Tim Uckun (Nov 19 2024 at 20:23): Tim Uckun (Nov 19 2024 at 20:23):Where is a good place to blog if you are hoping to make a couple of cents from your output. If you are self hosting what are you using and is it worth it?
Daniel Buckmaster (Nov 19 2024 at 21:42):Molly White wrote up some really detailed advice about how she uses Ghost https://www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghost/
Daniel Buckmaster (Nov 19 2024 at 21:43):I'm not hoping to monetise my own blog, so I just built it in 11ty and hosted on Cloudflare Pages https://crabmusket.net/2024/rebuilding-the-blog/
Kilian Kluge (Nov 19 2024 at 21:45):I have a blog/notebook on Hashnode, they have a decent WYSIWYG editor as well as a markdown editor and you can automatically sync the Markdown files to GitHub. I think it's possible to use your own domain as well. I was just looking for a place to collect notes and how-tos and I've found it to be perfect for this use case.
As a self-hosted option for long-form articles, I've been playing around with Astro using their official blog theme on GitHub Pages, which is straightforward to set up and use.
Either way, you'll get most of your traffic from search engines (mostly Google) or your own social media. So if generating an income is a goal, I don't think it really matters where you host the blog as long as it's compatible with your chosen way of monetization.
I think the only way to make money with blogging is through a newsletter subscription. With regular ads you're looking at around $1 per 1,000 visitors, so that's probably not worth it unless you have substantial traffic (plus it might drive away your target audience). Assuming you're writing about tech, you could look into EthicalAds (no affiliation, I just see their ads from time to time). They require at least 50k pageviews per months and claim to pay around $2.50 per 1,000 views, you can use their calculator to get estimates.
Based on my own experience, I believe it's unlikely you can get to these sorts of numbers unless you're consistently writing about a very popular topic that lots of people are searching for and where your blog happens to be among the top results, or have a large audience through social media.
Lars Ellingsen (Nov 19 2024 at 23:58):Yeah I built an Astro site and threw it on Netlify (which was very easy). But I'm not looking to make anything off of it
Brett Cannon (Nov 20 2024 at 20:51):I use Ghost(Pro) because I don't want to maintain my own setup and I wanted to support the project
Tim Uckun (Nov 20 2024 at 21:07):Thanks for all the tips guys. I will be looking into them to see what suits best.
Last updated: Dec 12 2024 at 15:40 UTC