Passive Income for Life

SGDividends asked a question that was very dear to my heart in his comment in my last posting. I’d thought it would be more worthy to put it up as a blog post to share with others as well.

As like most bloggers who have ventured into the blogosphere “just for the fun of it and blogging sake”, I initially considered services like blogger, typepad, wordpress sufficient. Not to mention that they are free as well. But as I progressed and learnt about new stuff online, there were questions that popped up like what SGDividends had mentioned.

1. Why have a domain name?
2. Why also pay for hosting?

Here are some reasons why I took the leap to “invest” in both:

1. Online Real Estate
   Having a domain of your own is akin to buying a real estate. Imagine if you own “google.com”, you are certainly to be rich! That’s why there are many people doing domain trading and parking as well. The domain name is like a location. The more demanded a keyword is, the higher the price. But this point is less relevant to most than the next point.
2. Branding
   Having my own domain name gives me a brand name without the “blogspot dot com”. It is easier to remember and has a premium over subdomain names. I cannot imagine a “www.capitaland.blogspot.com”. Makes it look sub-standard.
3. Searchability and SEO
   Actually, the name matters only slightly if you do your meta-tagging properly for either own-domain-name site or a sub-domain-name site. Search engines still index blog posts as individual pages. The domain name just gives the initial “meta tag” for searchability but at the end of the day, content is king.
4. Hosting and Domain name goes hand-in-hand
   Buying a domain name is merely for the name. It’s like the face of a person. Hosting is the entire works of the body. It makes little sense to buy a domain name without hosting (unless only the name matters to you). With only the domain name, you are still parking all your content with the service provider like blogger. They have clauses that can result in deletion of your blog (though usually rare). This is the biggest reason why people start “moving out” to set up their own space.
5. Control
   I’ve never mentioned it here but only in my personal blog about my experiences in using free services. I tinkered around with free WordPress before but found it highly limited, especially that I could not use scripts. WordPress blocks them for the reasons of security, which can be overly excessive. There are limited ways you can design your blog layout as well for many of these services. tsk tsk.

To specifically answer SGDividend’s questions, yes indeed you can use a free host and a domain as well. As mentioned, there is a part in blogger that uses a re-direct to do so. You don’t have to worry too much about SEO due to domain name as long you post regularly and tag them accordingly.

I use Bluehost for hosting. I paid about US$160 upfront for 2 years because there was a discount for doing so. It works out to be about S$10 a month i guess. Also, they give a free domain with it. The nice thing is that it comes with domain privacy which you would have to pay extra for with domain registrars like GoDaddy. It’s perfect for starters at least.

Well for those who want to venture in slowly and not want to invest so much in hosting, but are still interested in getting your domain name (before it’s taken up!!), you can go to registrars like GoDaddy. They are the most famous online. I’ve signed up a few domains under them before and paid about US$10 per year for each domain. Just a sample of another blog experiment i am trying using a domain from GoDaddy and hosting from Bluehost: http://internet-marketing-news.info/.

Just wanna share an advice to those threading the same path: You can actually get prices lower than what I paid for. Alas i found it via trial an error after some time. Just Google “GoDaddy coupons” or the likes, you can find coupon codes that allow you to buy some domains as cheap as $7.99 a year or even $0.99 a year, depending on the name.

Just to answer one impt question asked as well:

Are you able to cover the cost by online income?

I meant to post this picture taken of my Google Adsense check when i received it 2 months back but have never found the time to do so. ;p

For the months since Sept 08 (the inception of this blog) to Feb 09, a total of 6 months has lapsed. I chalked up about US$100 since then from an average website traffic of 400-500 weekly. Extrapolated over the next 1.5 years on a constant basis, I would have earned about US$400,  an ROI of 150% over a 2 year period. Seems pretty ok to me.

This is based on adsense advertising only as well and there are many other ways to monetize from your blog online.

So far, no regrets in ploughing in the $$ for this, considering a whole new world that was opened up to be since then.