One thing that you must do if you want to have a successful blog is distinguish yourself from the rest of the blogosphere. There are an incredible, uncountable number of blogs online these days, and many of them never even get indexed by Google. Why? Because some people keep blogs for just one week or one month, and then they give up or decide they don’t have the time. Other people start blogs that nobody reads. And the majority of these unread and unused blogs are hosted by third parties that make building your own blog simple.
Free Blog Platforms are Just OK
Google’s blog site is Blogger.com. You can choose from a template, add text and images using an editor, and you don’t have to pay a cent. Your blog will have a URL that looks like this: lameblog.blogspot.com. All Blogger blogs have the word “blogspot” in the URL. Another commonly used service that offers a similar set up is WordPress, and all free WordPress blogs have a URL that ends in wordpress.com. That’s fine if you are just having a bit of fun. But if you want to be truly taken seriously and to have complete control over the way your blog looks, you’ll need to host your own blog.
Hosting It Yourself is Where It’s at
Free web hosting sites are pretty convenient and you can’t beat the price. But if you want Internet users to take your site seriously, you should consider a paid host. Your URL can be unique on the web and can give you an easy way to share yourself with the world. So instead of being found at lameblog.wordpress.com, you can be found at www.coolblog.com.
At some point you’ll find yourself wishing you’d gone the private hosting route. The fact is that you have very little flexibility when it comes to building a site with a free host. When you host your own blog you’ll be able to design the site to your exact specifications – or you’ll hire a professional web designer to create a truly professional looking website.
The problem with starting out with a free host is that then your readers will get stuck using that URL. You don’t want to create a following only to suddenly switch web servers and change the URL to something new. All of your old followers are likely to give up if they don’t find you where you used to be. After all, websites disappear every day.
Chris Barber
Chris, as an inbound marketing professional, has helped hundreds of websites improve their SEO and Social Media performance. Blog Hands was started as way to provide the strongest of those techniques, blog writing and promotion, at an affordable rate while still keeping a strong level of quality that you'd find from a large internet marketing firm.