Here are some life lessons which I would like to share with those of you who are still using the free Blogger (Blogspot) site.
If you are blogging for fun, then keep enjoying this free service provided. Personally I still have a few Blogspot sites which I drop by once awhile to post some new articles. These blogs has no affiliate links, no ads and no linking out. They still make some money for me with the help from Adsense.
But for those you who are really serious about making money online or already having a consistently massive organic traffic to your blog, then I strongly advised you to get your own domain and migrate your Blogger to WordPress, without having to lose Google PageRank (PR), traffic and search engine result page (SERP), which you have worked so hard to build all this time.
I am telling you this because you never know one of this days, Blogger may pay you a sudden visit, telling you that your blog has been removed for violating Blogger TOS or considered as a spam. Then you are left with nothing. No blog to write or make money anymore. And you have to start all over again, with a clean slate. No indexing by Google, no traffic, no PageRank, no nothing.
One of the life lessons which I have learned from this unfortunate incident is listen and learn from those who have gone through bad experiences. All this time, I had read grievances of those deleted Bloggers; complaining and cussing in the forums and their blogs. I never knew one day I would be one of them too.
After having blogged for over three years, one fateful morning, Blogger dropped a bombshell. All of a sudden, my seven blogs with my own original written posts were considered as spams or had violated Blogger Terms of
Service (TOS). They all got removed by Blogger.
It was much later I learned that it was not my writing which got all my blogs deleted. If you have read those who have their blogs deleted, most of them were using Blogger to make money online. It doesn’t matter whether your blog is genuine clean or a spam. Its automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy. So any one of our blogs could be the next “victim”. When you site got wrongly deleted, you have to go through the whole rigmarole to have your site unlocked and restored. It could take a couple of days or even weeks. Chances you could have lost traffic and also money as well. And yet to know whether you could get your blog back.
My neighbor who has been in the Internet marketing for some years now, is the one who advised me to move from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress installation. After that rude awakening, I decided to move some of my more established blogs (those with good amount of targeted traffic) and have them hosted with Bluehost.
Frankly, the only regret is I should have started off with a self-hosted blog, rather with a free platform. I started blogging just for the fun and to pass my time, as I am already retired. Like many others, I started with the free platform Blogger or aka Blogspot. Over time, I had a several blogs on varied topics, ranging from songwriting tips to verbal communication skills to home business opportunities.
In fact it is blessing in disguise. After having my blogs deleted, I shifted to self-hosted site and I am making more money than before. Besides, I have no more worries about getting my blog deleted anymore.
Another life lesson which I have learned is there is price to pay for using free stuff. Yeah, I know there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, man!
Life lessons which I had learned from this incident are never take thing for granted and always be prepared for any kind of circumstances.
Luckily I still have a couple of profitable Blogspot sites from a different account. Immediately I bought some domain names from GoDaddy (around $12 each) and hosted them with Bluehost for around $7 a month. For a year, all you need to pay is less than $100, and you get a free domain forever. Plus you have unlimited domain hosting.
Today I am happily enjoying writing and making money online with my own domain sites. For those of you who are new, you do not have to spend any more money on buying those premium themes or templates. In fact, I am using both paid and free themes ( like this blog). They all look presentable and very SEO-friendly. All my new self-hosted WordPress blogs got indexed by Google almost 24 hour and they are all now enjoying various good ranking for their keyword phrases.
I will be writing an easy-to-understand tutorial on how I migrate Blogger to self-hosted WordPress installation for non tech-savvy folks, like me. I would explain in the layman term, so that you can quickly and smoothly get your site up and start blogging and begin making money online as soon as possible. [image]