Cashing In By Switching From Free Blogging To Self Hosting

The majority of people who start out trying to make money online have a little inner voice that tells them they will not be making very much cash in a hurry. So they start slowly, and with the minimum of investment. Perhaps they already have a day job, but reckon a little extra online cash might pay for a short vacation. Their expectations are set fairly low from the outset, and they do not think of, or approach, their online venture as a proper business.

The first thing they do is open up a few accounts with the free networks; so let's start with Blogger. It is perfectly fine to place Adsense ads on blogspot sites and make some money that way. What's next? What about Squidoo, and Hubpages and a series of other third party content platforms. Those are fine too. You can sell products on these via Amazon or Ebay or Zazzle. The problem is, you will be giving away a substantial amount of your earnings to these third party operators, and we are talking something of the order of 50%. But they're free, right?

Imagine now making the switch to buying web hosting and building your websites yourself. Millions of people do this every day, so there should not be any kind of technophobia here. You just register a domain name - anything you like, as long as it's not already taken - and purchase a web hosting account with a big, reputable company (eg Hostgator) and the rest is a piece of cake. Set up a blog in a couple of minutes; you already have an Adsense account if you were using Blogger, so you can now put ads onto your self hosted site.

"Why go to the trouble?" you might ask.

It's a good question, especially as now you will be paying an annual registration fee for your domain name and a monthly bill for your hosting account, both of which only cost a few bucks if you use readily available voucher codes to get special offers. The answer is that you are now in control of your sites. You control what information goes onto them. You can provide a unique experience to your readers and customers, which is very difficult to do on mass blogging platforms like Blogger. And most importantly, you decide what ads go on your site, and where to put them, and keep 100% of the earnings that they produce.

You will probably find that the extra money you make by switching to self hosting more than pays for your domain name and hosting costs, and if boredom sets in and you decide to quit, if your sites are self-contained on their own host, you can often sell them for good money; now you can't do that with a Blogger blog!

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