The recession, benefits, the safety net, and the learning curve

Max_Headroom_3

Phirefly wrote: »

Does wordpress have its own stats, or are you using google analytics or some other Pastures New stats vehicle?

It has its own stats page so I can see what's going on.

Max_Headroom_3

rolandpol wrote: »

put some adverts on it, make some money.
I've got ads on one of my sites, I've worked out that I average around £0.60 per click.

Now, you can't explicitly ask anyone to do clicking for you (as google adsense are like the gestapo), but y'know, wink wink.. i'll click an ad or two and you've got yourself £1.50 for nothing.

you do the maths. Might aswell, every little helps.

Unfortunately that's not possible with Wordpress.com. If I understand correctly it is with another platform that I'd have to pay to use, so I guess when my sales and marketing director deems it worth the switch we may move across and start doing this.

Or I may of course get a job and the whole thing will grind to a halt, anything's possible!

Phirefly

Max_Headroom wrote: »

Unfortunately that's not possible with Wordpress.com. If I understand correctly it is with another platform that I'd have to pay to use, so I guess when my sales and marketing director deems it worth the switch we may move across and start doing this.

Or I may of course get a job and the whole thing will grind to a halt, anything's possible!

I think you can have free ads on blogger... theres a tab called 'monetise' in the dashboard where you can display adsense ads - don't half make a mess of your blog tho (althouth I am an aetheticist - others probably aren't that bothered)

But I think PN is a wordpressophile so I'm sure she'll find you a solution for you down in wordpressland.

PasturesNew

IMHO Wordpress is superior to blogger on many levels. What Max was doing in the first instance was giving it a go and seeing if he really bothered. Most people fail to make any money/do anything online because they do it for a week and that's the end of it.

Wordpress is superior (imho) because it has a much larger following and many more features/benefits ... when he moves from the .com version onto .org,

So, there are many things he can do, there are 10,000 things he could do ... but it's a step at a time. For now Plan A is: see if you can be consistent and actually bother after the first week, then it's a spot of promotion.... once he's got the momentum rolling and found some promotion ways that work, he can decide if he wants to take it to the next level and monetize it ... which I suspect he will.

At the moment it is also building into a nice online portfolio, should he need such a beast for his writing work.

fc123

Phirefly wrote: »

Zeitgeist alert. They're making populist TV programmes about it now. It will be interesting to see what spin they put on this.

Clearly the media is looking for new angles on the current state of affairs we're in. They ought to get it touch with our Charlie for a fresh perspective.

Going to settle down and watch this now.

Love the irony of this quote from the 'about'.

A4E is run by multimillionaire entrepreneur Emma Harrison, who believes her business is 'improving people's lives by getting them into work.'

ETA Whoops no I won't as it's not on catch up yet....will have to wait for somthing else....more highbrow perhaps...like Ugly Betty later on.

Phirefly

PasturesNew wrote: »

IMHO Wordpress is superior to blogger on many levels. What Max was doing in the first instance was giving it a go and seeing if he really bothered. Most people fail to make any money/do anything online because they do it for a week and that's the end of it.

Wordpress is superior (imho) because it has a much larger following and many more features/benefits ... when he moves from the .com version onto .org,

So, there are many things he can do, there are 10,000 things he could do ... but it's a step at a time. For now Plan A is: see if you can be consistent and actually bother after the first week, then it's a spot of promotion.... once he's got the momentum rolling and found some promotion ways that work, he can decide if he wants to take it to the next level and monetize it ... which I suspect he will.

At the moment it is also building into a nice online portfolio, should he need such a beast for his writing work.

I knew there'd be a myriad of reasons from you in the vein of the above. I know wordpress blogs can become fully functioning websites in their own right and my good friend who has been a pro web designer for years now only uses wordpress.

Conversely, in my little ary-farty community, blogger appears to be the weopon of choice. Thanks to this thread - I'm now dipping a toe myself.

System

Arrg why can't it be on 4od...our tv doesn't work

PasturesNew

Phirefly wrote: »

Conversely, in my little ary-farty community, blogger appears to be the weopon of choice. Thanks to this thread - I'm now dipping a toe myself.

I point my mates at the one I use, which gives me one click installs, free domain name and unlimited bandwidth etc. Seem to be inundated at the moment with people who are actually starting to do this stuff now... they've all talked about it for years, but never got scared enough to try to make a 2nd income from it.

I just don't get the time to ever do anything properly .... I should have stuck with one site... got too many/never go to them... it all overwhelms me.

Today I spent many many hours going through some pages I wrote in 2007 and tidying them up and standardising them... I was stupid and created something like "101 ways to ...." each with its own individual page. One page alone today took me 4 hours to jiggle about. It'll be never ending.

PasturesNew

First 5 minutes of any installation of Wordpress:
- install wpbackup plugin and set up the backups to email you once a day to an online email account (I use gmail for that)
- install wordpress stats plugin
- turn off pinging for now
- change permalinks to be /%postname%/

Then I have a coffee

No theme, no content, but it must be time for a coffee.

Penniestopounds_2

I'm a newbie that's started reading Max's blog and enjoying it.

I design websites and use Wordpress too, it's very versatile. However one of the downsides of using it on their domain name (as in charliecroker.wordpress.com rather than charliecroker.com) is that you can't put affiliate ads on it and earn from it or build your own 'virtual real estate' to sell later.

It sounds ridiculous but the industry standard for website/blog sales is 10 times monthly earnings (after 6 months consistent earnings usually). So if your site could earn £10 a day or even £5 a day through ads it would be an asset to sell in the future. And if you were to create 10 more blogs.....

Anyway I'm sure you've factored this into your plans but I thought I'd mention it as you seem to be getting successful with it so could be building an asset in the meantime.

A domain name costs about a fiver for a year for a .com and hosting for your Wordpress site is about £3 a month (or if you want to go that route you can have free hosting through my account if you need it for a while).

Anyway it's probably in your (and PasturesNew) plans anyway but just thought I'd mention it just in case.

Penny