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Posted in Featured, How-To | beginner Blogger Blogging FeedBurner How-To newbie search engine optimization wordpress
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Most bloggers begin with a free blog. They create a Blogger/BlogSpot or WordPress.com blog so that they don’t have to pay for hosting. And of course that’s a lot easier than installing a WordPress blog, which though not extremely difficult, may not work smoothly with less tech-savvy blogging newbies.
When a blog ages and builds traffic (and revenue, if you blog for profit), many bloggers find themselves limited by the free blogging platform they chose. Nevertheless, they don’t readily want to move their blog for fear of losing PageRank, search engine position and even worse - traffic.
What is the best alternative to new bloggers then? To begin on a free platform and take the hit later when it’s necessary to move, or to buy expensive hosting without a guarantee of ever earning the investment back? I say neither.
Even if you begin your blogging career (if you can call it that) on a free platform, which I recommend for the ease more than for the cost, there are a couple of ways to ensure you can smoothly move to a paid option later on. These two are a custom domain name and a FeedBurner burned feed.
By buying a domain name for your blog you can later set the same name and address to resolve with the new blog. You will lose no “link juice” and any visitors who have bookmarked you or remember your URL will find you easily. I recommend GoDaddy for cheap domains, unless you have no credit card, in which case Namecheap is a better option as they allow PayPal balance transfers.
I have written a post previously about using a custom domain in Blogger, which you should check out for help on the matter. After you have grown out of the Blogger blog, you should choose WordPress as your blogging platform. Dreamhost is a quality host that I can recommend. I’ve also written a post on moving from Blogger to WordPress.
The reason you should use FeedBurner from the beginning is that when you move from a blogging platform to another, the feed URL may change. You don’t want to leave any feed readers behind, and you don’t have to with your feed burned.
By starting out with a Blogger blog you can eliminate unnecessary costs. You only have to (or should) pay for the domain name. And even that is not an expense, but an investment. You can get a domain for less than $10 for a year. After you’ve used it for a year, the domain is probably way more valuable simply for the age and backlinks it has. So even if you decided to stop blogging, you could cash back on the domain easily.
by Sutocu | October 19, 2007 
Is a wordpress or blogger blog automatically less valuable than a stand alone website?
I wouldn’t say that, but there are certain limitations, and you probably couldn’t sell a Blogger blog for the same price as a stand alone blog. That said, the potential of profit you can make with a free blog isn’t necessarily much less than with a paid one. Especially if you rely on Google for visitors, since Blogger blogs get crawled and indexed quite well in my experience.
Correction: GoDaddy DOES allow PayPal!
Thank you Ruchir, but I didn’t say they don’t allow PayPal. At least I didn’t mean to. They do allow PayPal, but they require you to have a credit card associated with your PayPal account. I do not own a credit card, so sadly I cannot purchase domains from GoDaddy. That’s why I recommended Namecheap for those who do not own a credit card.
They do allow paypal.But you need to have a credit card.
[…] I mentioned in an earlier post, when beginning blogging you should consider buying a domain name. Even if you are on a free platform, and mainly create the […]
well thanks for the info. i really like to have a blog but still feel like it will take so much of my time learning to set it up. need to focus on my sites first and doing some seo stuff. at the same time learn a few things here and there about blog so when i have the time i could start right away. and i still don’t understand about that paypal things with godaddy and namecheap. they both allow paypal but why did you say you need a credit card to use with godaddy. are you saying you don’t need a credit card to you use pay pal with namecheap?
To use GoDaddy you need a PayPal account that is verified (for that you need a credit card). Namecheap also accepts PayPal balance transfers from unverified accounts, so you don’t need a credit card anywhere in the process. I need to clarify the article on that point I think.
[…] How to successfully begin blogging. […]
Great post and some really good advice. I wish I had read a post like this when I started blogging, it would have been really helpful!
Great post man. Hope i could use the advices and make full use of it. Thanks
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[…] you are just beginning, you are going to find that beginning blogging is very easy. Anyone can sign up for a free blog and proceed to market basically anything that they […]
I think it is important to get your own domain and point it to your web host. Having a name with a blog provider included diminishes its value… get a unique domain!
it looks like a nice site, but it would better with multi language support, for example spanish.. but thanks..
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I wouldn’t say that, but there are certain limitations, and you probably couldn’t sell a Blogger blog for the same price as a stand alone blog. That said, the potential of profit you can make with a free blog isn’t necessarily much less than with a paid one. Especially if you rely on Google for visitors, since Blogger blogs get crawled and indexed quite well in my experience.