Important Lessons: Domain Names & Blog Topics

John Chow has a great recent post called "How to Brand Your Blog". In the blog entry, one of the first points he makes is "Get Your Own Domain Name" and I couldn't agree more. The Monetizer has done several other blogs and has seen some do better than others. Due to not having enough funds, most were built on Blogger or Blogspot. Reason being, blogger was quick, easy and free. However, Mr. Chow makes the great points about the fact that if your blog gets popular and big and you decide to move it, you're gonna lose out on link love and search engine help. In addition, you really can branch out with a domain name. First you have the blog, but then it will offer you the possibilities of adding a forum, or adding other pages to expand upon your blog. There's a lot of websites built using Wordpress blogging platform, it's just hard to tell. They have unique designs and are technically done with Wordpress blog software, because it's easy to make updates to their site material.

Darren Rowse at Problogger also has a recent video in which he discusses "Make Money Blogs". In this video he discusses how the Make Money niche of blogging is very crowded and gets little search engine activity. He also goes on to say most people will do a make money blog after seeing there are people "making money" already. They assume if they're doing it, so can I. It's very true, this is incorrect to assume, and Mr. Rowse suggests why not have a blog about making money in diary format about how you are trying to. Excellent point, and this is what "The Monetizer" blog is all about. An experiment in attempted money making. I can fail and succeed and show you what works along the way and how this is doing. In addition to that, Monetizer does know a thing or two about internet resources.

Back to what both, John Chow and Darren Rowse have said.

1) Get a domain name as early as you possibly can. Try to think up a clever catchy name that is easy for people to type into their browser. Domain names usually cost about $8 per year. You can head to most web hosting companies to get 1 and some will give you the domain free or cheap for your first year, if you buy web hosting.

2) Blog about a topic you'rea ble to blog about. This is strong advice Darren Rowse gives. If you start blogging about making money and it bores or frustrates you after not making money for a while, you're going to quit. However, if you're passionate about something like travel, sports, photography, etc, try blogging about those. It will show more to your readers and help you build the audience/traffic to make that money.

All in all, these 2 above factors are probably two of the biggest things to consider when you're setting up a blog that you want to turn into a successful moneymaker. Plan them well, and then start monetizing :)