The No. 1 secret of setting up a successful blog is to use your own domain name with your blog
No matter how tempting it seems to use free services with addresses like abc.wordpress.com or xyz.typepad.com.
Why? Because you’re in control of your blog. If it gets very popular and you want to customise it more, you have the freedom to do so without penalty.
You can choose to:
- move to another blog platform
- change your blog setup (categories, etc)
- move to a subdomain or subdirectory so you can redevelop your site
If you do not use your own domain, then you are stuck with having to tell everyone where your new blog is, and losing the value of all of the links pointed at your old blog.
You can register a new .com domain for less than USD $9 from namecheap.com and other registrars, and you can find out more about choosing a domain name in this previous blog entry.
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I do agree with you to have your own domain for the blog.
Long domain name such as yourblogname.blogspot.com its really irritated to user.
Having own domain such as .com, .net or .org visitor will easily remember your site as they will visit it frequently.
Why are you advocating .com so much?
You will have better choices open to you in .eu or .ie and the .eu is probably not going to cost much more than a .com (depending on who you go with)
Hello Michele, I know other domain name as u mentioned such as .ie & .eu cost cheaper. As I personally do prefer the three main domain name.
I was writing a blog on how to make money online and as part of process define an overall strategy.
But key thing i missed out as part of strategy was the domain name and owning the site myself.
I think by coming to your site, and seeing this as first post made me realize that strategy for making money online by blog, should start by actually owning site myself.
Thanks
Good points. I had a free account on Wordpress.com for a while, and just when it started getting really popular, it got yanked by them for a link back to another site I own. I lost everything, including my posts and my readers, and learned an important lesson….
Hi guys, thanks for the comments.
Louiss:
Brandability is an important part of the domain name choice, and going with the hosted subdomain solutions is diluting your brand.
Michele:
I’m a big advocate of both .com and .ie (and the other country level tlds), depending on the target demographic of the site.
I know you’ve had good results from using .eu. It’s not a tld I’m big into but I guess it has its uses.
I would *never* choose a domain name based on registration costs if it’s for anything serious. Maybe if it’s something experimental, but ultimately cost should be one of the last considerations.
Stockdude & Kristie,
Yes, one of the best rules to follow is don’t give a 3rd party control of any of your assets.
Cheers,
Alastair.
Answerable.com has domain names for US $7.00 – that is like a 100th of a Euro.
It seems to me that blogs on their own domain get greater traffic as well – I’m not sure if this is entirely psychological to the user or if it is just coincidence.
Yea, using your own domain is very critical
You have got to have your own domain. These free domain look spammy.
interview-questions.name
I 100% agree with your suggestion. Personally I have made a big mistake of not using my domain name for my blog at the beginning. My blogspot blog now is growing bigger but I find pretty hard to switch to my own domain now as I may lost lot of traffic and money I can make.
.ie cheaper than .com? Only on some of the Micheles promotions via Twitter – but in general .ie is about 3 times the cost of .com.