Don’t Build a Free Blog! Here’s How to Avoid It and Build a Better Blog

Last week I was telling you how to fight information overload, but skipped one thing on purpose, that I want to write a whole post on. Probably the biggest mistake bloggers make when they start.

Building a blog on a free platform!

OK, hold on, don’t give me the “I don’t have any money for a blog” story just yet. I come from a place where $60 a year is very hard to invest in such an “imaginary” thing as a blog. But it’s not just my country, I am sure 75% of the world countries consider $60 a nice sum of money.

And I get that! I know how hard it can be to put that aside, I was a beginner once. But that is not an excuse to build a blog on a free platform for two reasons:

• you are not serious about your business (and can lose it any time) if you use a free platform
• you can make $60 online before you even start a blog.

It can be way less than $60 actually, I am just talking about an average hosting and domain price for 12 months.

So how can you make the first $60 online? I will give you just two ideas that can both make you that money in less than a month (or even faster).

Sell on Fiverr

Fiverr is a great place where I spend a lot of money, some of those gigs are just so tempting If you sell a gig on Fiverr, you will make $4 per gig. That means you only need 15 gigs to make $60.

How can you do this fast? Do a little research on two things: what is the most-wanted product online at the moment and what is selling like crazy on Fiverr (sometimes those two things aren’t the same thing).

Here are some ideas that can get you going, popular things all bloggers need and may not have time for:

• setting up a Facebook fan page
• setting up a Google Plus page
• any image related gig – Facebook cover photos, Twitter backgrounds, blog headers…
• turning articles into presentations
• turning articles or presentations into videos
• transcription services
• article writing

If you can do any of these things, you are on a roll! Promote your gigs on social networks and as soon as you got those 15 done, you can get yourself a serious self hosted blog.

Create a rocking Squidoo lens

Squidoo is a project created by Seth Godin and it makes a lot of money to a lot of its users. On Squidoo, you create a “lens” which is basically a web page, for free, and monetize it.

So how can you make this work? Pick one topic that is hot at the moment and that has products you can promote with it. Try to pick a topic/product that has high payouts. Summer is coming so something summer vacation related sounds like a good idea. Or just pick any of the evergreen niches (health, relationships, etc).

Find one good long tail keyword on the topic that doesn’t have too much competition. Write a great page including as much useful info as you can. Sprinkle your affiliate links through out the page.

When your page is finished and all the affiliate links are set up it is time to make that money. This will be a great exercise for your future blog as well. Start promoting and sharing the page as you would your posts. Create links and go on a blog commenting spree, linking to your Squidoo lens.

Since you are promoting only one page, it will be much easier to build a significant amount of links to it. If you picked your keyword properly and optimized your page for search engines, you can actually find your page on first page of Google pretty fast. Squidoo pretty much kept its rankings even after Panda update so you know they are doing it right.

A Squidoo lens with a good long tail keyword and appropriate products, can make you those $60 in less than a week.

Conclusion

These are only 2 ideas to make you a quick buck and I am sure you can think of 10 more if you sit down and actually think about it. Making $60 won’t be such a big deal if you put some work in it and it will let you start your blog the right way from the very beginning.

You will later avoid costs of getting someone to move your content to a self-hosted blog and you won’t worry about your blog being taken off internet for breaking the rules (like putting any type of monetization on a free WordPress blog).

If you are ready to build your first blog but don’t have money for it, use these ideas to hop over that first hurdle. Sounds interesting?

Have you started your blog on a free platform? I would love to hear your opinion about this? 

Image: Chi King