Start of something beautiful?

I have been thinking about really getting into this blogging thing in the hope that I will one day be able to buy a box of smarties with the rich earnings from my AdSense ads.  Given that I run this blog and Grouchy Blogger on TypePad it seems like a good idea to explore expanding my new blogging empire using the TypePad platform.  Two options are available to me and I’d love to know what my more seasoned visitors think.

First option is to upgrade my account to a Pro account which gives me the ability to run as many blogs as I want and with co-authors.  This, of course, enables me to scale my empire pretty easily.  I have access to the stylesheets and html pages and can make all the weird and wonderful changes I could possibly imagine (or pay someone else to imagine for me).  The advantage of this is that my hosting costs are capped at the $150 per year or so which is the cost of the Pro account.  If I limit myself to a Plus account my hosting costs are limited to about $90 although I don’t have the ability to play with the underlying html.

My second option (and this could be used in conjunction with the first) is to use the domain mapping service and map my TypePad blogs to newly registered domains on the .com, .net or .org domains and run them as full fledged blogs with their own domains and all.  This obviously gives my network a little more credibility and makes the sites easier to remember.

Of course another option is to do what I have done with a couple of my sites and that is to just register a couple domains, buy a few hosting packages from my favourite local web hosting company and run my blogs separately using WordPress or perhaps even Movabletype (licence permitting).

What do you think?

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