My Thirty Day Challenge Notes

I successfully moved My Thirty Day Challenge 3.0 blog to its new home on HostGator with its own URL, mythirtydaychallenge3rdyear.com. You’ll see this new site change as I continue to work on the sidebar content and add new posts. New widgets will also be added to the sidebars. This theme has two sidebars, and I plan to make good use of the extra space.

It took less time to add this blog to my new host and move the blog content from Blogger because I have a little more experience with the host control panel and I called when I ran into trouble instead of trying to figure it out by myself. They have 24/7/365 phone support, so I’m taking advantage of it whenever I don’t know how to do something. I’m still on a steep learning curve, but it’s with WordPress now. As I learn more about all the great features of WordPress software you’ll see the blog change to include new features and functionality.

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Please let me know what you think of the new theme. Leave me a comment and let me know what’s on your mind.

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written by joubess

I finally got the bugs worked out and found out how to install WordPress correctly on my hosting site. I was doing it wrong. I was supposed to use the one-button installer in Fantastico. When I found that out it loaded right up and started working.

I was able to import my Blogger content from my Debt Free or Bust blog into WordPress on HostGator pretty easily. It’s not bad once you learn how to do it. The new URL is debtfreeorbust.com. I’m leaving my Blogger blog up until I get the new one completely the way I want it, though I won’t be posting anything new to it.

Then I spent hours looking through themes and finally decided on one with 4 columns. It’s pretty cool, but I’m still not sure if I like it for that blog. I like it personally because it’s easy on the eyes and I spend a lot of time there so it keeps the number of headaches down. But it doesn’t match the topic. It’s generic where topic is involved.

WordPress is quite different than the Blogger interface and I’m experiencing a big learning curve. It reminds me of learning how to use FireFox to your best advantage. You have to add the plugins to make it specific to you and your needs. I’m still exploring plugins. There are tons of them so I’m sure it will take me awhile to get everything set up just the way I want it.

I feel like I truly accomplished something big today getting that first blog set up and moved. Now I know how to do it and the next blog won’t be so difficult. I should have it down to a science by the time I move the last blog over. At least I hope I will.

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written by joubess

I purchased my domain names and set up an account with HostGator. It didn’t cost as much as I first calculated because I registered my domains at Dynadot for $10.99/year each ($8.99/domain + $2 for domain privacy). I parked my domains on my host account and I started working on the first blog I want to move.

I set up my first database and started working on getting Wordpress installed. I decided to use WordPress because I like so many blogs other people have put up with it. I downloaded the zip file and got through the first part of installation, which is setting up your config.php file. I followed the instructions, uploaded all the files and have an error when I try to run the install.php file. I’m stuck there, and after going to the Wordpress forum it seems 3 other people are experiencing the same error with version 2.3.

In the meantime, I am going to try moving my blogs hosted on blogspot over to HostGator and continue to use Blogger until I can get my Wordpress problem worked out. If I never do, well, I’ve been pretty happy with Blogger, so I’ll just continue to use it.

That decision may bring it’s own set of frustrating errors and glitches, but I’ll see how it goes.

It seems, though, that no matter how easy something is supposed to be, nothing is ever easy.

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written by joubess

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

This lesson is a tutorial on using the aweber.com autoresponder website.

Aweber.com isn’t a free service, but there are no free autoresponder services available that allow you to have a good-sized email list (more than 100) or more than one or two autoresponse messages.

What does an autoresponder service do for you? It provides an automatic email response to anyone who signs up on one of your email lists or email lists you already have loaded. People may sign up to receive updates or your quarterly e-newsletter, for example.

The first autoresponse sent would probably be a “thank you” note and perhaps a free report or some other free content just for signing up. Then you can add more autoresponder messages to mail to your list offering more information, the actual newsletter or reports, updates, and offers for products and services the requester opted in to receive. It’s also handy if you are out of the office and need to let anyone trying to contact you know you’re away.

This makes dealing with an email list feasible by automating a lot of the emailings you will need to do to keep your list active and your subscribers satisfied.

It’s also a key ingredient to increasing your profits once you find something that pays. It often takes 7 or more follow-up contacts (check moves) with each list member to result in a purchase from them.

Using aweber.com

aweber.com gives you unlimited autoresponses, list mailings, newsletters, free email design templates (or you can use text), and an easy way to create opt-in forms on your websites. You can host up to 10,000 addresses free, and the cost is $9.95 per 10,000 addresses thereafter.

Account costs are structured by how many months you pre-pay for service: $19.95 for one month at a time down to $14.95 a month if you sign up for a whole year. In my opinion, if you’re going to use aweber, you’re probably going to use it for more than a month, so signing up for one month at a time wastes $5/month ($60/year). Aweber comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it risk-free for 30 days.

First, sign up for an account, put in your credit card information, and you’re set to start using aweber.

After you sign up, the first thing you’ll want to do is click on list settings and create a new list. (In the global fields box, you must provide a physical postal address).

After you create a list, you’ll want to add a message.

• Click on messages > create message
• Select HTML or plain text
• Choose “immediate message” for a sign-up autoresponder
• Add the website address to enable tracking links
• Personalize your message

There are several tools you can use to automatically put a registrant’s name or other personalized touches in the subject and body of your email message.

After your thank you message, you’ll need to create 7 more autoresponder messages to send emails to your list every so many days apart; 1, 2, 3, etc. days after each message.

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written by joubess