a struggle, because I’m still perfecting and improving on the process of translating cold-hard-hits and web traffic into cash.
But, here’s how I got where I am/what I’ve learned so far.
First, the tech-side of things. I stayed on a free wordpress.com site for as long as I could. In February of 2012, I started my blog and bought my domain name, rachelschultz.com, for $26 for a year. To get started that was my only cost. (Having the .com name is more streamlined in my opinion, but there are lots of huge blogs that keep the “.wordpress.com” and are very successful).
After my traffic started to get pretty significant in about July (by that I mean thousands+ of daily hits), a friend prompted me to really consider monetizing things. WordPress.com doesn’t allow ads, but they were just rolling out a new program called “WordAds,” WordPress’ own advertising that was permitted on their sites.
WordAds, like most ad agencies pays per thousand impressions. An impression is someone clicking to any page on your site. If you visit my page and go to the homepage, click and read my “Meet Rachel” page, and then click on an individual post, you just accounted for 3 impressions. If you hear the term “unique visitors” that means how many people come to your page. In the above scenario, I had 3 impressions and 1 unique visitor. The “per thousand impressions” is often reported as CPM (an abbreviation for something latin I am guessing that means the same thing). WordAds was helpful for me to wet my beak in making blog money, but it wasn’t too customizable. You can choose between having 1 ad or 3 ads on your page, but you don’t have a choice of where they go or who can advertise. WordAds pays $1 CPM, which according to my market knowledge, is pretty fair.
Around November, my site had continued to grow and I wanted more control over ads AND desired to branch out from the limited wordpress.com page design themes. That’s when I transferred to wordpress.org so I could “self-host.” But, the freedom of self-hosting also comes with more costs too. As I opened with saying, I stayed on the free wordpress.com as long as I could. No matter how many people came to my site, it wouldn’t slow down or crash and I was always up and running for no cost. I had made a good amount of money and the only cost I ever had was still that $26 way-back-when just to get my domain name.
In layman’s terms, I’m going to explain 3 types of self-hosting. A real tech-expert may laugh at my explanation, but this is as much as I need to know to do what I do. First, there is a shared server. This has the lowest monthly cost and you share a server with several other blogs. It has the lowest capacity for traffic, so if you get a sudden burst in hits, you could bring down the whole server and all the other sites on it. (Likewise, if somebody else gets a traffic spike, your site can go down, out of your control).
The second type is a VPS (virtual private server). It is a virtual space that is only yours, and therefore you pay much more each month. When I first started self-hosting, my traffic levels required that I skip shared server and go straight to VPS, to the tune of $100 monthly. (That felt like a big jump from my $0 monthly at wordpress.com). Finally, is the dedicated server. It has the highest capabilities and is thus the most expensive. This is what I’m looking at right now. To give you an idea, I know some really big bloggers who pay more monthly for their server than they do for their mortgage.
Since leaving WordAds, I started advertising with BuySellAds. I was moderately satisfied with their service, but I recently signed with a new agency, Federated Media. For the design side of things, I am using a very basic version of Thesis theme, which costs about $60. I’m hoping to do a lot more and better with my site’s design, but I won’t go into too much detail on that yet.
Now, the big picture, creative-side of things. Somewhat frequently, people tell me that they are hoping to start a blog and ask for pointers to get going. I’ll fire off some snippets of things I usually say:
- Write about what you care about and something that will be sustainable. Make sure you have lots of ideas and it’s something you won’t quickly grow sick of.
- Post consistently. This is good for growing your readership, but beyond that, it’s good for YOU. It helps keep you to your commitment to endeavor in writing a blog. Have a schedule, whether it be once a week or everyday, or even more rare.
- Most people who start a blog quit within a few months. Think about that last sentence and read it again. Really keep that in mind before investing money or taking big risks. I view my blog as a small business.
- Excellent photography. I’m still learning, but I’ve come a long way since I’ve started. (Oh boy. Some of my first posts’ photos are embarrassing.) In my line of crafts & recipes, good photography is kind of everything. Think about it – usually what determines if you’ll make a recipe or not is the picture.
- Write in your own voice. Voice is hard to find. But a phrase that has often driven me comes from none other than Ms. Dolly Parton. “Figure out who you are and then do it on purpose.”
- It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you see sites that are huge and super popular. Usually when I feel discouraged that I’m not where I want to be, it’s because I don’t have my head down to work hard on my own stuff.
You can read all of my posts about blogging here.