Over the past few years blogging has been growing in popularity as a method for marketing an online business. But many people that make the decision to start a blog go out there and get one of those “free” blogs that you can just sign up for. Now this is all fine and dandy but if you’re serious about building a real following and get real results from your blogging efforts then you need to get a self hosted blog. Why you ask? Let’s get into just that.

The first thing that we’ll get into around why you need to host your own blog is about the “Look and Feel” of your blog. See with the free blog platforms out there you only have a limited number of designs that you can choose from. You can’t just go on there and start changing what it looks like. They have a set number of designs that you can pick from that that’s it.

Whereas when you host a blog yourself, you can do pretty much anything that you want to it. Change colors, move things around, delete things, add things, anything. There are literally millions of different blog layouts (or themes) out there and if you can’t find something that you want all you have to do is just hire a coder to create it for you.

So you truly have unlimited options in the way of the “Look and Feel” of your blog and that becomes very important as we’ll get into here.

The second reason you don’t want to use a free blogging platform is because of “Professionalism”. People that are searching around on the internet looking to find information on whatever it is they are looking for, want to see a site that looks good.

Now yes, the free platforms look good but it shows that they’re free. And from the eyes of a perspective buyer to your business, seeing a free site means that this business might not be doing so well if they can’t pay for a site of their own.

People want to do business with someone who is reputable, not just some fly by night business and having a “free” website doesn’t give the impression that you’ll be around for a while.

The third and biggest reason is because of “Control”. Control over the content that get’s put up onto the site. See when you use a free blogging platform they have the power and the ability to delete anything on your blog that they don’t like. Say you make some comment that they don’t like well they can just shut down your blog and everything that you would have done would disappear.

But by having your own blog that you self host, no one can shut it down. You have total control over what you say and what you do. And if the worst case your hosting company doesn’t want to host your site for some reason and wants to take away your hosting, you can just move the blog to another hosting company.

Remember, you have the total control over what happens on your site. You can write however you want to write and say anything that you want to say. And this is really important for long term success online.

So when you go out there and you start your own blog, host it yourself. It’s your blog and you should have the power over the “Look and Feel”, the “Professionalism”, and the “Control” of your content. If you don’t, you might end up losing out on either a lot of business or you might lose out on the site itself.