Choosing WordPress.com or Self Hosted WordPress Blog
Ileane over at Ms. Ileane Speaks wrote an article listing the top 11 reasons why she loves wordpress.com and the advantages of using a free wordpress.com blog instead of running your own self hosted blog. It is a well written article and I agree with all of her points, any blogger should choose wordpress.com over blogger.com in my opinion as you do have more power and flexibility at your fingertips.
I won’t go into listing the eleven reasons as you have to go read her blog to see what she listed as the reasons for using a wordpress.com blog but I wanted to let my readers know that if you are serious about monetizing your blog, you will ultimately end up transferring your wordpress.com blog to a self hosted wordpress site. The reasons are simple.
Advertisers want to know you are invested in blogging, if you aren’t invested in your own site then you could stop, abandon at any time. You are also subject to the rules of wordpress.com and blogger.com about advertising and I have known bloggers whose blogs have been removed from testing and trying new advertising programs just to experiment. You trade freedom to test and try what you want for convenience of cost.
If you look on SocialSpark, SponsoredReviews, PayU2Blog or many other systems you will see specific statements from advertisers that they won’t accept bloggers on wordpress.com, xanga, blogspot or other free blogging sites. PayU2Blog made a statement last year that they were no longer accepting any blogspot blogs into their account and I don’t know if they included wordpress.com blogs yet.
With the millions of bloggers out there you don’t stand out as much by being just another wordpress.com blog, or another blogspot blog you have to show that you are independent and serious about blogging and be committed to it. If you are just a casual blogger who is blogging for fun, then by all means go ahead and start a free blog
But if you are a serious blogger who wants to either make a career or at least a decent amount of income from your blog, then you are going to need to invest in a wordpress self hosted blog. Don’t think you can do it later, by shifting your blog to a new site later you will lose all of your pagerank and it will take months to recover the traffic and statistics you will work so hard to build up on your current “free” hosted blog.
Whereas if you have a self-hosted blog with your own domain name, you can move it between hosting providers with no loss in visitors, pagerank or Alexa (unless you have long term outage issues). I was able to move my blog from 1 hosting provider to another in less than 24 hours and took only about a two hour outage.
These are just my observations on blogging over the past fifteen months, and gone are the early days of blogging where someone can get rich and famous from a salon.com account. It worked when these services were new, but now that they are so heavily used you just make it that harder to stand out among the masses.
I don’t even go into the fact that I know so many blogspot.com blogs that are hacked and have trojans inserted or other malicious code. You have a much better chance of security your website with a self hosted wordpress install where you can install security packages and lock down your site.
-Dragon Blogger
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Hey Justin,
Thanks for the shout out! It's nice to see both sides of the coin.
I just want to add that I think the term "serious blogger" is a relative one. You can be serious about blogging without wanting to monetize your blog. I know that's the exception rather than the rule but I've always had a bit of a rebellious spirit. Personally I just don't like ads and I think that many bloggers tend to overdue it, but I do understand that they have different goals than me.
You're right to caution bloggers that plan to monetize and I'm glad you warned me about the trojans on blogspot, since I have a Blogger blog too. You would think that Google would be able to shut those "little nasties" down. I'm glad that WordPress.com seems to be doing a better job of containing them.
Thanks again, this is a great conversation to have!
@Ileane
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