UPDATE: it was a worthy experiment, but it seems there’s not enough interest in this thing to keep it alive.
Many people are either too busy or are not technical enough to perform the regular tasks required to maintain a blog beyond writing posts. The Blog Wrangler is a combined maintenance, backup, and traffic analysis service.
Blog Maintenance Service
The Blog Wrangler includes maintenance. As soon as a new version of WordPress is available, your blog will be upgraded. Many new releases of WordPress are security fixes, so it’s important to upgrade right away.
WordPress Plugins become outdated, too, and must upgraded. New features, bug and security fixes can pile up and go wanting when you’re busy running your business or are not tech-savvy enough to manage them all.
Blog Backup Service
On a weekly basis, your WordPress database and theme files will be backed up and copies will be emailed to you. I’ll keep copies as well. In the event of a problem with your hosting or database, you can restore your blog from the backups. Restoration is not included in the Blog Wrangler package, due to the variety of situations which can arise, but is charged at the hourly rate of $120/hr.
Blog Traffic Analysis Service
You may have a visitor tracking service, such as WordPress Stats or Google Analytics, but do you have time to dig into it to see what the numbers mean? Do you even know what they mean? 
Once a month, you will get an emailed report that provides important traffic information from your blog’s visitors:
- Numbers of unique and returning visitors
- List of popular posts
- List of search terms people are using to find you via search engines
- Number of FeedBurner subscribers, clicks, and reach
- List of sites that have linked to you
- Recommendations by me on ways to improve or capitalize on this information
If you have no traffic analysis at all, I will gladly create a Google Analytics account for you, which is the service I prefer to use.
Who Needs This Blog Consulting Service
This blog consulting service is for people who do not have the technical inclination or the time to perform these activities regularly. This service is for self-hosted WordPress blogs only, and not for WordPress.com-hosted blogs (which do not need upgrading and cannot use plugins).
Pricing
The Blog Wrangler Package has a setup fee of $199 USD (first month’s backups and reports are included). After the first month, the regular fee is $62/month ongoing.
Client Special: FREE Setup
If you are an existing client of mine, no setup fee is needed, because I have already set up your blog correctly in a way that facilitates this. That doesn’t mean there are no setup tasks at all, but even if there are, the setup fee is still waived for existing clients.
If you are interested in learning more or want to get in touch to purchase, please contact me. Thanks!
photo by Kevin Zollman
Michael – this is a much needed service and with all the people out there it’s hard to know who to trust – you are one I’d certainly be comfortable with. Glad to see you adding so many new services and sharing all your knowledge.
Very interesting new service. I’d love to see how it starts going for you Mike.
Thanks for the kind words. We’ll see what happens. I certainly have plenty to do already!
Another great extension to your services Michael – well done mate.
It’ll be interested to know how this one catches on – I’m guessing you must already be up to your neck with the original Blog Consulting service!
I don’t think I’ve run across anyone else who offers this sort of service, and it seems certain to fill a gap. Good idea, and good for you – growing your business in a way that helps make full-featured blogging more accessible to the less technically inclined.
[...] it’s hosted someplace else from your main site, you have a very fractured idea about its visitor analytics combined with your business [...]