There are several reasons people start blogs. Some are looking at them as a business right out of the gate. Others are looking for ways to let their brain unwind at the end of the workday. Others are looking for a creative outlet; they’ve always wanted to write, but don’t know what avenue they want to explore.
I started blogging on a whim in 2008. I worked as a race car builder at the time and had some ideas I just needed to vent into the racing world.
Of course, as the typical blog cliche sings, the only people who read my blog at first were my mom and my dog. That’s not true. It probably was only my dog because my mom hates racing.
Over time I got out into the online racing community, and traffic started following me back to my blog. Google found me. I started ranking for some good niche keywords, and everything started taking off.
That blog turned out pretty good, and people read it even today.
From the very beginning though, I self-hosted that blog. I took advice bloggers dished out back then to self-host. Self-hosting is cheap compared to the benefits you gain. I think I still pay less than one hundred dollars a year for hosting. It’s now that blog’s tenth anniversary.
Blog hosting can get much more expensive than that now, but getting your blog up and running won’t cost you much.
I’m going to tell you all the benefits of self-hosting a blog. And why they far outweigh any of the free options out there.
The first benefit is owning your real estate.
The internet moves very fast. Things that work today are gone tomorrow.
Your once-hot Facebook page can easily get erased with the simple push of a button at Facebook. There is nothing you can do about it. You don’t own the platform. Your Facebook profile, page, or group you’ve toiled with for months or years evaporated in the blink of an eye.
The same holds true for free sites or even cheap sites hosted on WordPress.com. You don’t own these sites. You squat on them for free so that the platform owner can get paid by ads hidden off to the side. I’ve heard stories of people getting shut down by these blogs without notice. These have a long list of ‘user agree upon’ terms. If you violate one term, they will shut you off.
People lose years’ worth of blog posts with the simple push of a button. Without prenotification to give them time to extract all their hard work; everything is gone.
Own your internet home base. I recommend Bluehost as a hosting platform. That site sits on that platform. I’ve used many over the years and never had any problems with Bluehost. I’m sure there are other good ones, they are what I use and enjoy promoting because of their reliability. They have tutorials and tools to help you along the entire setup process.
When I first put up Life Reboot Project, I used another host. I had a bunch of problems. I won’t mention their name because I don’t want to trash them. After days of frustration, I called Bluehost, and they walked me through the entire setup process. Bluehost also assisted me on their side a little to WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to install your own plugins. I use a plugin called Milo Tree. It has a little slide out box which is a call to action to follow my site on either Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. The site offered will rotate.get everything up and running. I’ve had nothing but success with them.
Regardless of who you choose for hosting, You need a self-hosted platform and a wordpress.org installation.
Have a fast well-coded theme with Studio Press.
The theme you choose is significant. People used to pick themes mainly on styling. Now, Google is using site speed as a ranking factor.
I am slowly converting all my properties over to Studio Press. The clean coding they use makes their sites load fast. Users don’t like waiting for long periods to watch a site load. Google knows this and pushes slow-loading sites further down in the listings.
I used another very popular theme until recently. I first started using that theme because it was so customizable. Everything was drag-and-drop, and for a non-coder, I found it customization reasonably easy to do. The problem was it was slow. I don’t know much about coding. But I have picked up that the more user customization a company builds into a theme, the slower it gets. With the other theme, I added in a couple of plugins to get the site how I wanted. The site got slow. I mean excruciatingly slow.
I switched over to Studio Press and instantly noticed a difference.
You’ll have the ability to install your own plugins.
WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to install your own plugins. I use a plugin called Milo Tree. It has a little slide-out box which is a call to action to follow my site on either Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. The site offered will rotate.
WordPress.com doesn’t allow Milo Tree on its platform.
I’m also a big fan of the Yoast SEO plugin. Yoast is an easy-to-use SEO optimization tool that guides you through optimizing your content for the best SEO.
The same goes for another of my favorite, and a very popular plugin among bloggers, Social Warfare. This plugin has a series of social share buttons that any user can modify for styling and where they appear on the screen. Traditionally, social share buttons reside at the top or the bottom of the post. With Social Warfare, these share buttons can be optimized and stylized to fit with your theme and pull the most substantial response.
You’ll get none of these features when using WordPress.com or many of the other free hosting platforms.
You’ll have the ability to do customization.
Even on a self-hosted WordPress where you can use an awesome theme of your own choice, you might still want some customization to tweak it to get the exact look you desire. Customization isn’t possible with a WordPress.com site.
Studio Press themes are pretty outstanding out of the box. But, after a little while of working with them, you may want more. There are coders out there who can tweak these for you at a fairly reasonable price. These tweaks aren’t possible with a free hosted site. It’s pretty much you see is what you get.
I use a Studio Press theme right out of the box with a little customizing I did on my own. I did mention I’m not a designer, so my customization is minimal.
The theme I use is called Flex Pro. Flex Pro has its own website, and it walks you through some common design tweaks you can make on your own.
See, when owning your own internet property, which is what you are essentially doing with a self-hosted WordPress.org site, it is like owning your own home as opposed to renting.
If you own your own home and come home after work one night and those bushes out front, don’t sit well with you, a half hour with a saw, and everything looks a whole lot better.
Try something like that while living in an apartment complex and you’ll most likely find yourself out on the street.
You’ll be able to monetize and list build however you would like.
Do you dream of making a little money from your blog? If so, you need complete control of how and where everything gets done on the site. Some free platforms don’t even allow any monetization options, although they will advertise on your blog to make money off your hard work.
If you think for a moment you will ever want to make a little money from your blog, start now with a property and a platform you own and can build to serve your customers best.
You need to begin building an email list. Not all email service providers integrate well with every theme.
To build your email list, put opt-in boxes at several places on your site. There are plugins which help you do this. But, we’ve already discussed the limitations of the plugins at free-hosted sites or even WordPress.com.
There is a new mindset floating around the blogging world now. I found out about it most recently through Amy Lynn Andrews in her Knotebook.
Amy Lynn is one of the longest-running ethical bloggers out there, and I value what she says.
A couple of years ago, most blogs used a hub and spoke framework. The blog was at the center of everything happening online. Then, all of the particular social media channels the blogger used drove traffic back to the blog.
Amy Lynn sees a shift toward the blog not being at the center, but just another satellite tool to drive traffic. She sees the center being the offer pages or products the marketer is selling.
To make your products the center of the business requires a separate series of landing pages. On a self-hosted blog, these could be developed and put on another area of the blog hosting platform.
Another way is to use a service like Leadpages to host these pages for you.
Creating custom landing pages on free-hosted sites is difficult or almost impossible if you want to optimize for the best conversions. You need to design and customize each page to get the best results from the particular customer you are trying to serve.
These separate series of highly customized pages aren’t possible with free-hosted blogs.
There was a time when free-hosted blogs played a significant role in SEO. This was back in the spammy SEO days when backlinks from any source would push your site up in the rankings.
Google gets better every year at eliminating spammy self-created backlinks. The only use I see anymore for a free hosted blog is for the person whose only goal is to write for their pleasure of writing. If someone stops by to read their stuff, great. If no one visits, that’s fine too.
Other than that situation, I recommend to anyone, to get a blog on an internet platform they own and can control.
Till next time, be safe.
Kevin