I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in a while this weekend and he expressed to me his plan to start a blog and jump into this “new blogging thing”. He sounded pretty enthusiastic about it and we talked a little about how he was going to go about getting into blogging. He had some good ideas of his own and I offered a few tips to help him out.
One thing that I steered him away from was his plan to start out with a free blog on WordPress.com and then switching over to a “real” blog after he got his feet wet. I know that a lot of people choose this route as their way to go, and I can’t help but point out the benefits of starting out with a blog of your own as compared to a free blog.
Yes, a blog of your own does come with a price tag, but in reality the cost is minimal. After you tally up the cost of your domain ($10 or less per year) and hosting (less than $10 per month) you’re looking at a grand total of around 30 cents a day to be the proud owner of your own little space on the internet. When you consider everything you get by owning your blog instead of “borrowing”, you’ll soon consider this to be a bargain.
First off, when you own your blog you have total control over your site. You are not limited to what you can and can’t do like you are if your blog is hosted at WordPress.com or Blogger. When I say total control, I mean the following things:
- You decide what your blog looks like. You choices are not limited as to what themes you can install on your blog. Or how much you can modify them. When you own your blog you can do whatever you want and tweak everything to your liking. You can’t do that with a free blog.
- You decide what is on your blog. Some free blog services display ads on your blog and there’s nothing you can do to remove them. If you don’t want other people’s ads on your site, then you need to have a site of your own.
- You can write about anything you want. Not that I would ever endorse or encourage some types of content that free blog services forbid in their TOS, I still strongly feel that people should have the freedom to say whatever they want to say. If you want total freedom to say whatever you want you are going to need a blog of your own.
There are some technical issues that you would incur when moving from a free blog to a blog of your own as well. All your prior efforts will stay at your old blog (links, traffic, etc.) and you’ll be basically starting from scratch all over again. Sure, you can possibly do a redirect from your free blog to your new one, but unless you can implement a detailed 301 redirect for your old site you are going to lose most of what you’ve accomplished so far.
After explaining these few things to my friend, as well as including the benefits of having an email address associated with his blog, he decided to take my advice and start with a blog of his own. I am going to help him get everything set up properly and show him how things work and I think he will do just fine.
Are you planning to start a free blog instead of starting a blog of your own? What do you find appealing about free blogging? What are your concerns about starting a blog of your own? Leave a comment below and let’s start a dialogue!
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I started a blog about a year ago on blogger. I had a web designer reformat my page etc., etc, but now blogger has installed an update that “might” mean losing all of my updates thus far. I have close to 60 followers and I can’t risk losing the site name at this point in time. Not sure what my next steps will be because I don’t make enough from the blog right now to even hire someone to reformat with the new template. Looking back, I would have definitely started my own blog. I don’t know what my way out is. Ugh…
Amanda,
I’m going to email you a possible solution that might work for you for your situation.
Running your own blog —on your own domain, is a fantastic way to maintain complete creative control over your content, look and feel and overall design. Add in knowledge of FTP management, a little CSS, HTML, and PHP coding and you’re able to move past merely installing pre-fab templates and get into more advanced customization that can really make your blog unique.
Yet, I still find blogging tools like Tumblr and Flavors.me fun, informal platforms to post content without having to worry about the technical aspects of set-up and maintenance. It really just boils down to finding a tool to suit your technical comfort level.