Carolyn, you don’t strictly need to pay for your own blog. I know a lot of blogging gurus say you should, but we don’t listen to them. Plenty of people have successful blogs on free hosts. I was with Blogger for years and my blog did very well. I’ve moved it now to a paid host, but that was to give me extra features, not because I felt I needed to professionally. Saying that, if you do own your domain and have paid for space, you do have all sorts of options you won’t have on Blogger or (free) WordPress. Plus, if you wanted to make a name for yourself, owning the domain is worthwhile.

Carolyn: $56 isn’t too bad for a bit of extra, “why not?” income. I think I made $9 from paid blog posting a couple of months ago, but that’s been about it recently! Strangely, Elance users seem to want to push me into being an editor rather than a writer, given the state of the offers I’ve been getting. Weird.

As for paying for your own blog, I don’t think it makes a significant difference, in all honesty, unless you’re famous. I paid for my WordPress domain name ($15/yr through WP itself) because I’d had trouble with a domain name before and didn’t want to run into any hassle, but it can’t host ads (I wanted it that way). If you are terribly serious about it all, I’d personally suggest getting hosted somewhere like FatCow, which will set you back $50-60 (at a guess) for the year, but you can do whatever you want with your WP install (or use Blogger or MovableType or whatever you want). I’d also suggest reading Grizzly’s AdSense post over on Today.com.

My ebook is earning nothing and my Adsense is still looking pathetic. It’s crept up, but I think I’m still years away from payout.

I’m toying with the idea of actually paying for my own website, rather than sticking with Blogger. I have a couple of WordPress free blogs that I keep forgetting about. Must go there again. I’m assuming you would advise going with WordPress for my paid for blogsite Spike?

I fear I may have reached my personal level of incompetence and it may stop dead now. I hope not, but you never know.

Anyways, I’ll be anxious to see how August turns out. Perhaps you’re out of the ruff? I hope you keep up this blog. Missed you last week. Maybe you can elaborate on some of your processes. What have you learned about making Elance work? I’ve been watching their RSS for awhile now, and still it seems gadawful to me.

Thanks, Steven. Things are really starting to pick up at the moment: two more invites today for projects. I’m not even applying for stuff, it’s coming to me. That’s a really nice feeling, even if it turns out to be short-lived.