Three Reasons Not To Use a Free Blogging Platform
Many people who work 8 to 6 jobs as wage slaves, often decide to try their hand at making a living on the Internet. They discover a product, program or service to promote, and set out about trying to build a blog or a website without spending a single penny. They use a free website building service or a free blogging platform. They work very hard getting the site built and try to attract visitors. Then they fail, and they say: “Earning money on the Internet is a Scam.” But, making money on the Internet is not a scam, you can do it, but like with any business you must invest in your business to succeed.
1. They Look Free — Most free website or blogging platforms look free, some do not even allow you to use your own domain name to point your visitors to. So you have a strange URL that mentions the other companies domain name. Some even include a link for your visitors to “build their own website free!.” That hardly incites trust with your visitors. Not only that, it’s not that expensive to own your domain and use a self-hosted platform. It’s also not that hard!
2. They Own You — Well, they own your content. Even if you are able to purchase your own unique URL, you don’t have control over your content, they do. Sure, you can download it and back it up, and save it all the time but if you cross the line and ignore their terms of service you may find out after spending a lot of time and effort making your site look just right, that it has been taken down. You do not own your own content, unless you own the space the content is in, either by outright ownership or by renting server space.
3. Transferring is a Pain — Let’s say you start out with the free sites, thinking you can just transfer it all over to a self-hosted website later if you become successful. There are two things wrong with this idea:
a. Why are you assuming you won’t be successful? — You need to believe in your business and yourself to be successful. If you don’t believe in yourself enough to invest a bit of money into your website, why would anyone open their wallets to you?
b. It’s not that easy to transfer. You’ll never have the exact same look, which is great, but you won’t be able to transfer most of your inbound links you’ve worked so hard to obtain. All transferring to a new domain is going to cause you to lose traffic, thus stall your business. Why not build it right the first time and avoid these issues?
It literally costs about Five Dollars a month to purchase hosting for a basic website. The domain might cost you Twelve Dollars a year. Joel Comm recommends Bluehost.com. They have a one-click solution to set up a WordPress website within minutes. The Socrates Theme is a recommended theme designed to help people create niche sites quickly and easily.
Have you used a free blogging platform and regretted it? Did you encounter any of the issues I mentioned? If you have any other comments or questions, please use the comment form below.
Guest blogger, Stephanie Watson, works with BarryPublishing.com
Hi Stephanie,
You are so correct about this. You never know when they will take over your blog with their own advertising.
The other danger is that they can just shut you down anytime they want to.
You might not even have a backup to reestablish your blog somewhere else.
That could mean lots and lots of work and time down the drain.
I use Bluehost and I am really happy about them.
I purchased most of my domains and webhosting with them.
REading your post a question arise spontaneously:
I run my site on WordPress.org and the direct link is http://www.holidayhomesroundtheworld.com . As far as I am concerned, I guess I am in control, ain’t I? Isn’t WP.org (not WP.com) a right way to do it?
True true, but sometimes when you are just dipping your toe in the water, you dont have the confidence to start out on a self hosted platform, even if you know what one is.
Many newbies just want to get up and running, and get the opportunity to make their mistakes and learn and the offer of a free blog without any of the technical hassles is often the thing that gives them the motivation to start.
With the benefit of hindsight its easy to say no dont start with a free blog, but going to something like wordpress might be scary enough to put most newbies off even trying.
A free blog might not be the best, but you can still learn a heck of a lot about blogging just by getting started and a free blog offers an extremely low barrier to entry, both financially and technically!
Well I can say that I don’t agree with this. Without going into too much detail, I started using a free blogging platform 6 months ago. I consistently make 4-$5000 a month from it in an extremely competitive niche. I have sites that have gone into crapville since penguin, but my free blogging platform is still making me money, thank goodness. So yeah you might be at the mercy of these providers, but, you’re also at the mercy of Google. Which is the lesser evil?
When I started building websites in the mid 90s, I used free hostings such as Geocities and Tripod. I was just getting my feet wet, and at that time, Adsense does not exist. Later, I used another free hosting company, Hypermart, because allowed me to choose my own domain. But after hosting me for a while, Hypermart decided to charge. And their fee was quite high. That’s when I relocated to Bluehost and have been their customer since. I now earn a full time income from my websites. They all have domains, and none of them are on free hosting anymore.
I do agree that a free blog platform is a great place to get started. I think of it as blogging with training wheels. If you are a total newbie and don’t know what you are doing, blogger.com is a good place to figure it out. But I wouldn’t BUILD anything that I want for the long term on that platform. The other reason I recommend blogger for short-term efforts is to get your AdSense account.
I’m in the reverse situation right now, as I’m in danger of losing my site simply because I can’t afford the renewal fees.
This may be because asking for donations to make movies based on Bible verses once a year may not be a sustainable model.
I agree with you, i hate free blogging platform. no flexibly no full control.
Hey Joel! I have been creating wonderful sites using Socrates! I started working with your theme when it came out and the sites I have developed look and feel so much better than other sites I have visited. It is nice to refer people to them without any apologies! 😉
Jean
Thankfully, I’ve never had the chance to regret using a free blogging platform because I started off using self-hosted WordPress. I just think that any serious blogger/content producer should use self-hosted WordPress starting off.
Interesting point of view Stephanie, but I agree with Mike on this. Whilst I could only wish to be making as much per month (congrats!), my approach has been to have sites on both self hosted and blogging platforms, and I’ve found that those on blogging platforms outperforming the others over past few weeks since Penguin update. I do think that self hosted sites probably come across as more professional (own domain name, etc), but that counts for nothing if you can’t maintain traffic. Also, depending on your strategy, it doesn’t really matter that you have a “strange URL that mentions the other companies domain name” – if I’m building an affiliate site that I just want to rank well I’m not really looking to build a brand, and people will click through top rankings regardless of the url.
PS Bluehost may be great for the US but no good for UK, so I use hostgator instead and they’re excellent.
You are right about people being able to earn money online, but it does take a lot of work and dedication from the person. Some people make it sound so easy and suck others into believing they can solve their money issues overnight and it doesn’t work that way.
That’s why 95% of people fail. I agree with you that it doesn’t cost much to have your own domain and hosting setup.
Fair enough, once you have progressed past newbie stage and want to take blogging to the next level, its time to move away from blogger etc for the reasons mentioned. Especially once you venture into the arena of trying to make money from blogging
Are you employing SEO only methods to drive traffic?
I work in the SEO field and I always recommend not using free hosting or native “easy-buid” sites like GoDaddy. Despite some comments above those sites don’t rank as well as a WordPress site on your own account. It isn’t very expensive.The learning curve isn’t that steep and there are forums to that will give you info to help build the site and as importantly, create a decent business plan. Online business isn’t a scam, but you do have to develop some skills and spend some time in the beginning learning how to market and develop a business.
WordPress software is the best blogging platform, I personally use it for my blogging business. If you want to start a blog, make sure to use WordPress software!
The points you raise are true indeed. I have gone through them but only because I had to have a starting point (was on a veeery tight budget).
That said, if I had to to it again? I would not use free services.
Good point.
Sometimes, free things are the most expensive.
I have purchase socrate theme, very good ctr! Thanks
Why won’t you go into more details about how you earn your living online from free blogging platforms Mike. Is your methods illegal by any chance?
I in some ways agree with this article however if you are using a platform like Blogger and obey their terms and services you should have no issues. If you go to btemplates.com there are many templates derived from WordPress templates for Blogger and you can point your domain name to our Blogger Blog.
It does take some html knowledge but very easy to build a decent site.
I have a couple of sites built this way and have had no problem – yet. Of course I am not in the make money online niche so I dont worry about those things.
I agree 100% with not relying on free platforms. As far as website hosting, I am considering moving the 5 sites I have on a shared server (GoDaddy) to a dedicated server with another hosting company to see if that improves traffic.
Antonio, if you’re using your own host you’re safe! Well safe as can be. You still need to regularly back up your website / blog as your host is not really responsible for that.
Surf Traveler —
It might just be me but I can’t stand Godaddy for hosting. Updates seem to take forever, and their back-end is confusing. I do have all my domains bought through Godaddy as I find it easier. I bet if you switch to something like bluehost or hostgator you’d really like it.
No. Otherwise once again I would be at the mercy of the serps.
What an idiot I am. Of course I should share exactly what has taken months to work out, with you Paul. My methods ARE conformant with the platform Ts & Cs.
Free hosting is a good way to get started. You got to learn how the internet work with very little cost. A chance to make some mistakes and learn before moving on to paid hosting.
Mike, you can’t afford $5 month to host your blog? Heck, if you are doing Christian and Bible work, I might consider giving helping you out. And I also know someone who studied film design (kind of like an Andy Jenkins)and he specialized in Christian content. Give me more information about your site and your business model and I think it could definitely be sustainable if it was done correctly.
Its all about Choices and availability really as many starters usually want to start out by learning and they do that with most of the free blogging platforms like bloggers and some people really can’t afford the hosting fees at the initials and prefer using the available free Blogging platforms. And for some who blog for fun, the platform doesn’t really matter so long as they are able to pass their fun out and get fun in return through their blogs.
For Me I actually run some Blogs on Blogger which I use for different purposes and i love playing with the HTML tool, I Use Blogger Blogs to create all types of sites including creating salespages and splashpages with Blogger etc. But when it comes to some more professional works i use wordpress. So its all about Choices and what you want out of any blog you are creating.
Mike why don’t you just come clean and admit. That whatever it is your doing online is dodgy. Otherwise the other websites that you own. Would not have been hurt so bad by the penguin update.
You talk about perfecting a system in a matter of months. Well guess what! there are people who have taken “YEARS” to perfect their systems.
And yet. They are still more than willing to share their secrets with anybody.
Personally speaking. I don’t really care how you claim to make your money.
But if you are going to keep making comments on this post. You should at least have the guts to reveal who you are.
Let me tell you something Paul. Many years ago a man came running into a town yelling, “there’s gold in them there hills”. The next morning when he woke up there were 1000’s of other people digging holes on what was his discovery.
And Paul, BTW, I had been trying to get a business going online for over 4 years. Spent #20,000+ with very little result. So when I come up with things that work, I keep them closely guarded.
My reply here was to whether free free blogging platforms work. For me they do. End of story. Perhaps you can figure out a way of doing that, instead of just asking someone to tell you how.
Free blogging platform such as Google blogger can be used to great effectiveness to generate backlinks to your main site which is self hosted.
Google index blogger blogs much faster than it does on other free sites such as WordPress.com
By the way you can redirect blogger URL to another domain and that is a feature.
Let’s stay for instance you want to build traffic for a product review of ‘XYZ’.
A quick way to generate traffic is by registering for blogger blog sub URL say ‘XYZ’.blogspot.com
Publish some quality articles and wait for a month or so and then redirect it to another domain say ‘XYZ’.com
Still hiding behind your comments I see Mike. Why in the world, would I be interested in learning from a man like you?
I’m only interested in doing business with people that I trust. And you fall way short of the mark.
What comments am I hiding behind? So far you’ve asked exactly what my method is, and also to reveal who I am. I’m not quite sure why you need to know this.
Then you start spouting about not doing business with a man like me. You’re all over the place.
Have a nice life 🙂
Mike let me explain something to you. My name is Paul Profitt. And if you hover your cursor or mouse pointer over my name on this blog post. You will see that it displays a link back to my website. Which is where I do my business from, and where you can find out more about me.
Hover your cursor over some of the other people. Who have also made comments on this post. And you will see a link that you can click on. That will lead to their websites or whatever page they want you to see. This is why They and I are leaving comments.
Because we want the exposure, and we have nothing to hide. Now I will give you 3 guesses what happens when I hover my cursor over your name.
Yes I see by all the comments you leave on so many forums and blogs, that leaving a link to your site is very important to you. I also see you use blogspot, so obviously you have an opinion on free platforms. Pity you couldn’t have shared those with us rather than personally attacking me. Obviously something I have said has rattled Paul Proffits chain. Ya get that. hehehe
Was it summink I said big fellah? I don’t fink anyfink I said was too bad.
Yes,, I don’t like use the free blog platform..
i like your wordpress article.