Tip #2 – Free Hosting vs. Paid Blog Hosting

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  • Written on: April 23rd, 2007

Once you have selected a platform that seems to be right for your blog, you will need to decide how you are going to host it.

There are two different ways to get your blog on the Internet. Some of the major blogging platforms offer you’re a free hosting option to get your blog online. These free accounts are somewhat limited in the amount of traffic they can handle before you are pressured to purchase one of their paid hosting accounts. If you use a free blogging platform your URL would look something like http://thorschrock.wordpress.com.

The second option is to sign on with a hosting company (like Schrock Innovations) and pay a monthly fee to host your blog from the beginning. This is a more expensive way to start your blog, but will save you from a search engine suicide later on if you attempt to move your established blog from a free hosting service to a paid one. For example, if you try to move an established blog from a WordPress subdomain (http://thorschrock.wordpress.com) to a regular hosted URL (http://thorschrock.com) all of the URLs to your posts in search engines like Google will become broken and will take a while to get sorted out.

When you are deciding which hosting option is right for you, keep your eventual goal in mind. If you are interested in eventually monetizing your blog (making money from it) you will want to make a decision for the long term. It is important that your URL does not change in order to maximize your visibility in search engines.

On the other hand, if your goal is to grow a daily readership and continually provide great content for them on a daily basis, chances are your readers will follow you to a new URL when the time comes to leave the free hosting services.

Once you have selected which CMS you are going to use for your blog, the next step in the process is to brand your blog. Branding your blog involves deciding what the primary focus of your blog will be, what color schemes it will use, and if you are going to implement any custom logos or graphics to help readers identify you and your blog as you travel the blogosphere. Come back tomorrow morning to learn some must-do blog branding tips.

Next Tip – Identifying Your Target Reader

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