Why Use Your Own Domain Name

It’s a common mistake, especially the ones who are starting their blog, to use a sub-domain (i.e. theweblogzone.blogspot.com, theweblogzone.wordpress.com) usually provided by their free host provider. I made the same mistake when I started blogging, and hopefully through this post, you will not have to go through the same mistake again.

In this post, I will discuss the benefits of using your own domain name compared to when you’re using a subdomain. More importantly, I will share some of the disadvantages and the opportunities you miss when you decide to blog under a subdomain name.

5 Reasons Why You Should Use Your Own Domain Name

Here are the five of the most important reasons why you should blog under your own domain name.

Using your own domain name is doing yourself a favor.

Starting your own blog using a subdomain will become a problem later on when you decide to move and host your own blog. Moving and hosting your own blog is the way to go when you become serious with blogging. Doing this gives you more freedom and flexibility and allows you to optimize opportunities. Unfortunately, when you move and host your own blog, you can’t use the subdomain given to you by your free host. You will have to register your own domain name.

The problems with using a new domain name for your blog include the risk of lossing your traffic and your precious Google page rank. Using a redirect does not always work, especially if you know little about the technical stuffs of blogging. Do yourself a favor and use your own domain name. Registering your own domain name is really cheap and will spare you the troubles of moving and hosting your own blog.

Using your own domain name makes your site more credible.

If you are running your business online under a subdomain name, you appear less credible to your potential customers, which means you’re missing potential profits. In fact, if you are doing business online and you are using a subdomain, you are likely to be suspected of scamming. This is the result of the wide use of free hosting services by many people to scam.

Credibility is an important element in order to succeed online. And as you use your own domain name, you increase your credibility and with improved credibility comes; more links from other blogs, more advertisers and more subscribers. Of course in the real blogosphere, credibility can’t be achieved by simply using your own domain name but it’s helpful in boosting your credibility.

Using your own domain name increases opportunities.

There are some problems monetizing your blog when you are using a subdomain or when your blog is hosted for free. Currently, there are advertising networks and review sites that do not allow bloggers into their publisher program if their blogs use subdomains or when they are hosted for free.

Just take a look at the opportunities available for bloggers in the more popular review sites (PayPerPost, ReviewMe and SponsoredReviews), some advertisers don’t wish to receive reviews from blogs using subdomains or blog hosted for free. This is probably because of the increase of spam blogs (usually with Blogger and Wordpress) created for the sole purpose of doing reviews without the intention of keeping quality and providing value to readers.

Optimize your blog for search engines by using your own domain name.

Based from experience, my personal blog that was hosted under Blogger took a longer time before  it was indexed by Google. On the other hand, the blogs I created using my own domain name was indexed faster and received traffic from search engines (Google and Yahoo!) in as short as 3 days. We can therefore generalize that search engines crawl blogs using their own domain names over subdomains, but then again, this depends on several other factors.

One way to optimize your blog for search engines is to generate more backlinks to your blog. One way to do this is to submit your blog to different directories (paid or free). From personal experience, a blog that uses a domain name has a higher approval rate over blogs using subdomains.

Branding is easier when you blog under your own domain name.

Everytime you use a subdomain name, like theweblogzone.blogspot.com, you are promoting and marketing your blog and your free host provider. This creates a problem of branding as it’s impossible for you to have a distinct blog. Using a logo or a distinct layout or theme isn’t going to do any good.

Why do you think businesses would like to register their business name and will go through court to prove their right for ownership? This is simply for the reason that your product’s name and business name means alot. Online, your domain name or if you’re using a subdomain name is your online identity. It’s your business name too.

These are only 5 of the many benefits of using your own domain name. You can find more articles available online with a more comprehensive list of benefits you can get from using your own domain name. Tune in to this blog to learn about registering your own domain name easily and using it with your free hosted blog in the succeeding post.

Like always, do share your comments and reactions. I’d love to hear what you think. Thank you for your time.

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