5 Reasons Why You Should Have Your Own Domain For Your Blog

Blogging is a great way to express yourself, inform people of your company’s products or services or just share your knowledge and wisdom with other people. When starting your blog, there are loads of great free tools you can use to get started (See our top 4 blogging platforms post for more information). WordPress.com and Blogger are undoubtedly the best in terms of usability and functionality.

But when you start to get serious about blogging, it is really worth investing some money and getting yourself a custom domain name and hosting. This will help you to take your blog forward and here are 5 good reasons why:

1. Top Level Domains Are Good For SEO

A top level domain or TLD 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 domain name, it is like having your own identity and search engines will award you for this. 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.

2. Branding

It is very hard to establish a brand if your website does not have its own domain name. It will be hard to build trust with readers or customers if your website begins with .blogspot.com or .wordpress.com.

3. Advertising

Many top advertising-publishing companies (CPM Ad Networks) will not accept sub-domains into their programme as they feel that including sub-domains will decrease their company’s reputation. If you are a serious blogger and want to start earning revenue from your articles and website, this is really going to hold you back.

4. Domain Remembrance

A fairly obvious one here. If you have your own domain name, you can make it catchy and memorable. This means more chance of repeat visitors, as remembering your website/blog address will be easier.

5. Problems with Blogger and WordPress

Blogger

Limited templates
Lack of customisation options
Permalink re-structure not allowed
Not great for SEO

WordPress.com

Cannot place Google AdSense Ads
Limited plugins
Not great for SEO

Conclusion

So, there we have it. Five good reasons why you should move your free blog to its own domain. Both WordPress.com and Blogger do offer the ability to have your blog resolve to its own domain name, but you are still restricted in certain areas. The best thing you could do would be to buy some hosting and use the self-hosted version of WordPress.

Posted on 12th April 2013 by Stuart in Blogging