Ghost Blog Setup Package
If this is your first time visiting my digital publishing site, welcome! My name is Christine Springer and I've been blogging for my business since 2009.
You can read a blog post about how I overcame my technical issues to blogging over on my blog for my legal company, Desert Edge Legal.
I have made some very expensive mistakes when it came to my digital assets. The most expensive mistake cost me a year's worth of revenue.
Years ago, I had a "business partner" who was interested in helping me monetize Desert Edge but didn't want to do anything else that needed to be done. He was invaluable for the early stages of getting the digital marketing for the business going, but we never had a solid agreement about money or who would do what. When I offered to formalize the agreement, he refused to put anything in writing.
In retrospect, he didn't have any legal experience or skills and probably didn't want to learn. I was so naive about my business back then. The memory still stings today.
I was blogging on a website that he owned called Foreclosure Industry, and it was built on WordPress. I almost never updated the version because when I did, it would rearrange everything on the external home page and I didn't know how to fix it.
So the business partner also ghosted and stopped doing ANY work on the blog. My content was still there but the site wasn't being maintained. Some new regulations had been passed and I had to change some of the marketing messaging, and I didn't know how to do that either.
I had to get someone else to export all of my content off there and onto a new WordPress site that my brother built for me. It took months to get re-optimized, costing me thousands of dollars in lost revenue because people couldn't find my website.
It got worse, though. Eventually my brother stopped doing any maintenance on the second website. His wife was battling cancer and he was battling burnout, and eventually his server was attacked and my websites totally disappeared this time.
That was my Scarlett O'Hara moment, when I declared that I will NEVER hand over control of my websites ever again! Ha ha!
I used to write content about cars for my brother's company and that's where I learned to write a lot of blogs quickly. I also learned a lot about search engine optimization, and one day my brother told me that he wasn't going to build anything else on WordPress.
I remember thinking "Thank God!" after my experiences with WordPress. It was just too complicated for me to install and maintain myself. And if the SEO was suffering because of how spammy the platform had become, that was one more good reason to stop using that platform.
Thankfully, Ghost launched right around that time and it was much easier to set up myself. It wasn't without challenges for me and there are still things I have to write to their tech support people about, but overall it's much easier to manage myself.
The best thing about Ghost (well, actually there are two things) is that I have a relationship with the people who created Ghost because they are also my hosting company. The second thing is that they manage ALL the updates to the platform, so I never have to push a button on the content dashboard and pray that my website will still be the way I left it. They deal with all the updates for you.
Once your blog is set up, you only have to worry about creating your content.
Now – to be clear – I'm not a web designer. I'm really just a content creator who worked through all of these expensive mistakes. I can do everything on a Ghost blog that I can do on WordPress, including selling digital products, send out e-mail marketing campaigns, and sell memberships.
It's an affordable service to other would-be creators who want to blog but don't know where to start. I'm offering the package for an introductory price of $1000. I think it's probably worth more than that, but I want to refine the process first.
At some point in the future I will probably offer a blogging class for people who want to become content creators. The tech side is very logical, and writing is very creative, which is an interesting mix of skills. I think a lot of people have one but not the other, but I wanted peace of mind so I learned more about the technical side to solve my problem.
And I can't tell you how many stories I have heard about people paying a web designer who never completes their website, or their brother-in-law never getting around to it, LOL.
If you are serious about your content or your business, then you know you need a website up and running.
The other point I want to make is that after successfully earning a living based on writing a blog and offering digital products, I would never ever put my high value content on a free blog platform like the free hosted version of WordPress or Tumblr or whatever else people are using now.
If you are passionate enough to write about a topic, it deserves a home on a website you own and that you control.
ALWAYS OPTIMIZE YOUR OWN DIGITAL ASSETS! Put your content on your own website FIRST.
If you are interested in purchasing a new blog setup package, please e-mail me at Christine [at] desert edge legal dot com.