As
technology gets ever more accessible, more and more people are looking to make
money blogging. In this article I will explain why you should try to avoid the
free options for blogging...
The
2 main free blogging platforms are blogger, which is owned by Google, and
WordPress. When blogging first came on the scene, they were great, in fact it
was blogger that really opened up blogging to the masses. Both options still
allow you to set up your own blog, right now, totally for free, within minutes.
The
opposite to the free option is the paid option. This means paying for your own
hosting, and operating your blog on your own webspace. Hosting can be bought
literally for just a few dollars per month, so cost is not really an issue -
here are the three reasons I suggest the paid option:
Firstly,
with the free blogs, you have no control over what happens to your content.
Your content is your greatest asset with your blog, but with a free option, the
provider might withdraw the service at anytime. You could find that all your
hard work, the following, the linking, may be gone in a moment, and there is
nothing you can do about it.
With
your own hosting, you are in control. Yes, paid hosting can go down of course,
but it is always preferable to have as much control as you can, and the free
option takes away that control.
The
second reason to go for paid instead of free, is the versatility of your own
blog. The free options have limited choices when it comes to design, and what
you can do, but with your own blog, there is not only a massively wider choice
for the basic themes, you can get into your own coding if you want, giving you
real options to make your blog unique. That's a good thing when you are trying
to stand out!
WordPress
is the most popular choice for themes for your own hosted blog. You can either
go for countless free themes, or pay for themes with a specific design purpose.
You
can also customise your own blog with plugins which can do all sorts of things,
like offering readers the chance to share on face book - great for traffic
generation!
Those
choices are simply not there with the free options.
The
third reason I recommend avoiding the free blogs, particularly if you are
looking to make money blogging, is that the free blogs can be limited when it
comes to monetisation.
It
might be that you can't use them for affiliate links, or sales pages, which is
not a problem with your own hosted blogs. Even if you can currently include
affiliate links, that's something the free providers may change at anytime, and
that's not something you want to happen down the road once you have put in all
that time and effort to get your blog making money.
Now,
don't get me wrong, the free options are great to start out, or for
hobby/personal blogs, but if you want to build a serious money making blog, I
advise avoiding the free options - there are too many risks and obstacles,
which can be bypassed for the sake of a few dollars a month to pay for hosting.
When
I say a few dollars, I mean under five dollars too, so I'm not talking about a
lot of money, and the advantages really outweigh that tiny outlay.
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