i7o Media

This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.

Many bloggers, especially beginners are faced with the dilemma of whether to get a free hosted blog or to fork out the money and get your own hosting and domain.

Free blogs such as wordpress.com, blogspot and typepad offer free hosted blogs which can be suitable as they reduce the technical overheads. This is especially appealing to those with little to invest and even less in tecnhical knowledge.

Whilst it may be free now, if you put considerable work into your blog and build up a following, you will soon realise that getting a free hosted blog was the worst decision you ever made.

Here’s why:

• You have serious lack of control over hosted blogs.

• What happens when you want to get a custom design and actually control what your visitors see? Having the ability to customize your blog is especially important when it comes to monetizing your blogs. Customization allows you to smoothly integrate your products, affiliate pages and other money making pages into your blog design. You can make your blog aesthetically pleasing aswell as highly functional.

• What happens if the hosting provider gets shut down? What happens to your blog posts from the last 2 years? What happens to all that page rank, authority and organic traffic you built up? It could all be gone in a heart beat. Go back to square 1 and start again?

• If your blog becomes popular, suddenly you are getting an influx of visitors and the number of simultaneous connections allowed may be limited by your host. Now your visitors get annoyed because they can’t view your blog, this will certainly test their love for your blog.

• With a self hosted domain, the possibilites of customisation are endless with thousands of themes, designs and plugins. If you plan to build a name/brand, then this will provide a much greater level of trust and credibility.

• You will be taken more seriously. I know some people will say “Hey I’ll follow a blog regardless of whether it is self hosted or not”. I understand that, but the harsh reality is – many people hate hosted blogs. If you choose a hosted blog – you better be packing some damn high quality in those posts, because content is going to be extremely crucial for you.

If you are still floundering around on a hosted blog, it is time to learn the ropes of hosting and domain registration, trust me, it really isn’t as daunting as you think and the rewards are endless.