There are many blogging platforms around the internet like Blogger, WordPress, Xanga and etc. They all provide user-friendly blogging software and free hosting to host your blog. You also get a subdomain like yourblog.blogx.com. With these three things, you can easily build a small but quality blog without paying a single cent. And since the free service is so good why would a blogger pay for their blog?
This could lead back to the beginning of your blog. When building small blogs, it is always a good practice to know your purpose of blogging. This directly affects your decisions on how much you are going to spend on it. If you are building your blog for thoughts sharing and keeping in touch with friends, honestly a free blogging platform is enough for you. However, if you are starting a business blog or you plan to make money from it, you should consider investing some small amount to maximize the effective reach.
Why so? Usually free blogging software like WordPress comes with limitations, you will not be able to host stuff online like photos, you will need third party hosting to have your photos hosted; you will have storage and bandwidth limitations, you have restrictions on the bandwidth usage, meaning when your number of visitor exceed the maximum capacity, your blog will be shut down or experience some downtime; you will not get any support too if something happens to your blog; and etc. However if you could invest some money, these issues will no longer be an issue.
What kind of investments should a money making blog have? Basically, there are 2 major things that serious bloggers should consider.
To begin, a domain name. A domain name is a URL. People and search engine recognize that name as your blog. For example www.YourBlog.com] is a domain name. The address will lead visitors to your blog when it is requested. A domain name cost you only a few bucks per year. However, with such a small amount of investment, you will stand out of all the other blogs. You will create a unique branding of your own. It is no longer a common blog but it is an official home for the information you are sharing.
The domain can be acquired/purchased through the domain registrants around the internet. The price ranges vary from time to time. After purchasing, some simple settings need to be done to connect the domain with your blog. Rest assured it will be a 5 minutes setting.
The second thing you should get for your blog is a quality web hosting. A web hosting is a piece of storage space on the internet and it allows you to host your blogs in it. With web hosting, you are only considered to have full control to your blog. Although free hosting is economical, paid hosting does give you tons of benefit like big storage and bandwidth, a great customer support, a huge script library that can boost the functionality of your blog, email address of with unique domain exp: email@yourdomain.com and etc. These definitely make your blog more professional and presentable.
Maybe On top of that, most of the hosting plan gives you a free domain name. This means when you subscribe to a web hosting, you do not need to pay for your domain name like what is suggested on the first item up there. Rather, your hosting company will provide one for free. Purchasing web hosting services will be more pricey compared to just domain name. The price range may start from $5 per month. The key point in this is getting a suitable hosting for your blog based on your usage.
Finally, whether to invest or not depends on the objectives of your blog. If you are hoping to expand your small blog into a money generating platform, you should start building it with proper tools. Doing so will increase your reach and probably you will have the potential to change your blog into your career.
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