Stop blogging on other people's domain names!

Description

I see it all the time and it really makes no sense to me - people set up a blog on Blogger, Wordpress or some other domain that offers a free blogging service. While there may be a few short term benefits with using these services, I truly believe the long term benefits of creating your own brand far outweigh the short lived fad. Let me explain:

Somebody Else's Domain

Although I am a huge advocate for setting up your own blog on your own domain name, there are a few benefits of a free service that should be mentioned.

It's easy

It's very easy to set up a blog on one of these sites. But as the case with a lot of things in life, most easy things are usually not the best choice.

High quality trusted site that will most likely rank for searches

Since these sites are very trusted and liked by the search engines you will rank for a lot of searches that you create an article on. This is definitely a huge benefit for using these free bloggin services, however, allow me raise a few points on the other side of the coin...

Your Own Domain

Listed below you will find a few reasons why I think in most cases it is smarter and more beneficial long-term to build your own blog on your own domain name.

It's your asset

By going around and blogging on lets say Blogspot, all you are doing is allowing these sites to grow stronger and stronger. You are basically working for them for free. Every time you write a good article on a free blogging service and it receives backlinks those backlinks go to Blogspot. Backlinks are not something you want to be throwing away and wasting. Why not build your own business by creating your own domain name and building your own equity? Links, branding, authority and every other long term benefit will now be yours.

It's still pretty easy

It really is not too difficult to set up a blog on your own domain name. All you need to do is pretty much buy a domain name, upload all the free files from a popular blogging software like Wordpress and then you're off. Now every time you write an article you will continue to build your own brand and business.

It's Scalable

Let's say you have a ton of links coming into your free blog and you decide, wow maybe I should try turning this into perhaps a forum or maybe I want to start selling some products. It's pretty hard to scale out like this when you are trapped on a free blogging service. However, if you were to already have your own domain name and presence, all you really need to do is just build out that section of your site now. It makes much, much more sense from a growth standpoint.

It's niche oriented

In most cases, if you do set up your own blog you will probably be blogging about stuff you know a lot about and stuff you like. This is a great reason to have your own domain name. Having your own domain name will make your whole site targeted toward one specific niche or theme, which will eventually have more and more weight as being an authority on this topic over time. If you were to continue blogging on a free hosted blogging platform you would never really be able to conquer that niche.