I had tried blogging a few times in the past and it fizzled after a few months, so I didn’t want to spend any money up front for hosting. I did pay for a domain name and dns provider though. Since I am a web developer, I went with Jekyll for my blogging platform (http://jekyllrb.com/) and am hosting it on github with a custom domain name at http://digitaldrummerj.me. I cost me about $100 to get the domain name and Dnsprovider.

Thank you again for the inspiration.

A couple of points:

1. Keep going. It takes a while to build authority and respect. Usually at least 1 year of consistency before you see any sort of real traction.

2. You don’t need to force anything down anyone’s throats. Just be yourself and genuinely seek to help other people and everything will come naturally.

3. Don’t underestimate the value of enforcing your own understand, as you put it. Writing and the process of getting your thoughts out and sharing them helps them become more solid in your own mind.

Keep going man. 🙂

I have been trying to push my brand down the internet’s throat for almost six months now and I feel that my contributions are worthless to the community and only valuable for me to enforce my own understanding. When will people recognize my efforts as the “authority” on XAML and Architecture?

Why am I trying so hard to give when it seems that nobody cares?

Not sure why I didn’t get notified of your reply. But I just happened to see it now. I agree with much of what you said. There is definitely a higher barrier to entry with hosting your blog on your own domain. That is one of the reasons why I am trying to make it easier.
I don’t think the decision hinges so much on monetizing your blog or not though. I hardly make much money from this blog and it gets 100k views a month. But, like you said, I get opportunities and make connections that I wouldn’t otherwise make.
I also think there are many different ways to make money off of a blog, not just through banners and affiliate links.
In your case, it sounds like you are fine and are able to achieve your goals. You already have a well established blog.
This advice is mainly for someone starting out. If you are starting out now, I think it makes sense to register a domain and throw up a real easy WordPress install–it gives you more options later on.

All valid and correct points. I can’t argue against the point that if your ultimate goal is to monetize your blog content that registering your own domain and managing your own hosting is the way to go. I personally didn’t set out with the goal of monetizing blog content; I set out to have a body of work publicly available that was associated with my name to make myself more marketable to potential employers.

The syndication approach is an interesting one, but I wonder if it wouldn’t suffer from a “chicken and egg” problem where you want to syndicate your blog content, but you don’t yet have any content and therefore no potential syndication sites would want to work with you. I’d love a post (or an addendum to this one) about getting your blog content syndicated if you’d be inclined to write one 🙂

I often think to myself, “If I had it to do all over again I’d have just registered my own domain name and hosted my own blog with WordPress”, but if I’m being completely honest I’m not sure I would have succeeded with that approach. I’m looking at an uphill battle now if I want to monetize my content, but I would have been facing an uphill battle early on if I was trying to market my own blog on my own domain name. The instant gratification of writing a post, hitting publish, and getting some traffic to it kept me doing it. If I had to think about SEO and/or marketing that content I would have given up I think. Someone could give me a fool-proof step-by-step blueprint for marketing my blog content and I probably still wouldn’t do it simply because it doesn’t interest me at all. Writing code, and sometimes blogging about writing code, is what I like doing.

So, I don’t make any money off of my blog, but I have made professional connections and gotten job offers from it, which is more or less what I set out to do in the first place.

Now, all of that comes with a price. I don’t get a lot of control over what the blog looks like or what features it has, and I can’t get revenue from ads or anything like that. For that reason I’m thinking about registering my own domain and striking out on my own soon, and am left withe task of migrating (which, as you point out, will be a pain), but I think that early jolt of success in getting people to read the blog got me excited and interested in continuing to write posts.

Thanks. Nice to be at the point to take that next step.

– Rajaraman R
http://agiledevtest.blogspot.com