Should Your Internet Marketing Blog Be On Their Site Or Your Site?

If you are contemplating setting up a blog to enhance your internet marketing, you need to know some of the basic choices you have. The biggest choice is to consider if you want to use a blog site as your host or if you want to host your own.

Hosting your blog on a blog site or hosting your own blog each has it's advantages and disadvantages. Knowing the differences and pros and cons of each will help you decide what is best for you.

If you are looking for the simplest solution in setting up your internet marketing blog, then hosting it on a blog site is you best option. You can have your blog set up in a matter of minutes ready to post to or upload content to.

The two most popular of the blog sites that will host your blog is Blogger.com and Wordpress.com. They are very comparable in terms of what they offer and how they work. Both have similar steps for set up.

All you need to do is work through a few screens that ask you a few questions about how you want your blog set up. The most difficult of those questions is what to call your blog. There are a number of different style templates you choose from that will determine exactly how your blog will look. Those can be changed easily anytime you want.

The biggest downside to hosting your blog on a blog site is that you don't have your domain url as your blog address. Your URL will be "your-blog-name/blogger.com" or "your-blog-name/wordpress.com". You will always have the blogs domain as part of your URL. Not as professional looking as having your own domain.

The other disadvantage of blogs hosted by blog sites is that you don't have a lot of control. You can change the formatting of the site according to a few dozen templates you can choose from. Other than that you are stuck with their designs.

You also have to live with the standard functions and options available on each site. You can not add your own options. You also have some restrictions you must comply with as to how you can utilize your blog.

If you want to host your own blog on your own domain, there are a few things you need. First, obviously you need your own domain. You also need a hosting server to install it on.

You can install it yourself if you like doing those kinds of things or you can have someone install it for you. One way or another you have to get it installed onto your hosting server.

Once you get by the installation, you're basically home free. Now you have a lot of advantages to hosting the blog yourself. You have total freedom to do to your blog anything you want.

There are hundreds of templates available to customize your self hosted blog almost any way you can imagine. You can also customize any of the templates you use. You might change the colors, or you might add your website header logo to the blog.

One of the biggest advantages is your URL will be your domain name. It might be "your-domain.com/blog" Another thing you can do is add different functions. There are hundreds of add on programs that just plug in to your blog.

You can change to a different WYSIWYG editor if you want, you can add a calander, you can add different options for your sidebars and more. There are even programs you can plug in that help maximize your search engine optimization.

It boils down to this. If you want the simplest and quickest way to implement your internet marketing blog, you should use the blog hosted type. It will be a little more restricting but you will have the comfort of an easy set up.

If you want more flexibility, customization, control and your own domain name then you should host your own blog. It will be a little more challenging setting up, but once it is up you can do almost anything you want with it.

Either choice you make will provide you with a good, usable blog. You will have one more tool to enhance your internet marketing.