Benefits of Hosting Your Own Blog

Q: With all the big, easy-to-use, well established free blogging services that are available why should you go to the trouble of hosting your own blog..?

A: Better SEO, total control, more traffic and more sales - although those reasons won't apply if you're not blogging for business!

When I started out blogging I opened a blogger.com account. That worked fine for me at the time because I was new to blogging. I was such a newbie that I didn't even realise it was possible to host my own blog.

Even if I had realised that, it's not something I would have given a moment's thought to. I was too new to working online. I was (still am) totally non-techie and it would have been too daunting a task.

So I happily blogged away on my blogger account until I logged on one day to find that Google had translated all the admin pages into Chinese. I live in Hong Kong so Google, thinking they were being smart, used my IP address as the basis on which to make the decision to translate it.

Not being able to find the help link (because I can't read Chinese) I logged into my Google account (Adwords, Gmail, etc,) to raise a request for them to translate my blog back to English.

After a week nothing had happened. I'd got no reply and still couldn't read my admin screens. So I simply decided to transfer my blog to Wordpress.com.

By this time I had learned enough about blogging to have heard that Wordpress was the place to be. So I imported all my old Blogger posts and started to learn Wordpress. Given what I'd heard I was looking forward to great things.

One thing I noticed immediately was that my posts were suddenly figuring much more quickly in the natural search results, so it looked as though at least some of what I'd heard was correct.

And I happily blogged away until...

...one day I tried to log on to be met with a notice telling me my blog had been suspended for infringing Wordpress' terms and conditions.

DAMN..!! Twice inside a month I'd been blind-sided by my blogging platform and the second occasion was even more damaging than the first. (It doesn't look too professional when your visitors are told that your blog's been suspended for infringing terms and conditions).

So, finally, I was pushed into the realisation that I had no option but to set up my own blog and host it myself.

So off I clicked to Wordpress.org to see what I could find out. And I was pleasantly surprised.

Firstly - the instructions they've set out for downloading and installing a WP blog are delightfully clear and easy to follow.

There are a few minimum requirements set out, which pretty much every hosting provider meets. You can always check with your provider if you're not sure. Mine does, so I printed off the instructions and got going.

First step is to set up the database. Easy to do - the instructions are very clear, include screen shots for every step of the way and are written in simple, non-techie language.

I then downloaded and unzipped the blog files, entered my newly created database details into the config file, (just followed the instructions), uploaded the files and accessed the installation screen via my browser (the URL is provided in the instructions). That kicked off the installation script and I was all done.

It was, literally, a 5-minute exercise.

However, the majority of hosting providers now give you an even easier method than that:

One click installation.

I've never done a 1-click installation so I can't confirm whether it really is one click or whether a few more are involved - but it's definitely very easy and it doesn't involve any downloading, unzipping and uploading of files.

So what are the benefits of running your own blog on your own server?

You have total control. You can write what you like, you can drive traffic to affiliate programs, no one is going to translate it into Chinese, and no one is going to lose your database.

You can customise it as much as you like. You do this by installing plug-ins - and there are plugins for pretty much anything you would want to do. You decide what you want to do with your blog, then you can either go to the Wordpress plug-in directory or do a Google search for a plug-in for the function you want.

Download the plug-in, unzip it, upload it and activate it through the blog admin screens. It's that simple. Really.

But of all the sexy things you can do with your self-hosted blog, probably the biggest benefit of all comes from the SEO elements.

This really turns your blog into an incredibly effective way of figuring strongly in the natural search results.

Optimising your blog for the search engines is simply a question of installing and activating the appropriate SEO related plug-ins. And you can find probably the best list of these in Jack Humphrey's Authority Blackbook.

You should definitely download this book and follow the SEO guidelines if you've gone to the trouble of setting up your own self hosted blog.

Firstly, it's free and secondly, if you don't set up your blog properly you're wasting an enormous portion of its SEO potential.

It would be like buying a Ferrari but never taking it out of the city centre.

I'm now using my blog as my primary means of drawing in traffic. I haven't spend a dime on promoting it - and I don't have any intention of doing so going forwards.

And yet my blog is now attracting a little over 50% of the total traffic I'm getting on a weekly basis - that's traffic to my blog plus traffic to all my other sites - and that's almost totally due to the SEO effectiveness of my plugin-rich, self-hosted blog.

Within the next year I'm aiming for that to be well over 80%.