3 reasons why hosting your own blog is a must if you are serious about blogging:
In recent years, blogging has grown in popularity as a method of marketing an online business. But a lot of people who decide to blog go there and get one of those “free” blogs that you can just sign up for. Now everything is fine, but if you really want to build a real following and get real results from your blogging efforts, you have to get a self-hosted blog. Why do you ask? Let’s go there.
The first thing we’ll cover around why you should host your own blog is about the “look and feel” of your blog. See with the free blogging platforms, you only have a limited number of designs you can choose from. You can’t just go out there and start changing what it looks like. They have a set number of templates for you to choose from. That’s all.
Whereas when you host a blog yourself, you can do just about anything you want. Change colors, move things, remove things, add things, anything. There are literally millions of different blog layouts (or themes) out there and if you can’t find something you want, all you have to do is just hire a coder to create it for you.
So, you really have limitless options when it comes to the “look and feel” of your blog and that becomes very important as we are going to get into here.
The second reason you don’t want to use a free blogging platform is “professionalism”. People who search the internet for information about everything they are looking for, want to see a site that looks good.
Now, yes, the free platforms look good, but it shows that they are free. And from the perspective of a prospective buyer of your business, seeing a free site means that business might not be successful if they can’t pay for their own site.
People want to do business with someone who is reputable, not just overnight business and having a “free” website doesn’t make you feel like you’ll be there for a while.
The third and biggest reason is because of “control”. Control the content posted on the site. See when you use a free blogging platform they have the power and the ability to remove anything they don’t like on your blog. Say you make a comment they don’t like, they can just shut down your blog and whatever you did would be gone.
But by having your own blog that you host yourself, no one can shut it down. You have full control over what you say and what you do. And if in the worst case scenario your hosting company doesn’t want to host your site for some reason and wants to take your hosting away from you, you can simply move the blog to another hosting company. Remember, you have full control over what happens on your site. You can write however you want and say whatever you want to say. And that is really important for long term online success.
So when you go out there and start your own blog, host it yourself. This is your blog and you should have the power over the “look and feel”, “professionalism” and “control” of your content. If you don’t, you risk losing a lot of business or the site itself.