How-To-Retire-Young.com

Posts Tagged ‘blog’

One of the first decisions you will have to make when starting out with internet marketing is whether you would like to build a blog or website. Actually most marketers would recommend having multiple websites so you may end up with a blog as well as static websites, but I am going to assume you are just starting out.

In my introduction to internet marketing I briefly spoke about the difference between a blog and a website, but in this post I want to look at where you would use these and some of the advantages of each.

Blog

You are currently reading my blog and this is what I have decided to dedicate most of my time to. The main reason I chose a blog was that I am currently on a bit of a journey in my life as well as my ‘career’, and felt that blogging would be a good way to keep people up to date on what I’m doing.

Some of the advantages of a blog over a website include:

Easy set-up – Blogs can be set up within minutes. I have spoken about how easy the free services like blogger and wordpress.com are, but even wordpress.org (this is also free, but you have to pay for your own hosting) is very easy to get set up.
Easy to update – If you want to add a new post to a blog, you click on “add new post” and fill out the boxes. It’s that simple.
Community – With blogging you can become part of a community or even have a community as part of your blog when your site gets popular. This can be extremely important for promoting your blogging.

Website

Websites are different and used for different types of sites. They are usually static and do not get updated as much as a blog. It is probably a little more tricky to set up a good quality website rather than a blog, but once your site is set up it is relatively low maintenance and a static website can potentially generate a passive income with little or no work once its set up. Advantages of a website include:

Low maintenance – unlike a blog, websites do not need constant updating and are relatively low maintenance once the initial set-up is complete.
Passive income – Because they require little or no maintenance, static websites can be a great way to generate passive income.
Design options – All blogs have a similar layout and run in a similar way, but with websites your design options are much greater. You can even incorporate a blog into your site if you wish.

Most of the best hosting companies these days will include some kind of basic web design program. However if you want to get serious about web design then you may want to invest in a serious web design program or hire a programmer to do it for you.

Whether you choose a blog or a static site is a personal choice and it depends on your plans for internet marketing and the style of website that you wish to create.

There is no right or wrong answer. Some internet marketers will swear by static websites, saying that you can build a few websites then sit back and watch the money roll in. Other marketers say that blogging is the way as you can constantly update it and keep up with the times and the latest news and products.

If you are really serious about internet marketing and making money online then you will probably end up with both. I built a static site before this blog, mainly for practice more then anything as I wanted to learn about web design and internet marketing but felt it would be better to start my blog when I started traveling.

I may build more static sites in the future but first I want to write and promote this blog. That is my choice and it doesn’t really matter whether you choose a blog or websites, the main factor of whether you will succeed or fail with internet marketing will ultimately come down to how much work you put in.

Most people today are familiar with blogging, but I thought I would write a brief introduction to blogging for those of you who are not. These days anyone can start a blog, there are free start up programs like Blogger and WordPress.com that make starting a blog a very easy process. It is also becoming even easier these days to make money blogging, and ultimately that is what I will be trying to do.

The word blog actually derives from “weblog” and it is presented online similarly to a diary or an online journal. You will notice with nearly all blogs that posts are listed in a chronological order, with the most recent post presented at the top of the main page. By scrolling down or looking through the archives you can see some of the older posts of the blog. This is how most blogs are set out including How-To-Retire-Young.com.

Blogs were originally designed to be used as online journals with many bloggers using them to keep people up-to-date with what they are doing. This has changed in more recent years, with blogs being used more often as a source of information.

So blogs differ from ordinary websites because they are set out in this way, rather than having static pages like the other websites. Blogs are usually updated more often, and updating a blog is much easier than updating a normal website, because of the ease of use of programs like WordPress and Blogger.

Blogging has made it much easier for anyone to start up a website. Even a dummy like me with hardly any HTML skills can start up a blog with relative ease. I am actually using WordPress.org for this site, which is slightly more technical than WordPress.com and it is not totally free as you do have to pay for your own hosting. But don’t let that put you off, the current WordPress 3.0 that I am using is really not too technical and is designed for internet dummies like me. The hosting costs can be as low as a few dollars a month, and when you consider a blog can make you money like a business (potentially thousands of dollars a month), the costs really are quite minimal.

If you are serious about blogging and possibly making money from your blog, I would recommend hosting your own blog. I will be going into more detail about this soon, but basically you get more control over your blog when you host it yourself, where as with a free hosted blog, you do not really own the blog and the host can potentially close your blog if they wanted.

But can you really make money blogging?

Yes you can make money with blogs, but it is not easy, and most blogs do not make any significant income. At the time of writing this blog is not making me any money at all, and it probably won’t anytime soon. There are countless ways of making money with blogs, but they all require one thing, Traffic.

Traffic is the number of people visiting you’re blog, and getting significant traffic to your blog is where most bloggers fail. You can write as much quality content as you want, but if you do not have any traffic then you are not going to make any money.

In the beginning it is very difficult to get traffic to your blog and keep people coming back. This blog is still in its early days so I currently have very low traffic. I am not going to kid you, or myself, it is not easy to get significant traffic to your blog. It usually takes several months at least. This is why most people fail to make money blogging, they do not have the patience to keep blogging when they are not making any money.

This is why I’ve given myself two years to build up this blog. I’m putting my life in the hands of this blog, so hopefully this will give me the drive and determination to keep going. It can be quite depressing in the early days of blogging as you are not making money and it feels like you are constantly talking to yourself.

There are many different ways to make money with your blog, but it is important to plan for the long term if you are serious about profiting with your blog. If you want a “get rich quick” plan then blogging is not the answer.

I will be writing a lot more about how to get traffic to your blog and how to make money blogging in the future, but I am not going to go into too much detail just yet as I am still learning and going through this process myself!

So this is my first blog post. I wasn’t quite sure how to start this, but have decided the best way would be to tell you a bit more about what this blog is about and what it is I am trying to do.

Before I get too carried away writing this blog, its important that I emphasise exactly what I mean when I say that I want to retire young, as retirement can mean different things to different people. If your only idea of retirement is when you reach a certain age and start living off your pension, then I’m afraid I can’t help you, you’re just going to have to wait until you get old.

However for me retirement doesn’t have to be like this, when I talk about retiring young I simply mean being able to live my life the way I want to, doing the things I want to do. In the matrix of the real world we are brought up to believe that retirement comes at the end of our lives, when we are too old to continue working. But by then our best years have already passed us by and we are probably too old to do a lot of the things that we have always wanted to do.

Retirement does usually mean that we no longer work, but what people define as “work” can also vary a lot. If I succeed in what I’m doing and manage to retire in about two years from now that does not mean I will close this blog and spend the rest of my life doing nothing. For me, building up this blog does not really count as work because so far I’m finding it quite enjoyable. For me work is the 9-5 routine in a job that we don’t like, a trap that so many of us fall into, and for most people becomes impossible to escape.

If you enjoy your job and turn up for work each day with a smile on our face then that’s great, perhaps you could already consider yourself semi-retired and don’t really count it as work, but sadly for most people, that is not the case.

That’s why I’m getting into blogging, because I enjoy writing and do not really count it as work. Today there are more and more people making money from their blogs and I want to become one of them. This site will introduce you to different ways of doing this, and any money that I make from this blog I will consider as my pension.

Of course blogging is not the only option, if you do not consider yourself a writer then there are plenty of other options that I will talk about later. Perhaps you could consider a different style of website or some kind of web-based business. I personally believe that an internet based business is the way to go because they can be run from anywhere in the world, do not require much work (anything you do consider as work can be outsourced these days where you can get some talented people at great rates), and the internet is only going to get bigger and better as time goes by.

I know its not going to happen overnight, as blogs, as with all websites, take time to build up and attract an audience. But I know it is not impossible as there are bloggers out there making thousands a month. Right now I’m not setting my sights that high, in fact I personally believe I can retire on about $500 a month if I’m living a simple life in a country where the cost of living is not so high.

So what I’m saying is retirement does not have to be something reserved only for old people, if you can think outside the box and come up with a way of making an income doing something you enjoy that doesn’t involve too much “work”, then you too could retire young.