7 Reasons NOT to host on a free blog host

12 September 2008 - By Ahson Rafiq - Filled in Blogging, Make Money Blogging, Make Money Online

I read this post earlier on youmoz, to be honest I hate free blog hosts with a passion when it comes to making money, this is from a blogger’s perspective, to make big money online you need to be unique and stand out from others, isn’t that the whole point? 

 

Uniqueness

Think about it, would you click through from a site called awesomebaseballstuff.blogspot.com ?

No. Anyone that’s been online for 2 years at most, would know to stay way from those kind of sites, it’s mostly spam with overcrowding ads, the potential affiliate commissions (users) are very  aware of this.

Spam/Dup-content

Now, let’s say you’re hosting a blog on blogspot, which I consider the biggest spam network, first of all 70% of the traffic you get would probably be from within the blogspot and I can assure you that the whole lot of that traffic would not get you a single affiliate sale and potential customers already know not to go to free hosted sites for unique information/products.

Monetization

This is what turned me off from free hosts in the first place, okay, let’s say you’re selling a product worth 140$ , it’s an ebook or some kind of an affiliate thing, put yourself in the user’s shoes, would you buy something worth 140$ from someone who can’t even afford to have his/her’s own site to promote that product in the first place?

And if you want to monetize with ads, then it’s even worst, usually blogspot blogs have tons and tons of ads and compared to the content the percentage looks like 60% ads and 40% content. The common ad placement on free blog hosts is already known by users, how many times could you possible fool them? seriously.

Pagerank/Strength

Imagine hosting your unique/useful content on a network that has tons of spam and is known to have alot of those cheap sites that you try ever so hard to avoid, do you really think your content would show up in top serps being on the same host as tons of other spammers?

As for PR, yea you just might get a good pagerank going on but what is it worth?

There was a time where blogspot domains used to sell for 500-1000$ but that time is gone now, now you if you have a really strong pr blog on blogspot, it wouldn’t sell for much, you might even get  ripped of on its sale.

Basic Identity

Who are you? You know who you are, but do other people get a chance to know you?

Let’s say you have this really unique name in mind for your new site, it’s already taken on blogspot. Now you have to resort to adding additional words to your already useful and unique name, which would make it really corny and really obvious for people to notice it as spam.

Unique name : FreeBlogTips : taken

Second try : DailyFreeBlogTips : crap, taken..

Third try : DailyFreeBlogTipsToday : big maybe or your only choice, do you really want your blog at : dailyfreeblogtipstoday.blogspot.com ?

Creativity/Design

Let’s take blogspot for example, yea you have a choice of alot of themes but do they give you all the freedom you need? no.

The freedom I get with wordpress and having my own host, gives me the oppurtunity to control every aspect of my blog’s design, that’s one of the reasons of my success.

Add ons

After a certain amount of success, you would definitely want to add some kind of tool or sub-site to it, like I have a gallery, and the tools in the resources section, how can you do that on a free host?

Think ahead, make sure you make the right choice before you put in all the effort.

 



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