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Free Blog Sites - The Pros and Cons of Free Blogging Services
Free Blog sites or free blog websites are great but are very limiting and bad for branding.
Here I compare their pros and cons and suggest when it's right to use them.
There is no doubt that free blogging services offer some great benefits. The question here is:
Are its benefits worth over-looking its downsides?
Pros of Free host sites
They allow you to set up a blog and have it accessible worldwide in 5 minutes.
Free blog websites reduces start up cost to zero.
And some think that Google favors sites that use Blogger which is one of the common free blog hosts in search engine ranking results. But this is yet to be proven.
These benefits of free blogs are great and almost difficult to ignore especially for a beginner just testing the waters. But here comes the cons...
The Cons of Free Blog Sites
One of the things you look forward to in blogging is being able to set up your blog to meet your taste and show your uniqueness.
Free blogging services restricts what you can do with your blog. When you create a blog with them you agree to adhere to their rules of what you can do and can not do on your blog.
For example, for branding purposes you might want to add a customized favicon to your blog unlike the default favicon of Blogger blog but you can't do that because it is against Blogger's rules.
So you can not customize your blog exactly the way you want it.
Wordpress self hosted blog is the commonly used blog software among serious bloggers.
This is because after downloading it from wordpress site you can buy a hosting for it and customize it the way you want with the different plugins available.
Still on Cons of Free Blog Websites
Sometimes you don't have the features of getting detailed statistics report to monitor how your blog is doing.
Also when you get a sudden spike on traffic to your site, free hosting sites or services can't be relied on to handle it.
Some free blogging websites display ads on your site.
The Greatest Cons of Free blog sites
They lack professionalism and are bad for branding. And this usually cost a free blog site lots of traffic.
Instead of getting your desired domain extension as simply .com .net or .org you have .blogspot.com in the case of Blogger.
Usually people stay off sites with domain names that end with a free hosting extension without even bothering to see if it offers real value.
And worse yet, you can wake up one morning to realize your blog is gone! and no reason will be given for it. And if that happens you can't do anything about it. They owe you no explanation.
That's what happens when something is free. You can't complain for a bad service.
In this case you don't even have a customer service email you can send complaints to. So should your blog disappear all you can do is wish you started right - with your own hosting.
I have read different cases of how some bloggers lost their popular blogs for reasons not even known to them.
Even if you're just blogging for fun, it still isn't a good feeling to know that your blog could disappear anytime. I mean it serves a purpose for you even if it's not for making money.
And it is worse for a business blog.
Imagine if you suddenly lost a blog already generating a 4 or 5 figure income monthly just because you were trying to spare yourself of a start up cost as little as $20?
If that happens you can only say "if only I knew I wouldn't have..." but you can't turn back the hands of time. So it's important you consider this seriously.
Will you give up the freedom of your blog for just $20 start up cost and a maintenance few of less than $7 (monthly hosting fee)?
Though not everyday free blog gets deleted, especially if you are doing a legit business on it. Except in some cases where geniune business blogs get deleted in the process of deleting spam blogs.
When a free blog site disappears (though very unlikely for major free blogging services especially Blogger and Wordpress) your blog disappears too.
Lastly, free blogging softwares are not the best for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.
The Conclusion About Using Free Blogging Services
In conclusion, though free blog sites and blogging services are good and can come in really handy, (some people make good money from free blogs).
But the cons we've discussed are too strong to ignore especially if you want to blog to make money.
Did I even mention that you can not sell a blog on free host sites?
That's right, so think twice before jumping into a free blog website and start blogging.
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