It must be the one question that many wannabe-bloggers are asking themselves. I know one friend who just didn’t know anywhere else apart from Blogger itself. But if you want to have a real blog, Blogger is just not the best place to start. Even if it is the most obvious.

If you are deciding to blog, then you need to consider what your priorities are. Having blogged on and off since 2005, I think that they can be boiled down to five points

1. Goals – These are often the most obvious, and they are often met with blank stares: I just want to have a blog. But what is your blog for? Who do you expect to read your blog? What do you expect to put there? There are a million answers available for each question. If you’re not sure, perhaps look around and make a list of things you think are important.

2. Expandability – Often when you start with a blog, you’ll find that you may want to have two or three blogs or that your blog takes off in a totally unexpected direction. With many hosting plans, you can be sure that you can have the additional resources for expanding your online presence without adding much cost.

3. Platform – Choose a broadly supported package or platform to support your blog! When you face problems, you will find it easy to get support, both free and paid-for support. Choosing one of the lesser known platforms will make things a lot harder when you have issues or bugs. Also, choosing a broader platform will mean more choice over plugins, themes, and additional services.

4. Pricing – If you are starting out blogging, affordability can often be a problem. Decide what your budget is for hosting. Don’t expect to make much or any money at the beginning. If you do, you’ll only be disappointed. Really. By choosing a host with room to grow, you’ll also avoid future extra costs should your site become popular.

5. Reliability – I was quite happy with my original host for a long time, but then we started to have lots of issues with their servers. While they were forthright, and I felt comfortable staying with them, not all hosts are able, or willing, to fix the issues as responsibly as mine was.

These concerns will surely be uppermost when you start to seek out your own web hosting however you decide to do it.

I’ve been looking at redoing my sidebars for sometime on InvestorBlogger. But the thought of doing that really strikes horror into me. There’s so much that needs tweaking. I have five blogs on InvestorBlogger Dot Com, and each of them has two sidebars. Worse: each of the sidebars needs multiple changes!

SideBar Changes: Adsense, Stats, and more…

I’m planning to remove the Adsense from all of my blogs to get impressions back to zero. It’s obvious from the number of clicks, payment rates and so on that my Adsense account has been targeted as ‘underperforming’, or to use Adsense’s euphemism “smart-priced”. I’m not sure what’s covering that phenomenon, but once I reduce my impressions to zero, I can begin giving them a test to see what the source is. Right now, my publisher code is spread across numerous sites.

Financial stats are outdated by more than a month. In fact, in September I easily broke through US$12K earned since I started blogging online! I have now averaged a little under US$500 per month, and recent months have edged towards US$600 in all, though the past two months or so have been weak. But I’m not keeping up with the ads, so I need to find some way to tame the information.

Trimming one sidebar, and standardizing the content much more would also help, as each sidebar appears different. This also makes trouble when widgets need to be pulled. I typically add as much to one widget to cut processing time, so I have to hack the HTML code in each text widget to make sure things are okay. It’s a bummer if I didn’t tag the code properly! I can’t find it! Right now, I need to move the BlogRush code because the BlogRush Project hung up its shoes (not surprisingly).

In future, I think I’m only going to have one major sidebar on my blog, likely on the right. It will it make finding things much easier! But there are other changes afoot.

InvestorBlogger and DollarTravels

I recently merged all my blogs into one ’superblog’, and created URL redirects. I figured it would be much easier to manage one superblog than numerous mini-blogs and each blog would benefit from the ‘traffic’ juice, thus gaining more exposure. The results have been pretty mixed: traffic is up, but I noticed a couple of things that give pause for thought: the sub-blogs are much stickier than the original blog itself; the original blog is ’somehow’ lost … and some traffic is not clicking through in quite the same way. I also preferred having an automatically updated blog. Wordpress MU isn’t much fun. Many plugins just don’t work properly. Some of my favorites cause problems for search engines by not working properly.

It seems that I’ve underestimated the hits on traffic to InvestorBlogger as a result of the Google Spank last year. My blog has failed to gain any appreciable increase in PR since then, and advertising revenue has not increased much since then. Some advertisements are sold, but many are not. This all-in-one strategy hasn’t really worked as it has also undermined mini-blogs by not providing a more focused and more ad-ready audience!

So, it looks like I’ll be reestablishing some of the original domains with the original content sometime soon, as well as adding one or two more. InvestorBlogger will remain but minus some of the financial content. It *could* be that InvestorBlogger in its current form is now reaching the end of its useful life: but then I thought that last year, and, if anything, content and traffic are 100% better. So who knows? It is clear that some refining of InvestorBlogger’s focus is becoming necessary at some point.