My Thirty Day Challenge Notes

I’m coming to the point in my blogging and online marketing where I need to decide if it’s time to buy domains and pay for hosting my blogs.

My goal is to keep all this as inexpensive as possible until it starts making enough money to pay for costs like this. But I could also be losing profits by not going on to the inexpensive paid services that might really boost my earnings. Those paid services are owning my domain names, paying for hosting and having a good autoresponder.

Advantages:

• The whole Tumblrgate thing can’t happen to you if you own your domains and pay for hosting. You won’t go to your blog account one day to find you can’t log in and retrieve your content. Not owning your domain can mean you have to learn to do back-ups from your blog on a public blogging site. This isn’t always an easy and straightforward thing to do.
• Wordpress makes a lot of free templates to use to make designing your own blogging site easy. There are also several other free templates available. Just search for them.
• You’re not constrained by the Terms of Service of blogging sites - which you should read carefully before committing your hard work to any of them.
• Better profits are more likely.

Disadvantages:

• It’s no longer free.
• It costs money to register each domain. If you only have one blog, this isn’t prohibitively expensive. But if you have several, the registration costs can get rather high if you register all of your sites at once. Still, at around $15 per year per domain name, it’s really not that expensive. A solution to the cost issue is to register a couple of domains a month so all your costs don’t come due at the same time each year. Most of us can squeeze $30 from somewhere no matter how tight our budget, especially if that $30/year is making you around $600/month.
• After you pay for domain name registration, you have to pay for hosting. Again, hosting can be as inexpensive as $8/month for an unlimited number of sites. Hostgator is one such service provider.
• But, this just took your free blog to a minimum cost of $111/year for one blog. The more blogs you have, the less the hosting costs, but you still have to pay the domain name registration fee each year.
• I could be losing money by not paying for these services.

If you have 7 blogs you want to own and host yourself, it would cost a total of $201/year. That’s not bad at all, but it’s still not free. If you added aweber to the mix, it would cost you an additional $179.40/year for a total cost of $380.40/year. That breaks down to $31.70/month for 7 sites.

I’m to the point where I have to weigh the costs against the probability of losing my content. I’ve spent months on it now, and if I lost it, I’d lose a lot of hard work and time. I seriously doubt I’d be able to recreate it in a reasonable amount of time, even if I had everything backed up. For me, it would be so discouraging to lose so much hard work. Tumblrgate really bummed me out and I’d only put two blogs on it for a few days. I can’t imagine that happening now.

So, looking at it that way, I guess I just made my decision to start buying my domain names and transferring my blogs to paid hosting.

Off to the budget to see where I can squeeze out some money…

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written by joubess

I’m three and half weeks behind where I want to be because of another computer repair. My laptop cooling system failed and it took the shop 2.5 weeks to fix it. The technician was in a bad car accident and was out of work for a week before he ever got the chance to look at my machine.

I’ve had two hardware failures in the last 4 months on this laptop. One wasn’t too bad, just had to order a power cable, but the cooling fan failing was horrible. It took too long to fix and it cost about $200. That’s about 1/3 of the price of a new PC laptop. The power cable replacement was $100, so that comes to about 1/2 the price of a new PC laptop. Repairs are getting too expensive so it’s time for me to save up for a new machine and replace this one as soon as I can, before something else fails. It’s 3.5 years old, so I’ve got to make this one of my priority purchases even though I’m working on paying off debt like a mad woman. No computer means no work.

I’ve found that once you set up Firefox on a machine, it’s very difficult to continue working at the same pace when you have to go to the library to use a computer. Our libraries us Internet Explorer and things often didn’t work too well when I logged into some of my stuff. You’re also time limited to 60 minutes per session, so you don’t end up getting much done.

My next goal is to use some of the money I make online and buy a new computer. I wanted to get a Mac, but I may have to settle for another PC because they’re so cheap. Then make my next computer purchase a Mac. Oh how I miss my Mac from back in the day! I’d love to go back right away, but this machine may not last long enough for me to save up for it.

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written by joubess

I believe I’ve figured out another reason I’ve been having so much trouble getting things accomplished since Day 27. At Day 27, your to-do list is no longer a linear progression. It’s a ring of tasks, or several rings of tasks, clustered around everything you’ve done up to that point.

Once you hit the phase where you need to do lots of small tasks to bring traffic to your sites, it becomes overwhelming. There is so much to do to promote your sites, especially if you’re using free software and other free, labor-intensive methods. Multiple sites compound the problem.

I went back over the training from Day 27 forward and discovered I’d jumped over a very powerful but simple tool to help visualize everything that needs to be done. Dan’s mind map technique. He starts with his main phrase in the middle of the page, then branches out from that main phrase with the first site having a cloud or cluster of primary tasks around it. Those are posts on the site. Then that cloud branches out to everything that’s been done or needs to be done. Each big thing that needs doing gets it’s own cloud or cluster of tasks from promotions and list building to adding other sites with related long-tail phrases, to writing articles and back-linking.

There is free software for this, but you should start on paper until you get using the technique down clearly in your mind. One free software program is FreeMind by Source Forge. There are others as well. Just search for free flow charting or mind mapping or project mapping software.

So, when in doubt, dump making lists and draw a map (picture) of what you’ve done and what you still need to do. Then your to-do list will become much clearer and easier to manage.

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written by joubess

This blog will be about the Squidoo Thirty Day Challenge 3.0 (abbreviated 30DC) on internet marketing. The challenge is to earn $10 in the thirty days of training - August 1 thru August 30, 2007.

I will blog until I reach the $10 goal, which may take a little more than 30 days from what I’ve read from people who took previous versions of this course. People come back to take the course again because so much changes from year to year on the internet.

The really big deal about this? It’s completely free. It won’t cost me one red cent.

Why am I taking the 30DC? To learn and implement:

• web 2.0
• how to use all the cool new internet tools
• how to use Mozilla Firefox as my browser
• how to do effective marketing research using these new tools
• how to better market my full-time business online
• how to use the new tools to implement what I learn quickly and easily so I don’t get bogged down in the process and not finish what I start.
• work along with the program and my team to be accountable so I have a good chance at success

From what I’ve seen of these tools so far, getting bogged down is what these are meant to prevent.

My son will also be taking part in this challenge as a home-school social studies project. There is no age limit, and he’s likely to get all this far faster than I do and make more than I do more easily. He’s already much more familiar with web 2.0 than I am and knows a lot about what people buy online.

I’ve completed setting up Firefox 2.0 and adding all the tools required. I’ll take one more pass at it tonight to make sure we’re ready to start tomorrow on Day 1. I’m so excited!

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written by joubess