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A Typical Example of Why You Need Self Hosting
An acquaintance I met in a forum has recently asked the question on how to best move her blog from being a free WordPress blog to a self hosted one instead. The lady in question has been blogging on her free WordPress blog for 18 month before she realized that she needed to go self hosted in order to make money.
She soon enough realized that all the hard work she had previously put into her blog to build backlinks were lost to her because she lost them all when she did the move. As free WordPress blogs don’t allow for a 301 redirect (apparently), where we could permanently redirect traffic from the old to the new blog, she had to forfeit the lot as well as her Technorati and Alexa ranking.
How many of you use free WordPress blogs?
Perhaps you need to clearly define on why you are actually blogging right now.
- Is it to sell affiliate products
- Maybe you are thinking of launching your own product
- Or else you want to build niche sites that earn money with Adsense
All these ideals have one thing in common. That one thing is the fact that you CANNOT use your free WordPress.com blog to sell anything from it. If you have, it only means that you got away with it so far - but before long you will be terminated and that’s it. You will wake up one day and find that all your hard work for month is gone.
Here comes self hosted blogging
Self hosted blogging is the solution to all your blogging needs that involve making money with WordPress. Please note that I’m not including blogger blogs because you can use them too. But since this is a WordPress oriented blog I wanted to keep the focus on WordPress.
When you go self hosted right from the start you’ll have plenty of room to grow. You will never have issues with not being able to earn money from or with your blog or being terminated because you do.
The other thing is that self hosted blogs can be hosted for as little as $5/month with some hosting companies.
I do however strongly suggest that you are using a well respected hosting provider and pay a little more. I’ve heard a few horror stories lately from friends who got shafted by their little known host because they were hoping to save a dollar or two every month.
Dedication matters
I don’t buy into the excuse of not having enough money for hosting and running a business anymore. After all, even if we are strapped for cash we still manage to buy coffee, cinema tickets, alcohol, smokes, occasional dinners and more.
If you are serious about the longevity of your business, then dedication starts by giving up on those little luxuries (if you have to financially) and pay for hosting and other essential business tools instead.
You will do yourself a huge favor and if you throw in some stickability with this, then you can afford all the luxuries you want in the future.
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Gobala Krisnan is a direct-response marketer turned blogger who makes over $10,000 a month from his blog empire. If you want to make money online from blogs, he is the only person who can reveal the secret of merging time-tested direct marketing strategies with web 2.0 traffic. Read more about him >>
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You hit the nail right on it’s head, Monika. Sometimes people try to save $10 / month and then realize after 6 months they’ve been just cheating themselves. Don’t forget “opportunity cost” is as good as money in the business world, and if you’re saving $10 but missing out on million-dollar opportunities, you’re not really saving anything at all.
Thank you Gobala,
I think we can’t stress this whole point more since I was also one who made the same mistake wasting more than 6 month with a free WordPress blog.
And yet people still keep doing it so all we can do is to blog about it every now and then.
Oh how I wish I had started out on a self-hosted WordPress blog. I’ve been blogging almost a year, and am finally starting to see some real traffic and make some actual money. If I moved now, I would lost page rank and probably some of my audience. Oh well. Live and learn.
I strongly agree with you on this. The main advantage of self hosting is you can have enough space for you blog to grow. And it guarantees the safety of your blog. Because you are in full control of your blog. You can do any modification you like and make it a way of income.
But when you choose a web hosting service, you better go for a reputed one and which supports Wordpress and easy installation. As Monica mentioned, I also have heard many bloggers complaining about the loss of their blog content after some time as they have hosted with a cheap hosting provider. I think even if you host for a higher value, it is very small compared to the future income that you will get from your blog.
I can speak from experience on this one.
Had a wordpress hosted blog for years and loved doing it.
But the time came to grow and when I moved to Hostgator I lost all my rankings for traffic.
I am slowly getting most of it back but it would of been easier to be doing it from the start.
All of the options and freedom of your own host is a blast!
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