If you are new to blogging, this will also help you. But the target of this post is more to the person who has been writing and writing and has finally burned out – or worse – lost all of their content because of a problem with their hosting, a virus, or a combination of factors.
Having a wildly popular blog is a rush! It is something that makes you jump out of bed at the crack of dawn and write until late at night. At least in the beginning.
When you have done this for 5 or 6 years, you may find that you are starting to wonder what is next. Or, you find that you need help with the writing, because you are being pulled in other directions in your life. For me, it was my family. My parents became ill and passed away in a span of three years, with my father going two years before my mother. It was difficult and my focus was on them and not my writing. I am not going to rehash the whole story, you can read about it in my previous post.
In the beginning, it was my wife and I writing the majority of the content. Once we became immersed in dealing with the aftermath of the loss of my parents, my wife began to spend more time with her grandchildren, as this difficult period taught us both that we should enjoy the little ones before they become adults and head off in their own directions.
One of my blogs, BlogTalkFootball.com, was one of my passions, but writing about 32 different football teams was too much, and I was trying to hire authors to write about specific teams. The problem was finding people who could post reliably without having to be motivated, and of course, having the ability to pay them. With a popular website, you can easily earn money from recommendations, advertising, or even just Adsense code placed on your website. The trick is to deliver the content to make the blog popular.
So over time, I found myself having less desire to write posts every day. So that blog deteriorated. Soon a few other blogs lost my interest. After a while, I had found that the majority of my blogs needed updates or that the hosting had lapsed on them because I had changed credit cards and forgotten to update my payment details.
A few years ago, that would not have been a problem, as I would have been checking those blogs weekly, if not daily. But recently, I was looking over the domain names that I have (hundreds of them) and realized that some of them were no longer up. I went to the hosting company and found out that the hosting had lapsed over a year ago… that shocked me into action. But the hosting companies do not keep backups of sites that have been terminated due to nonpayment after a few months. So now I had to start over.
The good thing for you is that I am going to document my steps to start over on a few of my blogs here on BloggingWithMicheal.com/blog. The best place to stay up to date with my progress is on the Facebook Page: https://facebook.com/BloggingWithMicheal
