Miguel Guhlin Another Think Coming Challenge Claims, Uncover Reality

by mguhlin

$1200 blogging bill

EdTech

As someone who is always concerned about saving money—both at home and work (i’m not sure which pushed me over the edge in saving money)—and pinching the dollars until they screech, I was shocked to read Dean Shareski’s summation of Wes Fryer’s blogging costs:

I can certainly understand your wife questioning a $1200 annual budget for blogging. I still think that’s absurd. There are many bloggers who use blogger with very high traffic, which costs them $0. I agree, I like having my own domain and host but other than the hassle of moving, I sure hope you can find an alternative. Given your trouble of recent months, there has to be a better company out there.

There’s no way I could afford a $1200 bill just for blogging. Even given that Wes has a zillion subscribers to his blog, this is an expense he should not be paying given free tools, as Dean suggests above. I made the same suggestion to Wes via tweet—switch to Blogger—but he didn’t go for it.

However, as I reflect on my own journey to Blogger from Thingamablog, I thought I might share some of my lessons:

  1. Blogger enables you to focus on the writing and sharing rather than tweaking the blog components, installing the right plug-ins, etc. While you can certainly continue to do that on your own—after all, setup MAMP/XAMPP on your laptop and install Wordpress and anything else you want—why do that when you’re focused on blogging? For fun, I do have a WP installation on my home computer…and I backup Blogger there. WP 2.7 has made this process VERY easy, including incremental backups.

  2. Blogger has made it easy to back-up your work…and will probably continue improving. In a very real way, Wes will always be able to transition his content out of blogger to WP. The only issue is, can Blogger import old content from WP with included audio/video/images? Would Wes have to leave some of his content behind? When I walked away from Thingamablog, I left 7000 blog entries on the table. They’re still published at MGuhlin.net (in fact, they get twice as many hits as the new domain, MGuhlin.org) and I occasionally drop content that gets visitors into the new blogger blog.

  3. Domain registration is $10 a year. Yep, I’m paying for $10 for the MGuhlin.org domain. It’s a recurring fee but…$10 a year. That beats $90-$100 per month.

  4. Google Picasaweb provides storage of all my images. I don’t have to rely on Skitch, Flickr, whatever…I can put it all into PicasaWeb and then back it off using the Picasa application. That makes backing up increasingly easy. Cost for approx 11 gigs of extra storage? $20 per year.

I understand what it’s like to walk away from a lot of entries. I don’t know how many Wes has, but I figure he writes more than I do! Still, $1200 per year for blogging…forget about it!

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