Advertising on Free WordPress Blogs?

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  yogijourney · Member · Apr 18, 2011 at 4:41 pm

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  Hi everyone! I’m very new to wordpress and started running a fansite using the free WordPress.com service. I would really like to put ads on my site but I was told that I won’t be able to do so as it’s a free blog. However, I have two questions I’d like to ask:

  1) If I were to upgrade to a paid service and manage my own WordPress installation, how difficult is it to transfer all the content I’ve put on my free blog to the new site?

  2) I read a section regarding Ad control and it mentioned I would need to get more than 25,000 views/month to advertise. If I were to reach 25k for one particular month, would I be able to apply for this service straight away? Or would I need to reach that 25k/month target over a prolonged period of time?

  Many thanks in advance for your assistance.

  Regards,

  Diana

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  thesacredpath · Member · Apr 18, 2011 at 5:52 pm

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  1. Relatively easy to transfer you content to a self-hosted blog.
  http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/#moving-to-wordpress-org

  2. You would have to talk with staff directly about the details on ad control.

  Contact

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  yogijourney · Member · Apr 18, 2011 at 7:04 pm

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  Thank you very much for your reply. I’ll look into your links.

  Regards,

  Diana

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  thesacredpath · Member · Apr 18, 2011 at 7:12 pm

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  You are welcome.

  I’ll just add this FYI (in case you are not familiar with self-hosting). You will have more responsibilities. You will need to do all installations, all upgrades, all backups and all troubleshooting. If something goes wrong, you have to figure it out and fix it.

  Backups are extremely important and should be done on a regularly scheduled basis, and at least once a week if you post once or a few times a week. Also, always do complete backups including the database, and make sure and do them before any upgrade or installation of any sort (plugin, theme, etc.). Badly written plugins and themes (whether on purpose or not) can in some cases kill your site and having a fresh backup means you can quickly recover.

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  yogijourney · Member · Apr 18, 2011 at 7:57 pm

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  Wow… This sounds immensely complex for someone who has very little experience building websites. Perhaps I should just stick with the free blog and hope I hit more than 25k hits per month. Thank you once again for your kind assistance.

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  thesacredpath · Member · Apr 18, 2011 at 8:02 pm

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  It might be a good idea until you get the hang of things. You can always blog here for a while and investigate self-hosting to see if it is something you want to take on. Normally with self-hosted blogs, things run pretty smoothly, but once in a while an upgrade will fail to complete, or a installed plugin or theme will bring the dreaded website white screen of death, or sometimes for no reason at all things will just break.

  The web is fickle.

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  yogijourney · Member · Apr 19, 2011 at 10:11 am

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  Thanks once again for your advice!