wangarific

When you first start blogging, it’s very tempted to sign up for Blogger.com blog. It’s free, it’s fairly easy and intuitive to use, and you can be up and running within minutes. If you have absolutely zero technical know how, using a free service like Blogger or WordPress.com will get you a live blog faster than any other option. That convenience comes at a cost.

Lack of Control

The biggest reason I advise against using a hosted blog platform like Blogger.com or WordPress.com is because you aren’t in total control of your site. While you never have to worry about Blogger.com “going down,” you are subject to its whims. One absolutely wonderful site, Bankdeals.blogspot.com (now living at DepositAccounts.com), recently experienced quite a scare. Ken at Bankdeals has been writing about banking for what seems like eons. You can expect to see a dozen posts a day on the latest banking news and his consistency is almost legendary. However on one fateful day, every single post he had ever written disappeared. There was some sort of technical hiccup somewhere, out of his control, and his content was gone. Thankfully he was able to recover almost all of it and I think that was part of the impetus to move to his own site.

You Can’t Accumulate Link Equity

The second reason, behind control, is that the currency of the web is links. When you write something linkworthy, and people link to you, that’s a valuable indication that you’re a valued resource on the web. As you accumulate link equity, your site rises in the eyes of both your peer sites and search engines. The problem with accumulate link equity for a site on a hosted platform is that you are accumulating link equity for Blogger, or WordPress.com, or some third party service. Your site doesn’t actually benefit.

Hosting Your Own Isn’t Hard

Finally, hosting your own site isn’t very difficult. Many hosts these days have one-click installation for WordPress and one-click upgrades, meaning you just have to tell them you want WordPress and they handle the technical aspects of installing it, standing up a MySQL database, and making sure all the credentials match. Before the popularity of blogs, it wasn’t quite so simple but nowadays the market has responded by making it simple.

In the coming weeks we will have an expert, Mrs. Micah of Blogcrafted, write a guest post on how to move your site from Blogger to your own hosted WordPress site. If you want to earn money from your site now or in the future, you will want to host your own site as early as possible. The longer you wait, the more painful it becomes.