Why Having a Free Blog is Wrong in my Opinion!

After having a lot of discussion with so many friends of mine on why having a free blog is wrong, here is my blog on why having a free blog is wrong in my opinion. Do read it out and share your opinion and thought on it.

Well, let me brief you a bit about the issue. There are many bloggers out here who dedicate so much time, energy, and thoughts on their blog, but unfortunately just to save a bit money, they invest their precious time on free blogging platforms like Blogger (which is a service given free by Google only and provide a blog like yoursitename.blogspot.com) or WordPress (remember WordPress is the best Content Management Software and is free as well, but it has two options, one which is free for user and they can use that with a subdomain of wordpress.com like the Blogger one, user will get a blog address like yoursitename.wordpress.com while the another one is the one which helps user having self-hosted blog with the help of the software from wordpress.org).

The biggest question which some of my friends and followers asks, why do I always oppose someone working on Blogger or WordPress.com blogs? Why do I say that having a free blog is not good? What is the reason why I think that running or managing a free blog is a waste of time?

When I discussed the same with different friends of mine, I thought to write a blog on the same topic. Although, I mentioned it in different blog posts of mine, like in how to get a customized domain name for wordpress.com blogs? But considering the issue seriously I thought to write a separate post for my readers.

Why Having a Free Blog is wrong in my Opinion?

Let me ask a simple question to you. You are residing in a rented home, and you are investing so much of your time on decorating it. You are not only investing your time, but you are also spending the hard earned money, your efforts, etc. on that home which is never yours. Your landlord can any day ask you to leave the premises.

On the other hand, you had your own home, and you can decorate it the way you want. Although, having your own home is really difficult these days, especially in cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, etc. but which scenario is better for you?

I am sure you will say that investing time, energy, efforts, money etc. in your own home is quite better than investing the same in your rented home.

So similar is the situation with blogs as well. When you are creating a blog with the help of Blogger or WordPress.com you are actually taking a blog space on rent from them, although it is coming as free, but still it is on rent only. They can even ask you to leave the premises or blog at any point of time, although it’s probability is too less, but it is not an impossible option as well.

So read on this blog post of mine to understand some of the reasons why having a free blog is wrong in my opinion:

Search Engine Visibility Benefits

Do Google a competitive keyword and see if any blogspot.com or wordpress.com site is coming into the search engine results page (SERP)?

No matter how good post you have written on any keywords, but it will be 99% sure that your blog will never come into search results. I personally have never seen any blog post from a blogspot.com or wordpress.com blog to come into SERP for any keywords.

Though there are some instances in which a Blogger or a Free WordPress blog will come into Search Results, but its probability is even less than 1% only.

The purpose of developing a blog is to get visitors to your blog, it is not like that you won’t get visitors to blogspot.com or wordpress.com blogs, but the majority of the traffic to your blog will be from referral sources. While if you write the same blog post for a self-hosted blog, it will certainly get some more visitors from Organic Search results as well.

Thus, to get the attention from search engines, which obviously your blog deserves, you need to upgrade your blog from a sub-domain structure to a purely customized domain structure.

No matter if you are using a self-hosted blog or a domain name with WordPress.com or Blogger software behind it, but you should have your own identity to get search engine love.

Ease of Remembering

In most of the cases, a blog URL like yoursitename-keywords.blogspot.com or yoursitename-keywords.wordpress.com is hard to remember. You cannot expect your readers to remember your blog name or URL in this case, and then it will be a loss for the sake of getting repeated visitors. On the other hand, if you are using a self-hosted blog like yoursitename.com or yoursitename.in, your visitors can easily remember this URL and can even get back to your site even after some time as well.

Obviously my blog name inewsindia.com is quite easily remembered by you, instead, if I would have a blog like inewsindia.blogspot.com then would you been able to remember that? I guess no.

So always try to have a small domain name so that your readers can easily remember the same.

Readers Attention

This point is somehow related to the first point of Search Engine Visibility as well. Do you know the reason why search engines don’t give value to free blogs? Did you think about it when I mentioned the first point?

Well, let me tell you the exact reason behind this. Not only search engines, but your readers as well consider the fact that since it is a free blog, so they don’t give much importance to it. Readers can even read your content and consider it a bit seriously, but for search engines, investing time on free blogs is like doing it for hobby purposes.

So why to waste your precious time, energy and efforts on a thing which no one is going to take seriously? It is better to have your own self-hosted blog and let others take you seriously.

Differences in Website Speed

In most of the cases, free blog websites are slow and provide poor user experience. This being one of the major reasons behind the poor SEO of your free blogs. Slow loading websites are hard to reach up in search engine searches.

They Can Close Your Blog Anytime

It is one of the most important reasons why I always prefer to have your own self-hosted blog. Free blogs like blogspot.com or wordpress.com can anytime be closed down by their service providers and it will be a headache for you since you invested so much time to establish it.

Not only this but sometimes later when you decide to upgrade your site too, they can create the problem in transferring data and it will be hard for you to recover everything from that free blog and establish the same in the self-hosted blog. So what is the need to put these much hard work on a place which can never be your own?

Limited Options

When you create a blog on Blogger or WordPress.com you certainly have limited access to Themes or Plugins through which you are going to develop your blog. With the help of different themes, you can show your blog to the world in a different aspect, but blogspot.com and wordpress.com come with so many restrictions in using different themes.

On the other hand, plugins are something which helps you in developing different functionality to your blog, but with these free blogs you always have restricted access to plugins. And these are some of the reasons why having a free blog is a bad idea to me.

You Can’t Advertise on Your Blog

With these free blogs, there are so many restrictions along with them, one of the most important restrictions with these blogs is that you cannot advertise something on your blog, and thus you cannot make money out of it. Although there are certain conditions through which you can earn from your blog, but that is no doubt restricted only.

So the main purpose why we start a blog is hard to achieve with these free blogs. I know most of the people who start a blog is having the consideration of earning through it, but if you want to generate money from your blog, then to you need to invest something on it. You cannot get some amount from your blog for free.

Conclusion:

I guess I have been able to justify you about why having a free blog is a bad idea. Although I can understand that since these blogs are free, most of us prefer them on self-hosted blogs as there are some costs involved with these. Here in this blog, I would also like to clear one of the most popular myth about the self-hosted blog. The majority of bloggers think that the investment required to have a self-hosted blog is one time only, but it is not true.

To understand it clearly, I would give an example. Although I don’t want to reveal the name of that friend of mine, but she asked to convert her blogspot.com blog into self-hosted blog, and I explained her everything, but after one year when I asked for the renewal cost of Domain Name and Web Hosting, she refused as she had the feeling that it was one time investment which she already made one year back.

But, let me tell you all that if you are going for the self-hosted blog then you need to pay for Domain Name and Web Hosting things for yearly basis, or even monthly basis too. These two costs are recurring one and you need to pay that.

If you do a bit of research about Domain Name and Web Hosting thing, you can easily understand the actual cost required for those services. Although if you think it is too high and not coming into my budget, do contact me with the help of this blog or my email id vatsalok@gmail.com or connect with me on Facebook/Twitter and I will certainly provide some customized option for you, which will be easy for your pocket too.

Here are some blogs which can be useful for you:

How to Make a Blog in Minutes?

Although it is too hard to develop a blog, but with the help of this blog of mine you can set-up a self-hosted blog in minutes by yourself only.

How to Install WordPress?

This is the easy process to install the World Famous CMS software by WordPress.

What to Do After Installing WordPress?

Read on this blog post of mine to know about things required to do after installing WordPress.

How to Transfer Your Blogger Blog to Self Hosted WordPress Blog?

If you are running a Blogger or a blogspot.com blog and worried about how can I transfer that to Self-Hosted WordPress blog that too without losing the SEO rankings, and subscribers of my present blog then it can be useful for you.

How to Transfer a WordPress.com Blog to Self Hosted WordPress?

If you want to move or transfer your blog from a wordpress.com blog to a self-hosted WordPress blog and use the world’s most popular blogging platform by wordpress.org then you must go through this blog post on how to transfer a wordpress.com blog to self-hosted WordPress.

How to Become a Power Blogger While Using Free Blogs!

And the last but not the least one is on the topic of if you don’t want to leave your free blogging platform and get better results from there only, then this blog can be useful for you.

Please do share your opinion about any of the blogs which I shared above or on this blog as well in the form of comments below and I will certainly be happy to discuss the same with you.