Why you will never make money with a free blog!
Free blogs are great for people just starting out, figuring out what the whole blogosphere is all about. But the truth is, you will never be able to make money if you use free blogging services for your main blog. Any professional blogger will tell you, the first step to doing what we do is paying for your own website. None of your potential customers is going to take www.petsupplies.blogspot.com or www.amazonreviews.wordpress.com seriously. This article will explain some of the reasons why that is.
Ad Space
Most free blogging services do not allow you to have many ads on your blog. They may allow something like Adsense or YPN, but ask most bloggers and they will tell you that those aren't the ad networks that pay the bills. You can make pretty good money from adsense, but I wouldn't count on it. The real money is in selling ad space to people wanting their ads on your site, which you can't do on the free sites. There are also multiple affiliate sites that you can promote on your self hostedblog, that you can't even link to on some of the free services. Content is what brings users back to your site, but ads are what pay the bills. Eventually, when you have some experience, you are likely going to want to write your own e-book, or product and you are going to want to sell it. That is not going to be very easy on a free blog. Who is going to want to buy a product from someone who won't even buy their own website? The answer is no one will and you will never make money from all your hard work.
Customizability
Hosting your own blog gives you the ability to fully customize everything. You can change the link structure, add a favicon, change your header, add logos and everything else you can think of. Some of the free blogging sites allow for a little customizability, but in the long run, you want to create your own brand that people will recognize you by. You don't want to be the guy/girl using the default blogger theme from google on your blog.
Article Marketing
One of the common ways people build traffic to their blog is article marketing. It is a great way to get your content out there and get people to your site. The problem is, many of the article marketing sites will not accept affiliate links in an article. They also require that you actually own the domain. While there are ways around this, the easiest is going to be just to host your own site.
Summary
If you want to make money on the web, you are going to need to host your own blog. I would recommend iPage, but Hostgator is also a great alternative. You can use my site as a resource for getting your self-hosted site set up and get started making money now!
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