Self-Hosted Blogs

As I am most familiar with the WordPress.org platform, I will use it to show the differences between free and self-hosted platforms.

How Does It Benefit Me To Use A Self Hosted Site?

First and foremost, you own the blog. You can do what you wish with it, including building it into a blogging machine and selling it.

Since self hosted blogs are extremely search engine friendly, all the traffic that is generated by your blogging and attracting visitors to your site is now yours. Your traffic helps you to get rankings in the search engines because each blog entry alerts the search engines to go to your site to “crawl it” for new content, thus building traffic due to the higher rankings, and around and around it goes.

You can look like a real pro with your own email address at your own domain name. You maintain your branding, build legitimacy, and you are taken seriously.

If you choose to have Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising like Google AdWords on your site, you get to keep the money, because basically you choose what goes on in your domain.

I think that the absolutely most beneficial aspect to a self hosted blog platform like WordPress.org is that you can customize it and make it your “website”. That’s right—no more spending lots of money on having a website built. No more charges for updating content on your site. No more waiting to have the updates completed. You can do it all yourself!

How, You Ask?

I won’t go into a lot of details about the technical aspect of it, but you will have to trust me that you can do it if you choose to. (OrJune 11, 2010 outsource, outsource, outsource the tasks you don’t want to and don’t have time to do).

Basically, you activate the WordPress.org software at your host site. You peruse the WordPress site for templates and plug-ins (these make your site functional) and then upload them to your host site as well. There are 3 or 4 very important plug-ins that all sites need.

Now you are ready to go. You go to your browser and type your new address into the address bar. You will log in to your new site at the “dashboard” where all the controls are. You activate your plug-ins and widgets, create some pages, and upload any graphics, video, and content you wish to have on your site. Sort it all and arrange it how you like and you are ready to blog.

The dashboard is very easy to work in so every time you want to add content, you log in there, use some drop down menus to choose what it is you want to do whether add a new page, or blog about your business, and then you do it.

You can create pages such as “About Us”, “Our Products”, “Contact Us”, “Blog”, and so on, just like a traditional website. Some pages can remain static if you like and some can be changed daily. Your blog posts will always go to your blog page though.

Of course this is the simple view of having a self hosted site, but it isn’t much more difficult than that. You may need some assistance figuring out how to upload to the host site, and maybe even in activating the plug-ins, but very few people would have problems writing and publishing their blog posts, and that I know for sure. Additionally, if you have purchased hosting with a really good hosting company, their support team will be willing to help you with the uploads.

Note: hosting sites generally do not support the WordPress platform per se, but they will help you get your site up on the net.

To read part 1, click here