The less money you invest in your blog, the more difficult it is to be taken seriously by people who would:
- buy your products
- hire you
- promote you
- endorse you
- multiply your success
- educate you
- inspire you
if you owned your blog by buying your domain and hosting.
Vishwajeet and I have helped each other for years. We are good friends.
The split second he asked me to guest post – after I invited my friends to ask me – I gobbled up this opportunity. But if he ran a free blog, I would have politely declined the invitation. I cannot take bloggers blogging on free platforms too seriously because if you cannot afford a few bucks a month, you obviously do not have what it takes to be a successful blogger. I may admire your skills and see massive potential in free platform bloggers but alas; I cannot take these folks seriously.
Ditto for all experienced, pro bloggers. We cannot buy in to someone who fears buying their domain and hosting because it shows a lack of commitment to blogging the right way. Plus prospective customers, clients and loyal readers rarely trust free platform bloggers deeply because generic-looking blogs with the amateur style domain name erode trust.
The curse of blogging for free is this: no matter how hard you work and no matter how skilled you are, you hit a success ceiling. Bloggers cannot get past a certain point on free platforms because you lose potential mass appeal, aka, coverage through major media.
World Famous Blogs
I have been featured on a few world famous blogs. No way I land those features running a Blogger blog because no seasoned, pro, experienced, serious blogger blogs on a free platform. Plus no way Forbes would maintain credibility by featuring an alleged top digital nomad blogger on earth who blogs on Blogger, with the free blogger domain. Seriously; imagine Forbes linking to bloggingfromparadise.blogspot.com? Are you nuts? Can you imagine Forbes being forbes.blogspot.com or Entrepreneur being entrepreneur.wordpress.com? Does this sound funny? Of course it does.
But bloggers who laugh while blogging on free platforms find out the hard way; joke’s on them.
I am promoting my blogging budget eBook to share how you can become successful bootstrapping. But you must invest in a domain and hosting at least to be taken seriously.
You could blog generously for 15 hours a day, 365 days each year, and most readers will not take you seriously, on a deeper level. Top bloggers rarely if ever promote free blogs and rarely guest post on free blogs because if you are an NBA player, you do not try out for a high school freshman team.
Even if you are a highly skilled blogger, top bloggers who open doors for you ignore bloggers on free platforms because technically, you are not even a blogger. Google owns your blog, Blogger bloggers. WordPress.com owns your blog, WordPress.com bloggers. See yourself as a person who writes online for the Google and WordPress.com brands because you are no blogger unless you own your blog and brand through a WordPress.org blog; you need to buy your domain and hosting to do that.
Save yourself years of heartache. Buy your domain and hosting today. Be taken seriously. Be credible. Allow readers to trust you. Pop up on the screen of top bloggers. All it takes is a few dollars a month to reverse the free blogging platform curse.
Great tips Ryan,
it’s true, I have never heard of someone who had great success on Blogger.com.
In fact, I never even see them ranking for anything meaningful, as if Google is ashamed of them too.
However, free blogs can serve as static resources, just to be there and they don’t have to rank at all.
Here’s a great example, built on Weebly.
http://bebopattic.weebly.com/
Cool Nikola; definitely good to know.