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With sites like Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and etc… What makes people think that hosting their own blogs are necessary? Features are constantly being upped on sites like blogger, which definitely draws people into using it, but does it stop experienced webmasters from hosting their own blogs? After years of experienced making, optimizing, and marketing websites, the pros and cons of a non self-hosted blog become quite clear. Social media is the biggest factor when determining if your site should be self hosted, or not.

Pros

• Many people simply choose a blog service like blogger because it doesn’t cost any money. Since other blog services like typepad do cost money but have generally the same pros and cons, we’ll leave this positive attribute as just a sort of bonus.
• You can get as much traffic as you want, use as much bandwidth as you must, and your site shouldn’t ever go down. Since your site has no bandwidth limits, you’re free to make the front page of digg, where you might have crashed your site if you were hosting it yourself.
• Uptime is maximized. With a blog you don’t host yourself, your uptime will probably be much higher than if you bought hosting from some whacked out, 3rd world host you thought would be good.
• There are plenty of features, and ways to easily integrate advertisements into your blogger blogs.
• Your pr will go up significantly faster, with significantly less work, just because your domain is a subdomain of a popular website. Which means it’s possible for your work to rank higher on Search Engine Rankings than self-hosted content.

Cons

• Your site is less valuable to advertisers that are looking for pr. Less people want links on blogger sites because they see them as unprofessional compared to blog’s that you host on your own. Also, since your site is running off of a subdomain, the link has less value anyways.
• When you don’t host the blog yourself, you have less customizability of its features. While blog hosts are doing their best to make this statement untrue, it will be some time before you’ll be able to do everything a self-hosted blog can do.
• Your site has less credibility just because you didn’t pay for your hosting. Sorry, but it’s true, I think of sites that are made for free to be almost on par with Barney.

All though it may seem like the pros far out weigh the cons, that’s not really true. All though there is more bullet points under Pros, the importance of the Cons should not be taken lightly. The credibility of your website is of the utmost importance when it comes to the ??????? - PROFIT! factor.

In conclusion, if you’ve got the money to spend on a decent webhost (bluehost), then just do it.

I’ve recently come to the understanding that publishing just about anything is not the right way to go about with your blog. Blog owners will agree with this statement, especially the professional bloggers that bring in hundreds of dollars each day. The downsides to publishing half-baked articles are numerous, and in order to retain your reputation, you really shouldn’t do it.

I know I’ve lost a good number of readers for the multitudes of blogs I’ve created because of my tendency to carelessly publish my uncreative posts. Bloggers all around the world and from each corner of the web have lost potential readers because of this bad habit. When you publish an article that’s not up to par, visitors that happen to make that fateful voyage to your site can only grimace in disgust and sail away. This can be extremely frustrating when you’ve worked so hard to write perfect posts, and then readers see your sloppy side on one occasion and decide that your blog just isn’t worth a read.

Some Advice For Publishing Good Articles:

1. After you write something, save it but do not publish it. An hour (or more) later you can come back and reread your potential post. If you think it’s perfect, then go ahead and publish it. If you think it’s garbage than just scrap it completely. What’s most likely to happen though, is that you’ll notice a bunch of mistakes and be able to fix them. After fixing your article you’ll think, “phew, I just saved my self from a huge loss of readers!”.
2. Don’t scramble to get a post done: Some people think that being the first person to publish an article for a viral news story is the only one that will get visitors to their blog. That fact is badoozie, and completely incorrect. Even if you’re first, and you’ve got the only post on the internet about a popular subject, people won’t read your article unless you’ve written in perfectly.
3. Peer Review: If you’ve got a good friend on the internet that you can trust won’t steal your content. You can ask him to read over your post and tell you about any mistakes he may find. Better yet, get your mom, dad, brother, wife, husband, or sister to look over your article and see what they can find (assuming they have equal or higher education than you).
4. Make sure you find your own post interesting, if you don’t then just get rid of it. Trying to post something that you don’t believe in will not help you at all. Also, make sure you know what you’re talking about, don’t try to completely BS (balonswivel?) your way through an article. Anyone who knows more than you do about the subject will discredit your article, and in time your entire site.
5. Practice: A highly redundant thing for me to say would be “practice makes perfect”. I’m going to bash that cliche statement and say that you’ll never be perfect. Nobody is, not even the professionals at Problogger, DoshDosh, or CopyBlogger. Godzilla forbid I call myself a perfect writer, I find it hard just to follow my own advice. The truth is, you’ll get better and better with practice, but reaching perfection is like trying to reach absolute zero for a chemist. It just ain’t gonna happen!

Despite how simple this advice may seem, it’s still extremely hard to follow. The more confident you get with your blogging skills, the less you’ll want to leave your posts just sitting for an hour. Even if your not confident yet, impatience can get the best of you. Try as hard as you can to follow atleast a few of these steps, and I guarantee your blog posts will come out 200% better than before.