Abhilash Pillai Website Designer

Yeah, I know it is pretty late for me to try this out, but eventually its turning out to be the coolest thing I have noticed in Desktop blogging platforms.. The Windows Live Writer. All windows 7 users can download the windows live writer from the Windows essentials pack on the Microsoft site.

It did discovered my wordpress blog with great ease and also downloaded the template styles so as to give me the natural look of the online blog. I did add multiple blogs in the Windows live writer and everything seems too smooth now.

Sample Table created by Live Writer

Creating tables is a breeze…and so will be adding maps…Let me try the maps..

Well it was cool too…however anybody would have loved the google map integration instead of the bing..:D But its not hard to guess why Microsoft didn’t include that. And thats where Microsoft makes mistakes, to appreciate a competitors product if it adds value to your own products.

Coming back to the writer, I just love this… Simply a great product for bloggers. Something really good from Microsoft ! And free too !

There may be a lot of argument regarding this as to which is the best URL structure to use in a wordpress blog. Before that let me explain how the URL structure is tweaked. Its known as permalink in wordpress and you will find it in the dashboard > Settings > Permalinks:

Here you see various options you can use such as http://www.URLHERE.com/2009/09/09/sample-post/ or http://www.URLHERE.com/2009/09/sample-post/

However, the best option to use is a Custom structure: Enter this in the field:     /%category%/%postname%/

That makes the URL SEO friendly by showing the category and post name in the URL. If you wish to remove the word “category” in the category url, what you have to do is just put a dot “.” without quotes in the Category base field below and save the changes.

There are a lot of variations and views regarding which is the best one to use, but in my view this is reasonably the best and the one which I use on this blog. Hope this post helps

Update:(26th Aug 2010) The “.” in tags fields no longer works with the latest version of wordpress. The better option for removing “category” is to edit the rewrite.php file located in includes folder.

In the previous post Blogging as a career : An alternative to jobs , I left out to mention where to buy domains from. I did mention about hostgator as a reliable host in that post but the domain part I assumed as everybody knows.

The best place to buy a domain is www.godaddy.com if you have a credit card or balance in your paypal account. If you are looking for some other alternatives to pay, then you will have to look elsewhere. I do prefer godaddy as the best source to buy domains as their control panel is something very easy to use and a lot of people are used to it, so its easier when u need to transfer domains due to a sale.

For newbies the price may seem high, but the trick is to use discount coupon codes while checking out. The code I use often for .com domains is ZINE3 which did work with my latest domain buy too.

Fed up searching for jobs in a highly competitive jobs market, where there is frequent jobs cuts and salary deductions. So what are the alternatives available? How about starting blogging? Well, lets see what are the options..

What you need for blogging?

A domain + web hosting account. Even though there is a lot of factors which determines the charges for hosting. Lets start with something as basic as a shared plan as hostgator: Recomemded baby plan . So the yearly expenses should work at to $105 or Rs.5200.  Also note that you can use the same host to host even more blogs. So for the second and third site you would only need domain i.e. $8 yearly. I would stronly recommend to start with one and later add two more.

Apart from the hosting and the domain, offcourse you need a PC and broadband connection. Lets calculate the net connection at $20 monthly or Rs.1000 monthly and a further PC depreciation and power charges at $20 a month.

So the total yearly expenditure would be at $105+$240+$240 = $585 i.e. around Rs. 29,250

I know by now you would start rolling your eyes…well blogging is surely not for the soft hearted and impatient guys out there. Its really hard to get results out of your blogs.

Now lets calculate the returns you can expect in the first year..

Before that, I would like to say that blogs do need unique content, atleast rewritten content to rank. Any 100% copy paste would be near to impossible to rank. A reasonable number of posts to start with would be around 4 to 5 a day.

For the first two months, I don’t see a chance for any earnings at all. Thats something which many of you would worry about , but thats the risk involved in blogging. From the third to sixth month I would calculate the earnings to be in the range of 30 to 100 $ per month ( Google adsense). I do prefer to start with Google adsense.  From the 6th to one year term, I would calculate the earnings to be anywhwere between $100 to $300 a month. So lets determine an average earning even though the earnings depend on a variety of factors like the category(niche) of the site and the traffic it brings.

First two months = Nil

3rd to 6th Month = $200

7th to 12th month = $1200

A total earning of $1400.. now thats Rs. 70000

So its a profit of around Rs.40000 a month. Very low , isn’t it? Well, these calculations are indeed at the lower end of the earnings, its better to start with low expectation than to have very high expectations and later feel demotivated.

Some more things to remember while blogging are:

Concentrate on writing for readers than the search engine.

Concentrate on getting traffic to the blog..(not on the earnings)..

Hope, this post clarifies the doubts one has regarding the initial investment and effort required to start blogging as a career. Do provide your valuable comments..