Quit Your Job Using Google’s Blogger

Today being a slow day at the office, I’m wasting time on the Intarwebs instead of doing anything productive and work-related. And then I found something surprising, this post from the guy who runs Strobist, a photography blog, about how quitting his day job and making his blog his full-time job was the best thing he’d done all year.

And then I checked out his site, only to discover that his domain name redirects you to strobist.blogspot.com. His full time job is maintaining a blog on Blogger, using what looks like a pretty stock template.

That’s amazing.

You see free blogs around a lot, and they tend to move off to their own domain name on their own server after getting big enough. But David at Strobist seems to be doing just fine using free blog hosting. 13,000 readers on Feedburner, Google PageRank 5. And he’s only been around since February 2006.

Less than two years, what must be very little overhead (no web hosting server, etc.), and it’s a full-time income? I’m just blown away. You’re my hero, David. For this unabashed hero worship, please send me a Nikon D3 and lots of money. Thanks in advance!

I’m also a little freaked out by the idea of your whole livelihood coming from a free blog on a site where you don’t have full control over what’s going on. It looks like he’s preferring links to his own domain name, which then redirect to Blogger, so that if Google decides to erase his blog one day, he can just redirect the domain name to a new site.

But still, I’d have trouble sleeping every night if all of my income was at the mercy of Google and Blogger. Not that I think they’re evil or anything, I would just feel better if I had more control over things.

But maybe I’m a control freak.

On that note, I’m off to hypnotize random pedestrians into doing my bidding.

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You’re currently reading “Quit Your Job Using Google’s Blogger,” an entry on Fake Rake

Published:: 12.31.07 / 12pm

Category:: Geeky

Tags:: Internet, Google, Blogger

David Hobby 12.31.07 / 2pm

Hey there-

It’s David, from Strobist. Just a couple of things to add to your piece:

1. I have not technically “quit” my day job. I am on a one-year leave of absence. Parsing words, but there is a difference.

2. I initially shared your concern about the Google platform, until I actualy got to know some of the people on the Blogger team at Google. Long story short, I actually feel safer in a Blogger-hosted domain than I would on my own site. Safer from a traffic standpoint, a longevity standpoint, an IT support standpoint — you name it.

My site does 50k page views a day, and the folks at Blogger had a little chuckle when I asked if this kind of traffic was a problem. In fact, they told me that what I was doing — creating new, real content on a daily basis — was exactly what they want folks on Blogger to do. Google’s goal is to make the web better and help people find what is out there.

I have a good friend who was just “fired” by his ISP for growing too big. I do not thnk that is gonna happen to me. But if I ever get to be “too big” for Google’s free service, I will gladly fly out to Maintain View, check book in hand.

And this last note should not be taken as a knock on anyone else, but I am 100% certain that Google will be around in 5 years. Not so some other hosts.

And if my blog goes down at 3:00 a.m., which it almost never does, dispite high traffic and over 800 posts in its archive, Google is on it ASAP.

As for Strobist’s pagerank of 5, of which I am very proud, I cannot imagine a more SEO-friendly content structure than a blog. Except, that is, for a blog hosted and continually indexed by Google.

Signed, a very happy Google-hosted blogger,
David Hobby
Strobist.Blogspot.com

Fake Rake 1.1.08 / 12pm

Hey David,

Thanks for the details and clarifications. Hosting with Blogger definitely has some benefits like you mentioned (e.g., not having to worry about overloading your server by getting Slashdotted or Dugg). And I’m starting to experiment with what you can do on Blogger myself.

I think that in the end I’m just too much of a control freak to have an important site so much out of my control, however irrational that fear may be.

And congratulations on how well the site’s doing!

Fake Rake

Quit Your Job Using Google’s Blogger

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