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Blogging has become an immensely popular form of communication. It has also become a crucial marketing tool, and for some, even a business in its own right. Some bloggers write for their own satisfaction. However, even these bloggers want an audience to actually read their blog. Even if you don’t blog to make money, you will still want to market your blog-in other words, figure out whose butts are in those seats in front of their computers reading your blog, and let them know you’re out there, writing something they want to read.
Whether you are marketing your business, your blog is your business, or blogging is just a hobby you do for the fun of it, it makes sense to approach blogging as if you want your blog to be successful and reach as many people of the right audience as possible. Given that, it makes sense to have goals for your blog. Not having goals has some advantages-for one thing, no accountability. But the downside of not having goals is substantial. You waste vast amounts of time spinning your wheels for an audience that is disparate and transient. You will never make any mistakes, but you will never have a sense of accomplishment either, if you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to do with your blog-and what you want your blog to do for you. Set specific goals, you’ll be glad you did.
Next, here it is, what you’re most likely reading this article for: the biggest mistake bloggers make. If you’re a blogger yourself, hopefully you haven’t made this mistake already. The mistake is simple, but not necessarily obvious: Do you control your blog? Quite possibly your blog started out as an experiment or a diversion. Given that you didn’t take it too seriously, you probably decided to use a third-party blog-hosting platform, with your own sub domain URL such as the kind offered by sites like Blogspot and WordPress. Hey, it’s free. Not only that, it’s easy. And the basic functions you’ll need to jump right in and start blogging are already set up and ready to use. It probably met your needs when you first started out, didn’t it?
You may be wondering why this is such a big mistake. Why wouldn’t it be a good idea to host your blog under a third party domain name? What’s the big deal? Simple. You have no control. Let’s say your blog starts attracting a lot of traffic. You then start to think that maybe you want to be more ambitious about your blogging. Of course, on a third-party site you’re limited to the toolset they offer. So you decide to venture off on your own. But wait! Now you’re stuck. There is no reasonable way to redirect traffic from your old blog, hosted on a third-party site, to your new blog, hosted in your own domain. In short, you’re stuck. Everything from building an audience to link equity is wasted and not transferable. So there it is, the biggest mistake bloggers make. Don’t let this happen to you.
Tags: Blogging, Blogging Tips
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I’m agreeing 100% with the advice given in this article.
I believe it’s the difference in between short-term planning and long-term planning.
In the short term it would be more convenient just to host your blog on a third-party site, but in the long-term it’s going to cause nothing but problems.
Hopefully those new to the blogging game will see this and take notice, it’ll save them some heart ache in the future.
I’ve used subdomain blogs myself in the past and the reason I think most do is, when you’re new to blogging and/or the web, you don’t realize you do it another way and just go to one of the big names you’re familiar with. Plus you have the security of not worrying you’re going to do some serious damage in the back end playing around with things beyond the blog admin side.
That I can understand. When I started using blogs, I just wanted to post and that was it. Why bloggers don’t buy a domain and blog there is mainly I reckon because they simply don’t know it’s an option to have a blog system installed or they think it will be cost prohibitive. When it’s only about $12 a year to register the domain name and with hosting costing less than most Starbucks coffees a month, it’s the way to go in my book if you intend to still be using your blog years from now.
Kays last blog post..SEO Futures
Another thing I just thought of as to why some prefer subdomains. They’re a good way to test the waters and see if you’ll stick with blogging instead of paying for something that’s going to gather dust. I’d say if you’re still blogging on your subdomain regularly in about ten weeks time AND enjoying it, make the leap then and just transfer all your posts across while you still have a relatively small amount of content to move. Better to do so when it’s relatively new and when your audience is more likely to will go with you than try later.
My blog started out as an experiment but it has seen great growth and I have discovered new things at the same time (probably should have used subdomain for it, but I wanted complete control and stats)
Otooos last blog post..List Of Blogs With Top Commentators Widget
nice article i really agreed…
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