Blog Hosting – Private or Public
Anyone who decides to blog will have a few decisions to make and one of these is finding a suitable blog provider. There’s no question about what a blog can do in terms of financial reward. Many success stories have been published online and off regarding people who have earned and continue to earn incredible amounts just by maintaining blogs. Usually, the moneymaking aspect comes in the form of pay-per-click ads or affiliate schemes. The bottomline is, the difference between a blog making money and one that sits in a cold, dark corner of the web has a lot to do with factors to be determined by the blogger himself. And one of these factors in the choice of hosting service. There are two basic alternatives that a blogger will choose from in terms of blog hosting. One is self-hosting and the other is through a free service. Of course, both will have their unique advantages and disadvantages each. Not all people will benefit form one or the either, however, which means the person’s success with his choice will have a lot to do with what he actually hopes to accomplish with his blog. Will it be to make money right on the blog itself or will it be to drive traffic to a company website? Understanding fully the difference between the two will also increase the chances of the person making the better choice in the end. The obvious edge of a self-hosted platform is the owner’s freedom to choose his own domain name. This means the blogger can have his own name for a URL provided such has not been taken yet by another blogger or site owner. With a self-hosted blog, one has full control over the design of his page or pages. In fact, the blogger will not only be able to manipulate the appearance of the blog but practically everything about it from bandwidth to storage. Another major advantage of a self-hosted blog is the owner’s ability to make his site more flexible with the use of free plugins. However, the main disadvantage of self-hosting is the great requirement for technical expertise. If one is not knowledgeable about web design, he will have to hire somebody who is. Obviously, this translates to additional expenses on top of the monthly hosting fee that will be required to keep the domain running. On the other hand, a free-hosted blog platform can offer more convenience for the blogger who is not necessarily technically gifted. With this free service, one simply needs to choose from a number of templates and may proceed to concentrate on his posts rather than on making technical adjustments. Aside from ease of use, the other major advantage of publicly hosted blogs is search engine friendliness. SEO people know how fast blogs on public blog sites rise on search engine rankings as compared to those which are hosted privately. This means, whether the blog was intended to make money on itself or drive traffic to a particular website, it will likely grow in popularity more significantly using a free platform rather than a paid one. Making money blogging is undoubtedly one of the easiest ways to fatten your bank account but it’s never as simple as it sounds. It takes one to grow a certain wisdom to know what decisions are likely to bring good results than others, from choosing a blog hosting site to employing search engine optimization techniques that improve the blog’s online visibility. Once this wisdom is attained, to earn money blogging will not be too far from reality .