whydowork.com

The question whether to buy or start a blog is one of the frequently asked questions in webmaster forums today. I have also received quite a number of emails from my readers asking for my advice regarding this matter. In today’s post, I wish to address this question and share my opinion on the topic. test

To Buy Or Not To Buy

Considering that the cyberspace has millions of blogs already and that thousands are created everyday, the most obvious benefit of buying a blog is being able to bypass competition. It simply means, you have an edge over your competitors in terms of traffic, subscribers and rankings. This will spare you long hours of link building, search engine optimization and networking.

Buying an establish blog also allows the new owner to monetize it immediately considering that the blog is receiving sufficient traffic. With an established blog, you don’t need to hazzle your way up in improving your blog’s vital rankings like Technorati and Alexa (rankings vital in blog monetization) in order to get accepted to advertising networks or review sites.

Naturally, since you are buying a blog, you need to have enough funds. Prices of blogs vary depending on its traffic, revenue, subscribers and rankings. The ones with good traffic, high rankings and high income are normally more expensive. And, if you want to buy a quality site, you will need to invest some money.

Another problem with buying a blog is the risk of lossing your subscribers, which has happened in several cases. This usually takes place when the new owner fails to keep up with the standards established by the original blog owner. Another reason could also be the change in tone and personality of the blog, which is a direct result of the different personality and perspective of the new owner. It also possible that the new owner may have new goals and objectives, which changes the direction of where the blog is going. If the readers don’t like it, it’s always easy for them to unsubscribe.

It is also possible that you can’t find a blog for sale that covers the topic that you want to blog about. I have told you in several of my posts that when you start to blog, blog about the things that are of interest to you. Otherwise, you might just end up abandoning your blog from the lack of motivation to carry on.

To Start Or Not To Start

Starting a blog on the other hand is not an easy job. In fact, starting a blog is the most difficult and the most crucial phase of blogging. Starting a blog requires alot of jobs to be done like setting up your blog, making your first few posts, promoting it, building its rankings etc. If you don’t have the patience and dedication to start something from scratch and gradually build it, then starting a blog is not advisable for you.

Since your blog is new, monetizing it will have to be done later when you have established traffic and rankings. These are important elements to be able to start making money from your blog. And these can be achieved through hard work, which usually takes a longer time. If you want to start monetizing your blog right away, then starting your own blog is not suitable for you.

Perhaps another problem with starting a blog is the fact that you need to compete with a great number of new comers. The competition is usually tough as most of the new bloggers are highly motivated to build their blog. If you don’t have what it takes to beat the competition, then starting a blog is not the right move for you.

Although starting a new blog is challenging, there are still some good reasons why you should opt for it. For one, starting your own blog and achieving some good results is more fulfilling than buying one and you know that the credits are not yours.

With you starting your own blog, you will be able to minimize the risk of losing disgruntled subscribers. Starting your blog also gives you the freedom to use your own tone, voice and style.

Lastly, although starting a new blog is so much time consuming, it is still alot cheaper than when you buy an established blog.

That’s my take of the issue. What about you? What would you prefer, to buy an established blog or start your own from scratch? What do you think is more rewarding?

I would love to know your opinion. Do share it in the comment.

Thank you for your time.

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I’m probably one of the few people who wasn’t impressed with Wordpress 2.5. I personally believe that Wordpress 2.3.3 was alot user friendly. At first I thought I’d appreciate Wordpress 2.5 when I get used to it. But then, three weeks of using it gave way for more problems (messy Wordpress theme, errors with plugins, troubles with widgets etc.).

After using Wordpress 2.5 for about three weeks, I decided to revert back to Wordpress 2.3.3. From switching to Wordpress 2.5 and back to 2.3.3, I noticed a potential problem with using Wordpres 2.5. (Note: This is just an observation.)

photo credit: MatthewCo

Right after updating my blog from Wordpres 2.3.3 to Wordpress 2.5, I noticed a sudden increase in the number of spams in my comment and trackback. Before the update, I usually receive about 20-50 spam (comments and trackbacks). Also, before I updated my blog to Wordpress 2.5, the total spam caught by Akismet was nealy 4,500, which was accumulated since I started using Wordpress in November 2007.

Since I started using Wordpress 2.5, on its first day, I received more than 600 comment and trackback spams. I didn’t mind it at first as Akismet is doing a great job in catching spams. On average, I receive about about 150 spams everyday, which is a 200% increase than when I was using Wordpress 2.3.3. Today, the total spam caught by Akismet is over 12,500 (comments + trackbacks).

I experienced receiving tremendous amount of spam after I updated to Wordpress 2.5 so it was my primary suspect. All my plugins, including Akismet, were all updated and yet I still receive lots of spam. It should have not been a big problem if Akismet was able to catch the spam comments and trackbacks but on the third week, spams started to show up in my comments and trackbacks that I needed to manually delete them.

To satisfy my curiousity, I reverted back to Wordpress 2.3.3. Guess what happened? After 24 hours, I just received 24 spams (14 comments + 10 trackbacks).

Was it Wordpress 2.5? Was it Akismet? Or it’s just some circumstances?

I would really appreciate if you share your experiences after you updated your blog to Wordpress 2.5. Did you have the same observation?

Thank you for your time.

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I’ve been doing a series of posts on what to do after you purchase a site. The SitePoint Marketplace has become THE place for anyone looking to buy or sell their small online businesses - especially ‘make money online’ blogs. When purchasing a site a fast transaction and transition period is of the utmost importance, which is where this post comes in.

If you haven’t already read them, please take a look at Part 1 and Part 2 of this series:

- Part I - The Checklist
- Part II - Analysis of “What’s Hot

This third piece initially made me think of Mr. Miyagi from one of my favorite ’80s movies The Karate Kid. Discipline, precision, execution, and well placed drop kicks are all an essential piece of this step. Ok drop kicks won’t really help, but the rest of them will.

.htaccess (redirection mastery)

As I mentioned in the checklist, you will need to do for your htaccess file what Mr. Miyagi did for the Karate Kid. Unless you are going to keep publishing at your newly acquired site, you’re going to need to migrate the content over.

What is a .htaccess file?

When a visitor/spider requests a web page via any means, your web server checks for a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors.

If you’re still not sure what an .htaccess file is, give this a read first. Assuming both yours, and the newly acquired blog are powered by Wordpress, you should be able to import all the “Hot” Items (identified in Part II) in a few minutes using the Wordpress automated import feature.

What the Search Engines Will Think

At this point you have a bunch of duplicate content.

In order to reap the benefits of your newly acquired content you’ll need to teach the search engines that these pages have permanently moved (status code 301 in tech-talk) to a new location. If you built a great list in part two this next step is pretty easy. A few weeks ago we purchased a great blog called ShylockBlogging. If you click around you’ll see much of the content now points to the same page on WhyDoWork.

To the search engines, this content has found a new permanent home, and we let them know by doing a 301 redirect to their new location on WhyDoWork. This has tremendous benefits:

• all the backlinks for those pages are now credited to WhyDoWork
• any accumulated Google PageRank is now spread across the WhyDoWork.com domain
• any visitors that find these pages via search results are redirected to their location on WhyDoWork, increasing traffic and advertising conversions
• assuming you purchased a great site, the quality of your unique content should go way up

Take a look at a few lines from our .htaccess file for ShylockBlogging:

redirect 301 /shylock-adsense-plugin/ http://www.whydowork.com/blog/whydowork-adsense-plugin/
redirect 301 /advertise/ http://www.whydowork.com/advertise.php
redirect 301 /about/ http://www.whydowork.com/about.php
redirect 301 /contact/ http://www.whydowork.com/contact.php
redirect 301 /free-wordpress-themes/ http://www.whydowork.com/blog/free-wordpress-themes/

All thats involved is writing the code redirect 301 [oldpagelocation] [newpagelocation]. Keep in mind when doing the old page location that you need to use relative path (i.e. don’t use http://www.). When search engines visit your site they will read this file (which you need to place in your root directory), understand that because it is a 301 the pages have permenently moved, and update their rankings and indexes accordingly.

Counterintuitive but Effective

You might be wondering; why buy a site if you’re just going to shut it down? Time and value are the biggest issues in my opinion. Finding the extra time to maintain a second blog for many can almost be as expensive as running it. The value, really comes from the benefit of growing your existing site from a search engine and traffic perspective. Next up in the series, we’ll look at another great benefit - You also get the old sites’ RSS readers.

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In case you haven’t noticed, I removed ProjectWonderful from my sidebar today. I have had no luck with it after using it for over one month. Moveover, I think that the revenue generated given the space and position it occupied was not worth it.

For 1 month, the three ProjectWonderful 125X125 banners only earned over $25. That’s a little over the price of one 125X125 banner advertisement on my blog. I also noticed that the highest bid price I got so far was only $0.80 and the lowest was $0.02. The huge range and price deviation occur because the price paid by advertisers depend on the number of bid (demand) and how much bidders are willing to pay. So even if you have a high traffic site when there are no advertisers bidding, your earnings will remain low.

Another reason why ProjectWonderful isn’t wonderful at all and why I took it off my blog today is because of the off-topic advertisements frequently shown on my blog. I know that Project Wonderful allows you to filter advertisements and approve only those that fit your blog’s topic but this means additional work to the blogger and lesser opportunity to monetize your blog. The earnings are just too meager that when you consider the time and efforts you put to keep advertisements relevant to your content, it’s not just worth it.

Other than the meager earning and the irrelevant advertisements, another reason why I took off ProjectWonderful from my blog is because it slowed the load time of my sidebar. This caused the advertisements and links below it to load very slow as well. As a result, my click through rate (Google Adsense) and page view (Links to other posts) are also adversely affected.

Lastly, since Project Wonderful requires you to install a script, it does not only slows your blog’s load time but it makes your blog not search engine friendly. If you’re considering optimizing your blog for search engines to get more of pages indexed in their seach result and increase your traffic, then you should minimize using scripts. By removing the long script of Project Wonderful, I am able to optimize my blog for search engines and give their crawlers an easier job.

To be fair, there are other websites like Entrecard.com that are making some decent revenue from Project Wonderful. Entrecard.com receives over $300 every month from Project Wonderful. I personally believe though that Entrecard.com can make more money from the space and position occupied by Project Wonderful.

What about your experience? Any luck so far? I’d love to know why you are keeping Project Wonderful despite the meager income you generate from it.

Thank you for your time.

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