Blogging Basics # 2 - Spend or Save?

One of the first questions I asked myself when I started planning my first blog was the question,

“Do I want to spend money on it or not?”

I would assume that you are already aware of what you would like to blog about before thinking if you are willing to spend a few bucks or not in creating your blog. Asking yourself if you’re willing to spend some money on your blog is important because once you have started your blog and it has been established with a good amount of readers, it it will be hard to move on a brand new domain because of the following reasons:

1. Your readers are used to the domain you have before, thus you have to inform them that your domain would change so they can update their links.

2. Your entries linked by other people would be lost if you deleted your old blog. (I read that there are available 301 redirects, but I don’t understand the way it’s done yet.)

3. If you opted not to delete your old blog, you might have duplicate content since lot of your entries would be the same as the ones in your old blog since I assume you would import them rather than leave them there and start from scratch. (Once again there is the 301 redirect but as I’ve said in #2, I’m still new and haven’t understand how to fully do it without breaking something.)

4. It might take longer to get indexed again by Google, which is hard in case you have a really good traffic going on in your old blog before (or if you have PR already).

There are other good reasons as well but those ones are what comes to mind most of the time. Another thing important in determining whether you would spend or save would be the control and customization of your blog. Most free blogsites enable you to customize your blogs in a limited way such as choosing themes/designs on the available selections they offer. Also, you do not have much control in your blogs like installation of plugins and other themes/designs that you might want for your blog. If you want a higher control and customization level, you must be prepared to spend a few bucks to be able to get your own hosting and domains, where you can pretty much do anything you like with your blog structure, functionality and design.

Also, you have to take note that free blogsites have their own disadvantages especially if you are planning on monetizing your blog. Free blogsites like wordpress.com does not allow its bloggers to put up advertisements as well as paid posts in their blogs. Doing so will result in getting your blog suspended or worse… get it deleted. So take caution before thinking which way to go. Investing a few bucks in getting your own domain for a blog that is intended to be used for monetization is the best and most practical route. Domains are cheap at $9-$11 per year (even if you convert it using the current exchange rate which is around P430 per year) and there are many affordable hosting plans offered in the internet. There are plans that is geared for a single blog (which goes for around $1-2 a month) and there are other plans for people with more blogs (average of $4-$6 per month).

Once you’ve decided if you’re willing to spend a few bucks (a month or a year) to get a blog that you can control and customize to your whim or save money by choosing a free blogsite to host your blog, you can get started on choosing which service providers would give you the most suitable platforms and packages depending on your needs.

Note: You can choose and read the next article of this tutorial series from the Blogging Basics Category.