Here we go again, moving from one place to another….it would be really frustrating were it not for the hope of helping others learn from ALL my many mistakes. I may not know what to tell you what to do, but i sure have some things to tell you NOT to do!
For those of you that haven’t followed us from the beginning, we started this blog with Wordpress that was hosted on another webhost. That webhost had Wordpress available in their Fantastico, and being somewhat new with Wordpress, thought I had arrived!
What I didn’t realize, was that different webhosts put Wordpress on their server differently. I found I couldn’t add any plugins or html of any kind, which may seem outrageous, but that is what their tech support confirmed for me, so I wasn’t sure where to go from there. Having had more experience with Wordpress, I question that, but at the time, what tech support says is all I knew.
So I ventured over to Wordpress.com, and found it incredibly easy to set up. Once again, I thought I had arrived (whatever THAT means!) . That is, until I got a friendly email from the Wordpress staff that I had too many ads on my site. I emailed them back and asked them if they were sure (I really didn’t have that many, surely not as many as SOME WP blogs…) and asked them “isn’t making money the main reason most people blog??”
Their response was kindly, and told me, yes indeed, most people did want to make money blogging, which is why they offer their program free to anyone who wants to host their own site. I guess if they are paying for the blog, they don’t want to pay for it. Makes sense, I just wish I had figured this out to begin with! I had read enormous amounts on blogging for profit before I started, but didn’t really read much written on who, how or what to blog ON.
This is the purpose of this post …..to let you know that it DOES matter where you set up your blog. There are way too many choices, but that’s free enterprise for you. So people like me waste hours and hours of time to look at every option only to arrive at what over 75% of bloggers decide-self-hosted Wordpress!
I love ProBlogger…purely platonic, I promise….but he has a chart posted with all the options you can look at, and tons of other tips and helps. Yaro Starek in his Entrepreneur’s Journey also has videos that are lifesavers that I have mentioned before. But Wordpress gets the prize for selfless offerings in blogging software. It’s completely free, and there’s a directory of all the plugins you can add and a bottomless pit of online support. If you are somewhat new at all this like I was, plan on spending a little time learning it all, but it feels sooooo good when you finally get it right!
I definitely can’t say I have ‘arrived’ yet, but I can share what NOT to do if you are trying to make a living blogging. It’s definitely one of the best homeschool projects there is!
