How To Blog For Newbies Day 18

I know, I know, many of you despite reading my blog for so long, is still not convince that registering your own domain name is the way to go. So let me guess, you search “free blog” in Google, and alternatives like Blogspot.com, Blogger.com, WordPress.com appear in front of you. Wow, free, no charge. Think again my friends. It is really worth learning how to blog with these free stuffs ??

Reason 1: You Don’t Own The Blog

At the moment, the best free blog is probably Blogspot.com and it belongs to Google. A subdomain from Blogspot.com is probably better optimized as compared to other free blogs like Xanga or WordPress due to the simple fact of Google’s influence in the blogosphere. However, this doesn’t mean that you should continue getting a free blog from them.

The primary reason is, you don’t own the site! The host own your blog. In other words, you, the blogger who used their facilities is at their mercy. They could just threaten to pull the plug from your blog after you have been toiling your time and sweat every night after work for the past 3 years.

Let me give you some information on one of the terms using a free blog. Under the TOS (Terms of Service), your free blog host could just lock or delete your blog if they marked your blog as spam. Almost all free blog providers state that they don’t guarantee in keeping the availability of your blog. They are the master and they reserve the right to delete your site anytime. No strings attached! It’s free after all.

Source: Zazzle.com

Reason 2: Readers May Doubt Your Credibility

Most of us will give up after posting one or two contents in this subdomain. Other’s will persist. I’m going to help you to put this scenario into perspective. I have a former schoolmate who happens to have a blog called SuperFour hosted by Blogspot.com (fictional name to protect my friend). He was so good in his commentaries on soccer that he was invited by Fox Sport (I hope i’m not wrong, coz, I’m never a fan of soccer) to be a feature writer.

Unfortunately, his blog was not given the deserved credibility by Fox Sport despite the fact that he has invested so much time on the blog. The blog has attracted so much backlinks that it is currently a page rank 4 site.

Put yourself in my friend’s shoe. What would you do? If you back out now, you would have to start from scratch. Getting a domain and toiling all over again for those readership and not forgetting, those valuable backlinks.

However, I would still advise him to start all over again because, it’s worthwhile for him to own his own domain on soccer. We never know where our blog business would bring us.

Reason 3: You Might Be Ignored By Search Engine

SEO experts mentioned that unless you are not serious about attracting traffic to your site, you should always have your own website. Search engines like Google and Yahoo are very selective in adding websites into their index.

It used to be very easy be be listed by search engine, irregardless of whether your blog was free or paid. However, with all the spam sites going around in th blogosphere, things got complicated. Throughout the years, most of the spam site comes from  free blogs. Other sub-reasons for free sites to be listed are as follow:

a. Cannot perform SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on your free blog. Before this, I had played with two blogs before under Blogspot. There is now way for you to do any SEO onto a free blog to optimize indexing by the search engines.

b. Unimportant and overlooked. This is a sad fact if you chose to operate on a free blog platform. You see, search engine spider or bots act like human in many ways. They look down on free blog because for the simple fact that, it is not a full domain. Spiders scan for  sites with a favourable amount of contents. Most free blog don’t command that many pages because a lot of newbies abandoned these free sites after some time.

c. No maintenance. Like I mentioned earlier, most newbies abandoned their free websites after a few weeks or months of blogging. Somehow, we don’t have the kind of commitment on maintaining anything free as compared to those domains that we bought with our hard earned money.

d. Difficult to build backlinks. Looking at my friend’s soccer blog, with the contents and work that he put in, he may have achieved a Page Rank 5 or 6 if he chose to have his own website. The fact is harsh. Not many established bloggers like to link their blogs to a free blog. Free blog garner few respect out here in the internet…

Reason 4: Limitations In Free Blog

When you blog on a free site, you face various limitations. Ok, let me list them down for your knowledge:

a. Lack Of Web Space. Most free blog is only limited to 1 MB per page and 300 MB to store images. Blog description is said to be limited to under 500 words. Observe, until now, I have already chalked up 850 words for this post.

b. Lack Of Support From Your Free Host. You can never chat up a technical person if you have a problem.

c. Each Free Blog Has Their Own Strength And Weaknesses. WordPress blog comes with a lot of nice themes, but may not be as Google optimised as Blogspot for example.

Reason 5: People Don’t Take You Seriously If Your ECommerce Site Comes From A Free Blog

Although you are free from paying to a blogging platform, you will still be putting in the most valuable resources into your blog. Your time! The time you put into your blog should be proportionate to the monetary gain you would achieve one day. The tipping point will come. However, most of these free blog services provide limited options for turning a profit. For example, Blogspot would only allow adsense advertisement in your free blog.

In addition, most free blogs would take a portion of your advertising earning for the free service they provide. I can tell you, it’s not worth it. With your own website, you can have full control on the many advertising and affiliates available in the internet.

At this stage, I hope my post has given you enough information for you to really make a wise choice. Choose your blogging platform wisely, because ultimately, you will be the one investing the time and mind in building the blog business. Remember, there is no free lunch.

(How to blog and Blogging tips for newbies)