# I Make A Living With Free Blogger Web Sites



## HCK

I have a homestead-based business that I worked to grow for over ten years, while working a full-time job in the city. Six months ago my home business was to the point where it made enough money that I could afford to leave the wage-slave job. It was a dream come true. One of the âsecretsâ to my success is that I figured out how to easily make my own completely free web sites using basic Blogger blogs.

If you have any kind of business and you want to make your own web site, all you have to do is invest some time learning the Blogger format. Itâs all there to âplayâ with and experiment with, and itâs user friendly. Here are just a few of the web sites for my business that have been created for absolutely nothing using the Blogger blogging format...


Whizbang Gardening
Whizbang Cider
How To Butcher A Chicken
Whizbang Wheel Hoe
Poultry Shrink Bags

All of those web sites, and more, are compiled at a central web site called Planet Whizbang, which is the name of my home business.

I want to repeat.... I pay absolutely nothing for these web sites that have been created within the Blogger format. I make them myself and I can easily make any changes to the web sites whenever I need to. 

I am not a whiz with the computer. Not at all. I have just taught myself what I need to know through trial and error within the Blogger format. If I can do this, you can do it too.

If anyone has questions about making free (and profitable) web sites with simple blogs, post them here and Iâll do my best to answer them.

Herrick Kimball


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## willow_girl

Impressive! :thumb::thumb:


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## fransean

This is an interesting idea, but honestly I would not have a clue how to start.

Did you start with one general site and add on from there?

Do you make money from selling products or ebooks? Or is there profit from clicking links to other sites?

How much time needs to be dedicated to this type of venture to make it successful?

How do you go about getting traffic to your sites?

Many more questions, but those are the starters


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## HCK

Willow Girlâ
Thanks.

Franseanâ
Back in 2005 I decided to start a blog. I had seen other blogs and they were created on the Blogger.com format. I went to the site and set up a blog named The Deliberate Agrarian. I have been posting essays to that blog since 2005.

I knew nothing about blogging when I started and I knew nothing about Blogger, but the site is user friendly and, as I continued to blog, I figured out how to post pictures and make it look more refined.

Separate from the blog I had published a book telling people how to build their own chicken plucker. I was selling the book through McMurray hatchery and on Amazon.com but I didn't have a web site.

After my first year of posting essays to The Deliberate Agrarian blog, I decided to take some of the essays and compile them into a book. It is titled "Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian." I figured I needed a web site for the book and hired a graphic designer to put the web site together because I knew absolutely nothing about making a web site. I think I paid the designer around like $700 to make the web site. It was a great little site, but if I wanted to make a change or addition to it, I had to pay the designer to do that.

I wrote and published other books and started selling some of the parts needed to make a chicken plucker. I really needed a web site and it occurred to me that I could just create another blog as a web site. I didn't know anyone who was using the blogger format to make a web site to sell their products, but I tried it and it worked. Why wouldn't it? A blog is a web site. Then I figured out that I could paste in the code supplied by PayPal to create a "Add to Cart" button in the blog. That made all the difference. 

I make money when people buy my products. 

How much time have I dedicated to the project? Hundreds and hundreds of hours. 

Getting to the point where I can make a living with this business has taken a lot of years. It was a step-by-step learning and building process.

Traffic to the sites comes from readers of my blog. It is currently getting over 1,000 page views a day. But a lot of traffic also comes from Google searches. I'm pretty sure that Blogger.com is part of the Google empire, and I'm also pretty sure that if you Google search something, Blogger web sites are favored.

This idea of creating free web sites out of blogs can be utilized to sell products you create or services you provide. I have made a web site for a political candidate out of a blog (she won). If I wanted to sell a property, I would create a Blog web site for it. Non-profit events can be promoted with free blog web sites. A lot of people do this with Facebook, but Facebook doesn't look like a web site to me.

Anyway, there's some details. There is a learning curve and you need to teach yourself the ins and outs of the Blogger format. But it's all there to work with and it costs nothing, except your time. Go to Blogger.com and you can create a blog in 5 minutes. Then you start working with it and learning what you can do.

Best wishes.


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## unregistered358895

I also really love the blogger format. It is REALLY easy to use. I manage several blogs (a couple for my own writing, and a couple for our business) and it has been a great way to get our messages out there into the internets.


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## fransean

How do you go about choosing a subject that people will be interested in following?
Or is it more about writing about something you love and finding the traffic?

I am too busy right now but I will have some down time in a couple months to explore this option. Right now for me is about asking questions and learning, putting into practice has to wait a little while.


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## chickenista

I have been using Blogger for a few years now and recently decided to start another blog too with a shopping option.
I was pleased at how easy it has been to add Paypal buttons and a cart etc..

I love me some Blogger!


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## HCK

fransean,
Yes, it's about pursuing the things in life that interest you and that you enjoy, then looking for ways to help other people by teaching (sharing) and providing products that help them to enjoy the same things. At least that's my view of it.

With the internet you can target all kinds of niche interests and markets. There is an enormous amount of opportunity for starting a home business with the internet.

chickenista,
Your blog looks great. I see you have a drop-down menu under your "SHOP" link at the top of the page. I haven't figured out how to do that yet!

Timberrr,
You got it.


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## furholler

OK. I'm interested....


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## motdaugrnds

What a great idea! Thanks HCK for sharing!

Maybe we could use this thread of yours to encourage and help each other find ways of doing what others are doing with their blogging website??

Just this year I purchased a year's subscription for a website and have been spending hours trying to make it look good...cannot afford to pay a website builder. However, using the blogging site for free as you are sure would be helpful....Wondering if the blogger.com would object........

I actually went over to create a blog, discovered I had to go thru Google to do this and that I already had a Google account that I had set up for YouTube. Thus, apparently the same username and password is now used for both YouTube and Blogger.

Started looking over the Blogger site, posting and uploading pictures; then it all started getting confusing and I even discovered the email address that kept appearing was one I had not even set up as I don't have a ".gmail" address. All mine are @hughes.net. Looked for a way of correcting that and could not find it. Got frustrated and closed all the windows.


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## Whistle Pig

Awesome! Herrick Kimball is on Homestead Today! The wife and I love your Whizbang innovations. I linked to your new book on here back when you first released it in late June. Looking forward to seeing your contributions to the site. 

farmer dickie


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## Halfway

I have a few blogs that I started out of simply wanting to keep a journal and archive site for videos and progress on a project. Pretty soon I had folks requesting updates and wanting additional e-mail.

Those simple blogs were not established with a business goal in mind, but after many thousands of hits I was encouraged to allows ads and this generates a small amount of income. Not enough to make it a business, buty it does compensate some of the time spent. It will never be cost effective for me and my time, but I would have minded the blogs anyhow.

Thanks Herrick for the great info. I am trying to motivate some others who have great ideas to begin the building process with blogger.

H


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## HappyYooper

What are some good free blogging sites that are free and easy to set up?


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## katlupe

I have had my blogger blog up since 2005 and for the most part, I loved working with Blogger. It was great and still is, as I still have that blog up and post on it every now and then. But I had to go with a self-hosted blog, using WordPress software. I just cannot take the chance of Blogger taking it down with no notice like they did to Pam's and others recently. They actually own the site it is on and if you get into some serious affiliate money, it will be a conflict. Some won't allow you to partner with them if you have a free site. So to be independent, I had to force myself to change. Some day, I may just take all my blogger blogs down for good. For now, they bring me some $$$ and traffic. They come up good on Google, as they should.


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## motdaugrnds

Kat, love your blogs about building your barn and setting up that wind turbine. Glad that storm didn't ruin anything else. Grounding is so important on our homesteads.

If I ever get my blogs up, I hope you won't mind to my putting a link to yours on it. My blogs will be of a similar nature in that we created our homestead out of forestry and will be talking about the wonders (and trials) of doing that.


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## jassar

I recently started an account at ning.com
been working my way through the learning process

So far, I like it.

I do not believe they have a free version.

Janna


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## jnkgal

HCK thanks for posting such helpful information!


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