Blogging From Scratch

Hello!

Just wanted to let you know that I will be taking over for Riyanne. It’s unfortunate because it has been built so well that who knows where Riyanne could have taken it. The good news is I can see what a great blog this is and have dedicated myself to making it even better.

Many times when a website changes owners things just go downhill. With a blog it’s even more hard because the visitor ends up connecting to the blogger. I know I will lose some readers just because of this fact but I am confident that I’ll be able to provide some great posts on the blogging and online money-making.

As with all my new acquisitions I make a list of things I would like to do right off the bat. Here is my to-do list for Blogging From Scratch.

• New theme, although I usually take the time to design a unique theme I will just be installing a different theme as to represent the new phase of this blog. You will find out why I am not designing a unique theme a little down the road.
• A new post series! Riyanne did an excellent job of posting great information. In fact I will publish one of her unpublished posts in just a few days. I will also be publishing a new series titled “Blogging From Scratch”, sounds familiar..this series will document the development of a new blog that I am launching. It will take you from the initial idea all the way to monetizing.
• Tutorials! Although bloggers mainly focus on content, knowing a few tricks can always enhance your blog.

Now you have a little bit of insight on my plans for the future of this blog..just a little.

Every post should have a little meat to it. Let me give you the reasoning behind the purchase of this blog from my perspective. Over the past 6 or so years that I’ve been in the web development world I have gone through many websites, worked with many clients, and made A LOT of money. Currently, I work from my home, I have flexible hours and pull in a nice paycheck. As I think back to why I am decently successful today, it’s because I had great tutorials and great inspiration when I was starting, and still to this day. Now, I focus on developing websites that help to teach others to do what I do and inspiring them.

Blogging is a thing that anyone can do. Everyone and their pets have a blog now, whether it be a myspace or a facebook or a professionally developed WordPress blog. This is why I had chosen to use blogging to be the subject of my new project. I had all intents and purposes to create a brand new site but as I was browsing SitePoint I saw this site for sale. I had already spent my budget for this month so I was a bit hesitant at first. I put in a few bids and finally gave Riyanne an offer. First, I have to admit I spend money like there’s no tomorrow, that might be the reason why I always find myself short on cash for some reason, but there’s also more factors that went into my decision to make the purchase.

We all know that starting a new site is hard. It takes time to develop and then you have to market the site to get an audience. By purchasing an already established blog I had already jump started the project that I was planning to start. The drawback of course is the initial investment of the purchase. In this case the purchase price wasn’t too much of an investment and I could see the benefits. For all of you who are curious, the purchase price was mid-high $xxx, a bit more than the $550 that was last bid on the SitePoint auction page. I won’t give you the exact price right now, although in a future post I may.

When I purchase a site I take into account many things but here is what really sold me on this site. First, there is a good established visitor base, a few hundred unique visitors per day. Taking the traffic stats further I also saw that the page views were much higher than visitors. This is important because you can start to see that visitors actually browse the website rather than taking a quick glance and then leaving. I also took into account that there was a good RSS subscriber base. This helps to show that the site has a good following. Even better there are a good number of comments on the posts. Like in a older post Riyanne explains how important the concept of getting comments is. For me the main reason I like to receive comments are that I know that people are reading what I have to say and I am able to connect with the visitor. This helps me to produce the blog posts that the visitor wants to read. And of course the revenue, although in this case it wasn’t as big a factor as it would be in most cases. If a site has proven earnings then you can usually calculate how big of an investment is worth the website. In this case revenue isn’t too high at $129/month. I am more than confident that this number will multiply very quickly (I will of course share my methods with you as time goes along).

Well, I hope you enjoyed my maiden post and I hope that you come back for more!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 5:09 am and is filed under Site Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.