If people have a lot of traffic to their website then…
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I’m new to wordpress and making websites in general so sorry if this is a noobie question =]
How come if people get a lot of traffic to their wordpress websites they aren’t paying for their own domain (the add-on option that gets rid of the .wordpress.com) and putting advertisements up to make money? Why do they keep it a wordpress site?
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Because most people with a lot of traffic who put up advertisements don’t make money.
Because some people just want to blog.
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Well said. Multi-millions of wordpress.com bloggers are are communicators and blogging provides ways to make a difference in this world by:
* connecting to and forming relationships with other bloggers;
* sharing expertise by informing readers about things they do not know;
* inspiring and persuading readers to do something we feel is right;
* exploring ideas, concepts and beliefs;
* entertaining readers;
* sharing personal experiences;
* learning and growing through reader feedback. -
BTW if you think most bloggers are making a fortune from advertising and affiliate marketing schemes think again. If your wordpress.com blog does not currently attract 1,000 – 1,500 unique visitors and not page views every day, and your traffic stats do not demonstrate a growth trend, and your SEO is not up in the 90 percentile range, then it’s unlikely that you will make a significant income from blogging. You will be lucky if you have a little spending money left over after paying web hosting costs.
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Also if you think that purchasing a domain name and domain mapping provides you with the ability to have advertising on a wordpress.com blog then think again.
The Domain Mapping Upgrade does not enable the permission to use advertising, any kind of prohibited code, or upload additional themes and plugins. With the upgrade, your blog will still be hosted here at WordPress.com, which means that you will not have FTP access to your files and must still abide by our Terms of Service accordingly. http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/
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I’m just talking about putting ads on the sides of your pages to make a little extra cash – not like an entire life supporting income. I’m a college student and could use some money on the side. What if my website does attract at least 1,000 visitors a day?
And I can’t believe advertising is against the terms of service! WordPress is the only way I know how to add functions like rating and comments, or just how to generally make the website. If they don’t allow advertising there’s no point in me doing this .. are there any alternatives?
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To have ads, you will have to self-host. Figure about $10 to $25 per month total cost for a domain name and hosting. As Timethief says, unless you can get 1k to 1.5k <stong>unique visitors per day, don’t expect to even pay for your hosting. Most people I know getting around that don’t make much over $100 per year.
It will most likely not pay for your web hosting, and you should figure at least a year before you get those 1k to 1.5k unique visitors per day, so you will already be in the hole because of the first years expenses.
The ad networks (adsense and the like) make the money. Those with the ads on their blogs typically don’t. Google makes 50 or 75 cents per click and you make 1.5 to 2 cents per click.
Besides, with 47% of the people on the internet using Firefox, and with the adblock plus add-on now at 82,262,619 downloads, fewer and fewer people are even seeing the ads. I’ve been using it for three years, and I simply don’t see ads anywhere. If one sneaks through once in a while, I just zap it and never see it again.
I’d find a part-time job around the campus or community if I were you. Even minimum wage is likely to work out better than advertising on the internet.
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Blogger allows you to run ads, in fact Google would be tickled to death for you to run ads. It puts billions in their pockets and they send you a check once a year or so for 100 dollars.
It’s a sham. Don’t believe all the hype you read on the internet. It only works that way for a small percentage of people.
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Wow! Wisdom! Thanx TheSacredPath!
Another wow for TimeThief! Great Avatar (I know it’s not an Avatar:)
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I do have a part time job. What if I keep my blog hosted at wordpress, and if it gets enough unique visitors a day – say 1,000 or so, can I then switch it to its own domain name and host it myself and not lose these visitors?
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To do that the best thing would be to go ahead and buy a domain name and then map it to the blog here. That way when you moved the domain name would stay the same and there wouldn’t be any interruption for your visitors when you switched, and you would also keep any search engine ranking that you had built up.
You can buy a domain name and the domain mapping through wordpress for $15.
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If you don’t do the domain name right away, then when you switch to a self-hosted blog, you are going to be starting over from scratch with the search engines, and your hard-won traffic will have to figure out where you have gone.
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Exactly. the Google Page Rank and Technorati authority and rank belong to the root blog ie. the original wordpress.com sub-domain url for the blog.
If you purchase a domain name and move the blog to another URL all the links will be broken unless you also purchase domain mapping so readers are seamlessly transferred between the URLs.
The PageRank on the new blog on your domain will drop to 0/10. That can’t be avoided, however, in about 4 – 6 months time, all things considered you may be able to restore it.
If your wordpress.com blog does attract 1,000 – 1,500 unique visitors and not page views each and every day then hiring a web host and getting a wordpress.ORG install will not result in you making much more money than what your hosting costs. Aklso note that Google Adsense does not even issue a check unless or until the site earns $100. US funds from ad clickers. Typically this takes about a year and in some cases even longer.
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I blog for a living on several sites and also have several blogs here. The reason I keep them here when at least one of them has averaged 3000 hits a day for years is, PROTECTION.
I know WP.com isn’t going to poop itself in fear and kill my site at the first whisper from a lawyer.
I know WP.com isn’t going to break.
I know WP.com isn’t going to get sold and shut down, or sell my details to spammers.
I know WP.com is just going to work, pretty much every time I want to use it, and it’s NOT going to take a lot of thinking to operate. Advertising is a quagmire that, in order to do well, requires serious learning, serious effort and serious commitment. Think: how clever would you have to be to put ads on your school binder and have it make money? That’s how clever you have to be to put ads on your blog nowadays and make money. I live this nightmare daily.
I know, also, that WP.com will allow me to reach more readers than any other blogging platform (for technical reasons, including independent WordPress). If your priority is to reach minds, to communicate, or simply to write, this is the best place.
If your priority is to make money, there are other options, but it is important to be realistic about them.
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Yes, but you may do so as often as you like!
Really, advertising is NOT as easy as it used to be, and I hate to see people going on assumptions that even two years ago would have been accurate but are not now. It’s important.
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Good to know that all one can realistically hope for – money-wise – is for the hobby blogging to maybe one day finance itself. So I shall stick to the hosted-version and just enjoy the process. :)
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Honestly, in the current advertising climate that is an unrealistic expectation. Everyone I teach is all “Let’s slap Adsense on it and prepare to retire to Cabo” but without at least a couple of thousand hits a day, you’re not even going to earn your hosting back. And to get a couple of thousand hits a day requires much more hard work than most people are interested in giving to a simple hobby blog.
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@raincoaster
May I suck up to you and get you to publish a guest post on my blog. We could then have one helluva discussion and put to rest these asinine myths and unrealistic expectations about making big money by blogging. -
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