If you’ve ever rented an apartment or house, you know that it’d be silly to invest money in that property. You don’t own it, so at the end of the day you are adding value for your landlord, not you. The same concept applies to blogging. If you are writing blog posts on a domain that is not yours (like blogger.com, wordpress.com, tumblr.com), you are building SEO value for their domain, not yours. In the first lesson, we established that more blog posts means that your site will have more pages indexed with Google, but that is only true if your blog is on your domain. To clarify what I mean:
evolveyourweddingbusiness.blogger.com <-Blogger owns this domain. WIth this, you are simply posting to a page on the blogger.com domain.
www.evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/blog <-I own this domain. I bought it and added a blog page to it.
SEO is not the only reason to keep you content on your own domain. Let’s say someone reads a great post that you wrote, but then they can’t immediately find out how to access your main website. You are writing this content and then just losing potential customers because people have no tolerance for websites that are not easy to navigate. There is also a level of professionalism that is conveyed by owning your own domain. It’s just like email addresses. If I emailed you from heidiisawesome@gmail.com, it would definitely come across more amateur than heidi@evolveyourweddingbusiness.com does. Domains are not expensive, but they are a great investment when it comes to presenting yourself as a professional.
Having your content somewhere that you don’t have 100% control of is dangerous. In this great article on Copyblogger, Sonia points out that some people put hundreds of hours into sites like MySpace, only to see them drop off of the map and even Facebook changes it’s rules more often than anyone can keep up with. Having outposts is great, but you need to own your home base.
So if you want to move your blog to a WordPress.org site that you own, here are some resources for you do-it-yourself types:
Moving from Blogger to Self-Hosted WordPress (aka WordPress.org)
http://tentblogger.com/migrate-blogger-wordpress/
Moving from WordPress.com to Self-Hosted WordPress (aka WordPress.org)
http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2012/08/31/moving-your-blog-from-wordpress-com-to-wordpress-org-resources-and-tips/
If these articles don’t make sense to you, just hire someone to do it for you. There is no sense screwing up your website or blog when you could spend a modest amount to outsource it to a professional. I can personally recommend Jessica Williams of Tech Biz Gurl. Just email her directly at jessica@techbizgurl.com and tell her that Heidi sent you. She excels at the technical things so many of us struggle with and her rates are affordable.
What’s Next?
The next lesson in this ecourse will cover what to write about. Until then, if you have any questions please ask them on the Facebook page so others can learn from your questions.
Get here from a link from a friend, Facebook, or Twitter? This lesson is part 3 of a 10-part free email course called Kickstart Your Blog. Learn more about it and sign up here.
