While I wait for my basic bookselling course to start. I’ve come up with some projects for myself in the meantime. Last week I decided to focus on moving the blog to a new web host and research how to move a WordPress site to a self hosted site. Trying to diversify the income coming in for the business.
I kept seeing that bloggers “should” have self-hosted sites over and over, the algorithm was algorithm-ing. Since I’ve been thinking about it for a while, I decided to see how difficult it looked. Research turned into me making the move.
Moving the site was a bit of a headache at first. It was especially difficult because I’d already started posting through WordPress’ free .com site. If I’d started with their .org site and self-hosting I wouldn’t have to backtrack. But you live and you learn. I took the steps one day at a time, to not get overwhelmed. I was done with moving the site after a couple days. Now I’m waiting on Google to approve the site for ad placements.😬
Here’s what I did to move my site to self-hosting:
- On Monday, I exported the WordPress.com site onto my computer and updated the design layout for WordPress.org. This was the most stressful day, because my tunnel vision kicked in. Problem solving without breaks made the hours slip by very quickly, in a way where I felt completely unproductive.
- On Tuesday, I signed up with Bluehost to get the site self-hosted. Most bloggers advocated for this site since it seemed to be the most cost effective for beginners. Of course later I saw someone suggest the bloggers were all recommending Bluehost because they’re affiliates. But whatever, the site is self-hosted now, so I’m going with Bluehost for now! I can re-evaluate next year.
- On Wednesday, I continued to adjust the site design and looked into joining Google AdSense so I could start adding advertisements to the site. Also, transferred my subscribers from WordPress.com to the self-hosted site.
- On Thursday, I announced the site re-launch on my social accounts and updated all of my various membership and social sites with the new site address.
- On Friday, I continued to tweak which pages to include on the site.
While I waited on Google to approve the site already, I moved on to another passive income idea. So this week I worked on joining Amazon KDP to publish low-content journals and see how that goes. I designed two journals, one blank journal and a habit tracker. So now I’m also waiting on Amazon to approve the designs and start showing them on the site!
I’ll probably start looking into making additional merchandise through a drop ship service next week.
What business moves are you making? Let me know in the comments.