Hosting your own blog ~ do it ASAP

Ok, let's talk about the difference between hosted and free blogging. I've done and still do both. I do them for different reasons though.

I started out with a free blog, because I didn't think I could afford to pay for hosting. I had about 60 posts on my blog when one day I logged in and there was a big red banner across my blog. It said ~ you are violating terms of service and your blog will be erased if you don't comply ~ or something equally scary.


I freaked out ~ and I actually went back and read the TOS. I was using wordpress.com and soon realized they are NOT make money friendly. In fact you are not allowed to have affiliate links or any type of advertising on your blog.

Considering my blog was about making money from home ha ha. Well I made a quick backup of my blog so I had it in case the worst happened. I still was in denial about being able to afford hosting, so I went through my whole blog, took out all the links and cleaned it up so it fits terms of service.

At that point it was really useless for me to be blogging. I finally started looking around to see how much hosting would cost, and I think more importantly tried to quell my fear of "using hosting". It was a whole new learning curve and I had no idea how complicated it was going to be.

I looked into a few of the often recommended hosting companies and called Lunarpages ~ which is the hosting I finally decided on. I talked to the customer service rep who answered the phone immediately and was very willing to answer my crazy first timer questions and was really nice about it.

I have since called back every time I have had to do something new so someone could walk me through it. :) I'm not sure that's what customer service is really for, but they have happily helped me through it all.

I also have taken advantage of their forum. In fact, I have asked questions and had them answered within 5 minutes, and my replies answered immediately after that. Which is VERY helpful.

All in all, for a year of hosting it cost me 98 dollars, and I have had help at each step along the way. I installed my wordpress blogs with one click. (make sure whatever hosting you choose has fantastico) I have installed a forum with one click. I can now upload reports, images and host them. It's very handy.

But anyway, back to blogging.

A hosted blog allows you ultimate freedom. You can choose from a million themes, you can have a custom theme made. You can make SEO built in with a certain plugin. You can monetize in a million different ways. Your content is your own. No one can ever take it away from you. (except a crazy computer if you forget to back up ~ which you can also put on autopilot with a plugin)

The reasons to have a hosted blog are plenty. If you are trying to make money with your blog I definitely recommend having your own blog on your own hosting.

With that said ~ I also use free blogging sites. I use these to basically have a place to backlink to my "real" blogs. I set up blogs around the internet and write quick articles or link to other articles, but I can always have a link in the post and in the blogroll with my keywords in the anchor text. This lets me get great backlinks for my sites, and helps me drive traffic.

I don't really try to make money on these blogs, I'm just driving more traffic and building backlinks for my other sites, and squidoo lenses.

The last thing I will say about this is if you are going to try to make money on a free blog make sure you choose blogger.com. It is the ONLY free blogging service that allows you to make money from your blog (all hail google). You still have to worry about google randomly pulling the plug one day ~ and if you don't believe it happens stop by the warrior forum and put blogger blog disappeared or something similar in the search feature.

Make sure you back up your blog regularly in case this happens and save the first 100 bucks you make and go to Lunarpages hosting and get hosting for a year then upload wordpress. If you can't figure it out, send me a note and I'll walk you through it. :)