The Trials and Tribulations of Starting Blogs as a Greenhorn

Since today is the last day of 2012, I’ve been reflecting on the progress I’ve made in my first two years of blogging.

I won’t mince words. I’ve made a lot of mistakes.

My first and largest mistake was not buying domains for my websites from day one. Instead, I set up one main domain with subdomains. The only problem with that was that my urls ended up being far too long and difficult to remember.

After a year, I decided I needed to buy domains for the two subdomains – and did. The only thing I didn’t consider was the hit I would take on my seo and search engine status.

Once I set up the domains, I quickly realized that my hard-earned Alexa, Google, and other rankings were reflected on the original subdomain urls. The only way to show the better rankings for the old urls was to create redirects from the new domains to the old domains, causing a large negative impact on my page speed, ultimately negatively impacting my advertising revenue.

If you’re considering starting up more than one, or even several blogs or website, my first recommendation would be to purchase unique domains for each, thereby safeguarding site performance and rankings.

It is possible to purchase bulk domain names at reasonable rates. Be sure to check this out before you do anything else.

Had I made more of a concrete plan ahead of time, I could have avoided a lot of costly mistakes.