Blogging is a great way to share your thoughts, inform people about your company, product reviews or services or just share your knowledge with other people. In the first stage of blogging journey, we try to start a blog without spending money. So our best choices are Blogger and WordPress. Although there are lots of great free blogging platforms that you can use to get started.
While a free blogging platform is a good way to start off, but it’s not the best option for those bloggers who are planning to make money online with their blog.
Fashion blog, food blog, or personal blog, no matter what type of blog you want to start. When you’re so serious about blogging, it’s really worth investing some money and having a custom domain name. If you’ve a big budget for building your blog, it’s much better create a self-hosted blog on premium web hosting companies like: BlueHost, SiteGround etc.
Why You Should Start a Blog with Custom Domain?
There are so many reason to have a good catchy domain name for your blog. Let’s check out the following 10 good reasons and will understand it real facts.
1. Get Serious
First time, most of the people never been serious about their blog. From curiosity they just create their first blog without a heavy planning. Yes! You can start a blog without spending a single penny. But when you’ll spent some money for making your blog or website, it means you’re so serious about blogging.
To get a custom domain you’ve to spent some money and that’s the good thing to be a serious blogger. Also, a custom domain is very important to get audience attention. If you write more quality contents in a free hosted blog then visitors will not take it seriously. Because, they will think that you’re not serious that’s why doesn’t have your own domain name.
2. Limited Customization
When you’ll do something for free, there will have some limitations. If you go with WordPress subdomain blog then you can’t install any plugins. Also you can’t use any third-party premium theme. Also you can’t do anything inside the theme files when you’re using WordPress default themes. That’s the biggest customize limitation in WordPress.
On the other hand, Blogger has same issue but that’s not related with themes or plugins. In blogger has limited templates usage and some template customization lacking.
So when you’ll use any free blog with subdomain there will have so many limitations in customization.
3. The SEO Advantages
A top level domain has the potential to get a better search engine ranking than a sub-domain (which is standard with WordPress.com or Blogger). If you have your own custom domain name, it is like having your own identity and you will get huge SEO advantages. How often when searching will you find results from a WordPress or Blogger blog? Not often. It’s not to say your site won’t rank without its own domain name, but it will make a big difference.
4. Sitemap
Sitemap is a most important part in a website or blog to get better indexing. In a free subdomain blog you can’t create your own XML sitemaps. It’s a big issue when you’ll go to submit your blog for Google crawling and indexing.
If you get your own custom domain then easily can create search engine friendly sitemaps like example.com/sitemap.xml. It will help you to get well rank in Google and other search engines.
5. Page Rank
Page is is another important thing for a blog. It’s a way of measuring the importance of any blog or website pages. For a free subdomain blog you will not get page rank which separated from main domain. For example: if your blog with example.wordpress.com, the page rank will up for wordpress.com not for your blog. When you’ll check the page rank with your blog url there will show up the page rank for main domain.
So, buying a custom domain is very essential for getting Google page rank.
6. Hidden Costs
First of all, we decided to create a free blog when we don’t have any budget. But in a free subdomain blog may cost you lot’s of money on buying premium layouts or upgrading more features. We always skip that kind of costs and never think about it.
To get some extra features we spent lots of money but we don’t think that we can get it buying a custom domain. So in a free blog hidden costs is much more than getting your own domain name.
7. Branding & Promotion
Branding and promotion are both important things for any blog, business or website. First of all, you can’t show off your own name without getting a custom domain name. At the same time, you can’t promote your blog or launch a marketing campaign for your brand without having a good domain name.
Every single moment you’ll see some issues happening with you. So, it’s very hard to establish a brand if your website does not have its own domain name. It’s very difficult to build trust with readers or customers if your website begins with .blogspot.com or .wordpress.com.
8. Ad Placements
Although with a .blogspot.com blog you can get Google AdSense approval but when you’ll use .wordpress.com you can’t do it. Even if you use any other free blogging platforms you can’t place AdSene ads.
Further, most of the top-rated Ad networks will not accept sub-domains into their program as they feel that including sub-domains will decrease their reputation. If you are a serious blogger and want to start earning revenue from your writings and blog, this is really good to hold a own domain.
Also read: How to Get Google AdSense Approval With A Self-Hosted Blog
9. Limited Storage Space
Sometime we need to upload a big media files in your blog. But the free blogging platforms comes with limited storage space. You’ve created a serious blog in blogger and added some high-quality images into your blog posts, after 150 posts you’ll see the storage limit is up. And then you’ve to buy more space which will cost you lot’s of money day by day.
10. Domain Remembrance
A free blogging platform will give you extra domain extension after your main blog name. It’s look like: example.wordpress.com or example.blogspot.com, right? And this will make your website url so long. It’s quit hard to memorize it by your normal audiences.
It’s true that, If you’ve a custom domain name, you can make it catchy and memorable. This means more chance of getting repeat visitors, as remembering your website/blog address will be easier.
Conclusion
Hope you’ve understood those reasons why you should use a custom domain name for your free blog. Both Blogger and WordPress do offer the custom domain name, you’re still restricted in certain areas. So, best thing is that you can use web hosting provider and use the self-hosted version of WordPress.
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