When considering a blog you may think doing a free blog will save you money and you’d be right. Except for just a few things that fall under the category of you get what you pay for.
First, a free blog doesn’t belong to you, you just write it. The blog belongs to the provider and as such it stays up at their discretion. They have a funny way of disappearing sometimes and you may never know why.
You can’t use your own domain name. You can use whatever name that’s available with the addition of the blog name. Like yourdomain .blogprovider .com, kind of cheesy for a business address.
Next you need to know that you can’t do whatever you want with them. You may or may not be able to add links and services of your choice. Your also restricted in how you may modify the templates. Access to styles and colors are usually quite limited.
Lastly, on a free blog a competitor or a customer may make a complaint or an unfavorable comment and as a result your site may be shut down or you may not be able to edit out or remove the comment. Again your control may be quite limited.
All of these things can be avoided when you own your domain name and have it privately hosted. For instance, I bought the name for this domain at GoDaddy.com and have it hosted at HostGator.com. The fact is I have many blog sites for several business’s like this and have had no problems whatever and have total control. I use Wordpress templates for free and their are a huge amount of additional templates and plug-ins you can get at no or low cost at several locations on the net.
Over the next few weeks I’ be posting many useful tips and techniques for using and modifying templates as well as using plug-ins. So stay tuned.
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