When you are eager to set up a WordPress blogs for your business and found out that you can launch a blog for free with WordPress, you will definitely pretty attracted to it. I would like to remind you the fact that there are many differences between self-hosted WordPress blog and getting a free blog at WordPress.com. Does it really worth your time and effort to blogging using free service? Before you start your blog please go through this article and weigh the difference. The following summary will help you make a wise judgment.
Free Blogs – Why You Should Not Use Them
We take WordPress blogs for example here. If you are simply expect to launch a blog for expressing your personal ideas, showing your daily lift activities, and more importantly you will never hope to make any money with it, it may be find to go with WordPress.com and register as a user there. I will list the two major weak points that will pose an obstacle to a professional blogger who are expecting to make money with blogs.
For one thing, the limited resource is a huge disadvantage. The remotely hosted blog platform is built to hundreds of thousands of bloggers. For such reason, WordPress.com only affords to offer each user the very least resource. Whenever there are many big volume of activities happens on the server, your blog will ultimately run the risk of major crashes problems.
Also Read: How to Create a Successful Online Blog
For another thing, people who are going to monetize their blogs will find out that a free blog will limit your monetizing opportunities. Unfortunately, many (free) remotely hosted blogs are not allowed to use any form of direct advertising, such as Google AdSense or affiliate links.
Self Hosted WordPress Blogs-Seven Reasons to Use Them
Different from free WordPress blog, having your own WordPress blog on your own server will give you full ownership of it. You are allowed to add whatever ads and affiliate program as you like. You will also able to customize how the blog look and feel. Follows different reasons explanation will definitely convince you.
- Freedom: Hosting your own blog will give you full control over your blog. You will be provided with your own server space where you can place whatever you want and decorate how you think fit. This full control gives you more freedom. Free blog service providers mostly force their own advertisements on your blog/site to get revenues for the service. With self-hosted blog you can join your own publisher program like AdSense and start making money.
- WordPress Plugins: Plugins allow easy customization and enhancement to your WordPress blog. You will be allowed to extend the functionality of your blog. If you want to display the most recent comments on your blog, simply integrating a “WP recent comments” plug-in will accomplish it for you. Whit free blog service, this can be very limited or impossible.
- Themes Support: You will be allowed to use only a limited number of themes with free service. However, if you go with a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can choose from thousands of millions of themes from the WordPress communities, you can even ask somebody to make a unique theme for your blog. The selection is endless.
- Disk Storage: As we mention above, you will be provided with a limited disk space with a free service. That means you will be only allowed to upload a limited amount of files. If you are expecting to place images and videos for visitors to download from your website, it will be a bit unrealistic. With a self-hosted blog, you are allowed to choose the right hosting package that most suitable for your requirements.
- A Sense of Professionalism: If you care about how visitor think of you, a self-hosted blog will give your visitor a sense of professionalism. This can be considered as your reputation and credibility since most people do not see free service with great eyes. When talking about self hosted blog, people think that the person has paid for the service and he is serious about his project and work.
- Easy SEO: Search engine optimization is a must to successful blogging. When your blog contents are best optimized for search engines, they will be indexed quickly and rank a higher position on search results. With a self-hosted home for your blog, it is much easier to conduct search engine optimization activities. For instance, you can expect high ranking position with the help of All-in-one SEO WordPress plugin and so on.
- Resale Possibility: Another advantage of your self-hosted blog is that you will be able to sell your self-own blog if you decide to do so for whatever reasons. If you set up a blog with free blog service, if you are not going to post content on your blog, you have no choice but to abandon it without any revenue since actually you are not own your blog.
