The WordPress.com free blogging platform is a great tool for people wanting to start a personal blog, but for someone serious about making money online the WordPress.com offering isn’t going to work.
The developers of WordPress made a decision (and a good decision it was) that people running WordPress.com blogs would not be able to advertise on their sites, add pay-per-post content or do anything else that could monetize the blog in any way.
Kind of restrictive isn’t it? But here’s the thing. WordPress.org, the self-hosted WordPress platform that most professional bloggers, and a growing number of companies, use to run their websites lets you do anything you want, and I mean anything.
How your own WordPress site benefits you
The immediate benefits of having your own self-hosted WordPress website are:
- You control your account. Nobody can pull the plug on you.
- Your content is yours forever. While it’s highly unlikely WordPress.com disappears in a puff of smoke, if it did, your blog’s content would go with it.
- You can advertise whatever you want.
- You don’t have to operate as a subdomain of WordPress. Simply register your own domain. It takes a few minutes and costs next to nothing.
- You can make changes to your blog’s structure if you’re feeling adventurous, or hire a coder to make changes for you.
- Fully hosted WordPress sites can be made more search engine friendly than their WordPress.com counterparts.
Setting up WordPress is not expensive
The crazy thing about the self-hosted WordPress package that I never understand is that it’s so cheap to setup and host. For example, I charge a measly £50 (about $85 depending on the exchange rate) to:
- Register a .com or .co.uk domain (for 2 years)
- Host your WordPress site for 12-months (including email and all the other technical stuff you need) on US or UK servers.
- Import your WordPress.com content to the new site
- Set up WordPress with the plugins/widgets you need and any one of the hundreds of free WordPress themes available
- Set up a Google Analytics account on your blog to allow you to track visitors
- Upgrade to the latest stable version of WordPress when releases become available
- Provide technical support when you need it
Considering the freedom (and professionalism) this provides, even the smallest of microbusinesses could afford this.
EDIT: This service is now a bit more refined, hence a little bit more expensive. Please visit the GrowPress page and read about it.
So if you’re on WordPress.com and you’d like to change to something a lot more flexible, please get in touch. I’d love to help you out.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Good deal. This really takes away the barriers of entry very quickly.
Having your own .com to blog with isn’t all that hard. A lot of people are scared because of a lack of knowledge.
Awesome post, your idea is very well intended for serious bloggers. Keep it up
You Have A Great Blog Keep Up The Good Work ..Cheers
I agree setting up wordpress is quite easy. The hardest, for me anyway, is continually adding quality content to them. I am lazy by nature
I am brand new to blogging and just signed onto WordPress.com today. I wanted to start blogging so I could still be a stay at home mom and work (but not be on someone elses schedule, even if I continue to work virtually as I do now). Of course, the intent is to make money. I signed up without fully understanding the difference b/t WordPress.com & WordPress.org, and their difference in advertising. It’s hard at the moment to decide where to start, with actually blogging or to set up the site with ads, but I think I’m leaning towards actually blogging first. If I am still writing in a few months and enjoying it, then I will make the switch. Thanks for letting me know that I could switch!
Yes, I am always telling clients to move to a self-hosted blog because of the freedom and flexibility.
And in the wake of companies such as Uber.com going down, there is a REAL reason that you don’t want to rely on a company to host your blog… (Of course, WordPress.com, Typepad, and Blogger probably aren’t going down anytime soon…)
Yet, I still find those outliers, those super popular professional bloggers who still rely on hosted solutions and haven’t migrated to their own domains.
I found your site and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good articles. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you!
That is the only thing about wordpress.com that I hate, otherwise it is a hell of a lot better than blogspot and the like.
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
I really very liked this post. Can I copy it to my blog? Thank you in advance. Sincerely