I admit that I do intend to monetize this blog once I’ve made enough posts. The idea of setting up my own domain and blog started when I realized that my only source of “income” is the scholarship stipend from my graduate studies. A regular industry job isn’t advisable now because the school workload is heavy enough, not to mention that I’ll be working on my master’s thesis soon. Daily expenses sometimes exceed income, thus, I have to find an alternative way of generating income.

Blogging revived

Cy @ Work is not my first blog. I first discovered blogging as a hobby back in the year 2006, before I pursued my graduate study in OR. Back then, I blogged about both my personal and work interests. But along the way, I neglected updating my blog due to the demands of graduate school, a research work for a software company and personal matters.

Then, just last month, I started researching about alternative income sources. My choices boiled down to two: blogging and quantitative stock trading. The latter was something I already considered sometime ago, but I knew it was a riskier and more difficult path. Still, it’s a personal project I’d like to pursue in the future. For now, I opted to restart blogging.

Somehow, I wasn’t at ease with the idea of monetizing my blog, e.g. through ads from Google Adsense. But I realized that if my blog can generate real value, i.e. useful and interesting articles, then these ads won’t really matter. An example would be Steve Pavlina’s personal development blog, a truly invaluable resource.

Setting up the blog

Deciding to eventually monetize my blog, I began by reading Steve Pavlina’s article on how to make money from blogging. Discussed here are building a blog from scratch and generating revenue from multiple sources. It was from this article that I realized that I have to create my own domain to allow for more flexibility. Based from the recommendation of a fellow Filipino blogger, I signed up on PlogHost. It’s too early to tell right now about the reliability of this hosting service, but so far, I haven’t yet experienced any problems.

Next step is installing the blogging software, Wordpress in my case. This is as easy as following the detailed installation instruction. The real difficulty I had in the process was finding a good theme. As of the moment, I’m still experimenting with various themes to use for this blog.

Blog up and running

After a few more posts, I intend to apply to Google Adsense and display some ads on this blog, though not too obstrusive. Again, my model would be Steve Pavlina’s blog, in which the ads are placed just right. Then, I’ll read about search engine optimization in order to increase the visibility of this blog.

I can talk more about my plans for this blog but in the end, I really want it to be my networking tool to connect to other bloggers. If I can generate some revenue from this blog, that would be great. But if I could only expand my network through this blog, that would be more than enough.