Hi all!

I keep redoing this as I am still getting the hang of WordPress but stick with me and I promise you’ll gain some value.

Today, January 8, 2025, I am finally going to publish and not ever touch this again.

I want this blog series to be like what Glassdoor should be like without having to always sign in and not let you view the information you’re after.

If you are a new blogger or are interested in starting one or just here for entertainment, I want to show you the absolute truth of what I’ve done and what you can do (or shouldn’t do).

Journey Kickoff

Opening my website was a journey of its own. WordPress made WordPress sound extremely easy… it didn’t start off that way.

My first challenge was opening a site with a finalized name (you can change it later but that’ll cost ya!). I am planning on doing everything diy, whether that be 3D printing, mechatronics, changing car tires, building cat toys or whatever. So, I thought a great name would be something like “Peter of All Trades” or “Jack of all Peters” (turns out people and the internet have too dirty of minds for that lol).

In doing more research, while those were unique, they weren’t great about getting the point across, along with websites being personalized can reduce their value if they get popular.

As you’ll find out if you stick with me, I tend to jump to conclusions. I bought the domain and hosting under the name “Jack of all Peters”.

You can see in the bank statement to the right, I used Bluehost and those together (domain and hosting) cost me $23.88 for a year. Not bad right!

I would recommend searching around, but it was pretty easy to find hosting sites cheaper than wordpress.com. (WordPress in general is a simple drag-and-drop architecture for website building.)

Yoast SEO

Bluehost has several built-in tools to help add the most value to your blog/website. It scores your headline and lets you know what you can do better. It also uses Yoast SEO to score your pages and posts based on so many factors.

Before getting into it, I was pretty overwhelmed. I heard a lot about the importance of keyword research and wanted to start nailing this right off the bat.

So… I paid $99 for Yoast SEO premium for the year.

Now looking back, I don’t think this was necessary.

I thought Yoast SEO would do keyword research for me, it doesn’t. It does add a couple features from the base package, but the base package gives you all the information you need. It just leaves out some AI highlighting for some of the basic categories. But who knows, maybe that’ll be the edge I need.

Early Mistakes

As I hinted at earlier, it would be a lot easier if you put all these thoughts into how to name your site before opening anything. I did indeed have to pay an additional $13.17 and maybe another $12.99 because I wasn’t very careful.

I used ChatGPT to come up with some new names. We narrowed it down to “Blueprint Diaries” and “Crafty Chronicles”.

We (Kenzie and I) thought chronicles sounded great but were afraid it sounded a little too Christmas-y. So we went with Blueprint Diaries.

I jumped straight into transferring the domain from “Jack of All Peters” to “Blueprint Diaries”. And Me thinking Bluehost would do the work for me if that domain was available, I was wrong. Transfer is used to switch domains you already own, so I guess it assumed I owned Blueprint Diaries, even though I do not. So that was a waste of $13.17.

So I jumped straight into checking first this time if “The Blueprint Diaries” was available, and it was. So I purchased it and started to transfer my domain, which took about a day. Another $13.17 that I’ll hopefully see later.

This is the story of how not to spend $149.04 starting your website. I wish you all the best on your endeavors and I hope I have a journey that you can follow.

Oh yeah, I plan to make money solely through affiliate marketing. Ya know, linking products that I can earn commission on through Amazon and other diy/electronics sites. So you’ll be the first to know if I ever make a sale or break even or replace my income!

Wish me luck, and I really hope this turns into a successful time capsule one day.

Peace, blessings, and happy holidays,

The Blueprint Diaries