My primary concern for leaving the confines of developer-hosted blogs is the enormous monetization potential of affiliate marketing, contextual advertising (Google AdSense comes to mind), and pay-per-click marketing–all of which I’m not the least familiar with until a week ago. In fact, I barely even thought it possible for me to single-handedly build a website from the ground up.

Various informative articles scattered online managed to get me through all the preliminary obstacles of setting up a website but newbies seem to have a way of attracting new and difficult problems along the way. As I have mentioned before, I don’t have previous knowledge about any advanced programming languages except for the elementary HTML I gleaned from my Livejournal days (even that, is a bit shaky). It is quite understandable therefore why I find myself struggling with layout designs and feeding on free WordPress themes from generous designers online.

The real problem, however, is not in the technical aspects of developing a blog so much as generating internet traffic your way. I’ve set up some trial ads from AdSense but of course, there isn’t anyone around to visit the site and do the clickity-clicks.

For some strange reason, I woke up last Tuesday morning feeling a very strong urge to write although I didn’t find the time to because there was too much sun outside. Nevertheless, I spent the entire day reading news items and blogs, hopping from one link to another until I found myself overcome with the great possibilities the blogosphere has to offer those that actively pursue it.

Later on, I realized most of these sites are published with WordPress so I went on to download it expecting I would soon be installing a desktop client from which I can write and publish voila-style. Apparently, I was next to illiterate at pro blogging. The download gave me a couple of files that needed uploading to a web host–and I wouldn’t have known about that either unless I Google-ed “WordPress installation.”

Soon enough, I was reading everything about buying web domains, web hosting, name servers, a little bit of CSS, X/HTML, PHP, and mySQL, leaving the computer afterwards feeling I only understood about 10% of it. Experience, as they say, is the best teacher, so I braved the intimidating world (wide web) and went to sleep that night with a free domain and web host, and a functional but empty WordPress account.