If you’re like me, you read posts about blogging to see if you can learn anything. I imagine that this is especially true when we all started out blogging. What should we do to be better bloggers?
I encountered this on the blog of a person who had been blogging for a month:
Upgrade to a premium account as soon as possible.
I blinked as you do to make sure you’re actually correctly reading the words.
If you’re a newbie blogger, DO NOT UPGRADE TO PREMIUM. This is my advice to you. If you look around the interwebz, you’ll see a statistic that something like 1/3 of bloggers stop within three months. More stop within the subsequent months. So, let’s say you follow that advice and buy a domain immediately. Two months later you quit, thinking you might get your money back. Nope.
My advice is: if you still love blogging after four, five, or six months, consider going premium then. Frankly, depending on why you’re blogging, there may be no need to ever go premium so save your money and be happy (or spend your money on something else and be happy). Bloggers go premium in order to have more control over their blogs and/or to monetize. And, unless you have mad skills, after a month you probably don’t have enough followers to monetize your blog. Buy yourself a book or go to the movies, instead.
Back to your regularly scheduled blog experience.
ps The Gutenberg editors allows drop caps. I am now a drop capping goofball.
I’m still on a freebie site and happy enough. 😀
Yes! And you’ve been blogging for a while, too, right?
Since Sept 2013, and I love it!
After a few months I took my son’s advice and moved to premium. He works in social media and marketing. Now almost 2.5 years later I am still happy with Premium. And you are right….see if you actually want to be a blogger before committing $$$.
If you don’t mind my asking, what were his reasons for advising you to move? And I ask because I’m curious.
I moved to premium after 4 or 5 months because I just loved blogging and felt sure that it was now part of my life. And since I’m nearly at 3 years, I think I did the right thing. 🙂
He has set up a lot of websites and he said that WordPress has good support and would help me with any problems or questions any time of day or night. He also knew I had taken an online equine photograpjy course and would be posting a lot of photos and the Premium had more memory allotted for photos. I think basically he thought I would be happier with it and as I was doing it for fun and not to make money it would be easier with Premium.
All excellent reasons. I can definitely tell you’ve taken an equine photography course. Your pictures are always beautiful and catch the horse right in the middle of action.
Thank you. Capturing a moving subject is not always easy but I really enjoy it and having media accreditation has taken me to interesting places!
Yes, I have lots of blurry dog pictures. Nice on the media accreditation. 🙂
I blogged for almost two and a half years before going premium. I mainly did it to have my cyranny.com domain as I knew I’d keep blogging after that much time, and I needed more GB capacity… I totally agree with you that jumping to premium after a month or two can be a big mistake…
especially if it’s your first blog. I remember I found the whole enterprise daunting and didn’t get followers forever and then slowly caught on. 🙂
Exactly! It is so easy to get discouraged at the beginning…
…but now it’s so fun! 😀
I agree. I can’t believe I didn’t even know what blogging was, just 3 and a half years ago 😛
Well I am not sure it is the worse advice – but as you noted – it might not be the best idea – however – if someone wants to post videos they need to upgrade – so it might depend on what their goal is…
Granted, I presume there are people who enter into blogging with disposable income and who won’t be affected by throwing away $100 on a misadventure, but I suspect this not true for the average young would-be blogger. And if video is their goal, I would think that YouTube or vimeo would be their destination.
Well I don’t think it is throwing away 100$ as it helps pay for the service at wp and then the blog posts have less ads (something like that) and I just meant adding a video into a post – not the same thing as YiuTube or Vimeo –
I think you may have missed my point. If you’re an individual who has just started blogging, how can you be certain in a month’s time that you’ll continue? Why purchase an upgrade at this time? It just doesn’t make sense. If you quit, it IS throwing away money. That’s the point of this post.
Btw, if you are adding videos to your posts, you might look into doing them first on YouTube and then adding them. Unless you have a business account with unlimited space, that is.
Thanks for commenting. 🙂
Oh thanks for the clarification (got it) and the tip about adding videos – and I do it the way you said – add from YouTube and it works well for me –
Hope you have a nice weekend
Thank you. I hope you have a great weekend too! 🙂
That is terrible advice, I took the jump to personal after about a year because I had actually stuck at it and I didn’t like the domain I’d picked when setting up, so I wanted something a bit more refined. I’ve only jumped up to premium this year after three years because I’m still going and because I wanted a bit more control and a new look ☺️
Congrats on 3 years! I hear you–it’s kind of like moving from an apartment to a house.
Thanks, that is such a good analogy 🙂
🙂
I’m not likely to pay for anything I can do for free.
I like your new layout, except your comments are hard to read with that gray print on white background.
ooooooo….thanks! I’m going to have to see where to fix that. I’m still fixing other things, but I do like the change of theme. It’s kind of fun. Thanks for pointing it out.
It is good to switch it up sometimes. I like it. I hope it helps with your reorganizing.
So far so good. Except that I wish wordpress’ online help was better.
I write because I enjoy it. I never got into it for the money, but I hoped it would come,. The unfortunate the reality is, I made 7 cents last month on my WordPress monetization. This what happens to most, if they’re even that lucky. Ads are great, but if no one views my articles, well…
I have a feeling that people who go into blogging to make money (unless they have a great product or something like that) don’t remain bloggers long. The rest of us do it because we love to write.