Should I Host my New Blog on Blogspot or on My Own Host Using Wordpress?

Carol asked a good, and common, question at the writing forums this week:

“As well as writing blog entries for someone else, using Wordpress, I have a few ideas for blogs myself, and would like to create them.

Which will lead to better monetization of the blogs do you think:

a) doing them on Blogspot.com, (or is it blogger.com?)

b) finding a host and putting my own blogs up using Wordpress?

I plan to use google ads.”

Answer:

I’m going to echo a few things that I recently posted on another blog of mine (Jentrepreneur.com) in Should You Use a Free Blog Host or Your Own Domain for a New Blog? (check out that post for more of my thoughts on the subject)

1. You have a much better chance of monetizing a blog that you’re hosting yourself. This is because you won’t have full control over monetization with free blog hosts. While Adsense might be your only plan now, it’s not wise to monetize a site in only one way (you should always have a diversified income stream on the Web to protect yourself from things like market or Google changes).

2. Having your own hosting site can lend more natural trust to the blog, meaning people may be more likely to buy things that you recommend (since we’re talking about monetization specifically here).

3. While not directly tied to monetization, the biggest reason I suggest hosting your own blog goes back to control. If you start with a free blog host and later decide to move to your own hosted blog solution, because you want to monetize in other ways (or for any other reason), you can lose all of the backlinks and direct traffic you had previously, because it’s highly unlikely that you’ll have access to do a 301 permanent redirect from the free blog hosting account to your new blog (the way to maintain links, rankings, and traffic).