Why Have a Hosted Blog

However if you are serious about your blogging, and intend to turn this into a profitable enterprise then it is, in my opinion, important that you have a blog that is on a good quality, hosted domain.

There are many reasons for this. The main one is that with the free blog sites you do not own the domain. Therefore you have little control over it. If Wordpress or Google decide your site is spam, even if it isn’t, then they will close your blog down. This can happen if someone reports your site, or if the content is considered too spammy. Also there are strict guidelines in place about adding revenue generating affiliate links. Now if you have spent months, or maybe even a couple of years, adding content to your blog and it gets shut down, you lose all your content. No questions asked, no right of appeal.

However with your own domain you have complete control. The site is owned by yourself and therefore you can put whatever you please on your blog! This is the single most important reason to have a hosted blog. (Please see end of article for personally recommended host)

Now what if sometime down the line you decided you would like to sell your blog? The free hosted sites at Google’s blogspot have a strict no reselling policy, but with self hosted these limitations no longer exist.

The art of search engine optimisation (SEO) is basically getting your site as high up the search engines rankings as possible to ultimately gain more traffic and sales. With a wordpress self-hosted blog there are a multitude of plugins (plugins are add ons to improve the look, functionality and quality of your blog) that you can add to your site very easily to improve it’s SEO and gain more traffic.

Other reasons for self hosting include the look and feel of your site. A self hosted wordpress blog has a huge amount of themes available tailored to the subject matter that you discuss. This can make your blog look far more professional than free hosted, which have limited capability in this area.

Also you can customise a self hosted wordpress blog in a variety of different ways. For instance it is possible, and easy, to make unlimited static pages on your site so that it looks less ‘bloggy’ and more like a conventional website. You can also change the theme (or template if you like) if you fancy a change to the look of your site.

Or maybe you don’t have the time to write your own blog. Then you can set it up to pull information, at a time and interval of your choosing, about your chosen subject from the many RSS feeds littered all around the internet.

The advantages of a self hosted blog are too many to mention in their entirety here, but I hope I have given you the fundamental reasons. I would recommend starting a blog to anyone…so have a good day and happy blogging!