PROFESSIONAL BLOGGING

A self-hosted site is a website that is stored on a server the site owner owns. With this definition, most websites aren’t actually self-hosted since bloggers pay for a hosting service provider instead. (buying and maintaining a server is actually very expensive and technical, paying for the service makes more sense) This site included. So when most people say self-hosting for blogging terms, they actually mean do you have control over the location and structure of your website.

Self-hosted sites give you access to customising the structure of the website, where you can actively tweak it to be more SEO friendly. You can allow your posts to have tags, meta-data, and organise your media for example. All of these activities are easy to do with self-hosting but might not even exist on a third party platform.

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Traffic is a key indicator for blog success or failure. Everyone knows this, but almost every new blogger is absolutely clueless in how to get traffic. Google traffic is what we deem as organic traffic. This is the best type of traffic to have. You do various things to improve your SEO on your blog in hope to rank higher on Google. Sounds simple enough, but is unfortunately not simple at all. Google does give clues now and again, or outright tells you what the algorithm likes and dislikes. Smart and savvy people on the internet than compile and experiment with this raw information to determine the best way to optimise content for search. a.k.a SEO There are 200 known variables that can effect SEO.

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You can’t monetise your blog if your readers aren’t coming back again and again, that’s because most people don’t impulse buy from a blog. Impulse buy in real life, sure. Impulse buy on a big online store like Amazon, sure. But a small blog, no.

A lot of people need to visit and consume a lot of a blog’s content to do any sort of monetised behaviour. That means you need a reader to not just visit your site, but to keep coming back.

There’s a few way to do this, but every way has the same idea. You, the blogger can communicate and access your reader at any time, instead of being passive about the whole exchange.

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