Get Your Blog Hosted for Free

by Travis on March 10, 2010

I always encourage bloggers that want to take themselves seriously to get their own hosting, and manage their own site.  The most common pushback I get is the price of hosting.  You can get your blog hosted for free.  It is pretty easy.

First some perspective.

Let’s say you really do have your blog hosted for free right now on a site like Blogger or Wordpress.com.  That’s great.  If you are happy, god bless.  If you want to step up you game a little, you are going to have to move on to a self hosted solution.

What are we talking about price wise?  Roughly $80 – $120 per year.  You can pretty easily get your hosting done for about $7.95 per month.  That’s really cheap.  Granted, that is much more expensive than free…I will give you that.  However, it is a small price to pay for the potential increase in revenue and content flexibility that is then afforded to you.

How to get your hosting for free?

There are two easy ways, but first consider our goal.  We need to come up with $7.95 in revenue every month to offset the cost of hosting.  That is not a lot of money. Check out the two methods for getting free blog hosting

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Blogher networking event.

That’s right. Don’t.

Bear with me on the following journey.  I promise, there is an important lesson to be learned that will make you money.

I happen to find myself at a variety of business networking events in New York City through out the year.  I tend to go there because I have to go.  I’m usually dragged there by co-workers.

Hey, if there’s an open bar, why not.

Inevitably, someone ends up trying to force a conversation on me about their business.  Most of the time, I could really care less.

Can you tell I am not in sales?

Well, since I’m not in sales, I end up telling these guys what I do, and start asking some questions about their websites (or lack thereof) because I really don’t want to them give me their hard sell anymore. I promise there is a lesson to this story. Keep reading!

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Chart of server loadtime.

What’s the most common problem that growing blogs always run into?  Their Wordpress site needs to be cached in order to handle the growing influx of traffic.

The lifespan of the common blogger goes something like this.

  1. Blogger starts blog at Wordpress.com, Blogger, or Typepad.
  2. Blogger realizes they want more flexibility and ability to generate a little revenue.
  3. Blogger moves their site over to a self hosted Wordpress.org setup on a cheap blog host.
  4. Blogger’s traffic continues to grow.
  5. BOOM.  Site begins to fail because their shared PHP server and database are overwhelmed.

That’s where most bloggers start scratching their head.  They start to do some research about all the errors they are getting.  Of course, their lame hosts have no good answers and just tell them to upgrade their hosting plans. Learn more about caching your blog

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Making your own custom Wordpress shortcode is actually very easy to do.  All you need to do is add a little bit of code to your site to generate a new Wordpress shortcode.

Everyone loves the convenience of shortcodes such as the built in Wordpress gallery shortcode.  All you do is put [shortcodehere] into your post, and the gallery shows up

You may have used some plugins that implement their own custom shortcodes as well.  For example, if you want a poll in your post, your plugin may just tell you to throw something like this in your post:

[poll id=43]

That tells your blog to go get poll number 43 and place it into the post with all the proper formatting. Find out how to make your own shortcode

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5 Ways to Get More Comments on Your Blog

March 3, 2010
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For most blogs, comments are the lifeblood of pageviews.  What do pageviews turn into?  Ad impressions.
That’s the business gold behind comments, but there are a lot more benefits including community building, site loyalty, and more.  There are many ways to get more comments on your blog, and they are all very easy.
1) Just ask for [...]

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Adding Social Networking Buttons to Your Blog or Website

March 2, 2010
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If you are sick of hearing about social networking, join the club.  However, there is real value in the traffic that it can generate for your site.  Does that mean you need to add social networking buttons to your blog or website?
Probably.
But don’t go crazy.
You should care about the traffic that can be generated by [...]

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Got Speed? The Problem with Slow Loading Blogs

January 5, 2010
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If you are not the tech savvy type, I’d be willing to bet your site loads slower than it should. Most amateur bloggers (and some professional ones) are not very good developers. Here’s where I would normally make the case for hiring a firm like BlogCraving to handle these things for you, but this time I will spare you.

Let’s just jump right to the point and find out if your site is a load hog.

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How To: License photos for your gossip blog

January 3, 2010
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Many of my clients are celebrity gossip and entertainment bloggers.  The gossip niche has been our bread and butter for many years now.  We stumbled across the category by accident really.  It turns out that in 2006, there were a lot of high traffic gossip sites that needed real technical management in order to keep [...]

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