The Inbound Marketing Blog

Entrepreneurs, SMB owners, publishers, creative-types, writers, citizen journalists and independent subject matter bloggers don’t make the same mistake I did. If you have been blogging a long time whether for business or personal publishing, seriously consider the points made in this article.  If your goal is to gain influence over others, demonstrate expertise, promote your business, make money, get leads and sales, make connections with others interested in similar topics, express yourself or a combination of these, you should stop spending all your time building others’ content. Content equals currency on the web and you are someone else’s user generated content if you’re not blogging on your own domain. Always start with the end in mind.

If you are blogging “just for fun,” but are passionate about certain subjects, why shut the door to making it a viable tool for other avenues of life such as: building credibility and gaining respect in a particular area,  landing the job of your dreams, making money, and creating invaluable relationships in the mean time? As they say in academia, “publish or perish.” You can either be a footnote in someone else’s biography, or create your own. It doesn’t take as much effort as you think. You just need to 1) Register a domain 2) Get hosting (affiliate link, seriously a great host) and 3) Install a CMS or website builder (Wordpress, Drupal). I will show you the easiest way to do this in a future post, but for now this post covers many of the reasons why you should primarily blog on your own domain, not a hosted ad-centric blog network.

I realize no website or blog is an island, and having supporting profiles and posts on other websites where there is already a huge existing network is highly important. This is especially true when syndicating your content. You should only do this AFTER the content has been published on your blog and indexed by Google. The name of the game is having a large targeted audience of people who care about what you have to say and for the search engines to see your blog as the ORIGINAL source of that information.

Here are ten reasons why:

1. Avoid Deletion- On someone else’s network your blog could be taken away at any time and years of content deleted without your consent. Look at Yahoo! 360° (3/2005 - 7/2009) and GeoCities (Late 1994 - Oct. 2009).  More likely and more often, a network could lose popularity and stop reaching your audience. Think about MySpace and Friendster, both were replaced in our attention age by the ever-growing popularity of Facebook. Who’s reading your blog posts on those sites now? The same could happen to any network including Facebook.
2. Better Personal Branding - Having your blog on your own domain is better for your personal branding or business branding because it shows you are more serious and are business savvy. Me 2.0 author and personal branding guru Dan Schawbel took the plunge in January 2009, switching his branding blog from a sub-domain on wordpress.com’s network to his own website. Even if you don’t own a business, unless you are independently wealthy, personal branding is crucial in a time where recruiters Google  every serious candidate. I’ve received several more job offers and second looks because of my writing contributions to my industry and articles I have posted on my blog. It says a lot more and lets employees get to know you a lot more than just a resume.
3. Don’t Lose Credibility in Business - You can get your name@yourwebsitename.com and dozens more of personal email addresses for free if you own the domain instead of having an email at gmail, hotmail, or yahoo. When using these emails on your business card or trying to pitch someone as a business partner using an email from these networks does not have same credibility. Serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist  Mark Cuban stated on his Facebook this is one of the first red flags he looks for when getting pitched. If someone/a business does not have the confidence to have their own website, then he/she does not believe in their product or personal brand.
4. Easier to Remember  - Instead of having your website on a sub-domain (examples: yourwebsite.worpress.org, yourwebsite.blogspot.com) and having to tell people dot something else other than com, there will be no need. Secondly, you should try your best to get a .com over a .net or .info for the same reason.
5. More Traffic Opportunities - In my Livejournal days, I was relying on traffic of other bloggers already on the network. You can reach a much larger audience of non-bloggers, researchers, and info seekers alike who are INTERESTED in what you have to say because they have already been targeted by the keywords he/she typed into the search box. By having high placement on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.com you can reach them.
6. Better SEO - When placing independent site building software like Wordpress on your domain (not creating one on their domain), you are already 90% ahead of others when it comes to having a search-engine friendly site or blog which brings traffic. For Wordpress, changing your permalinks (interior individual blog post URLs) to %postname% and installing and using the All-in-one SEO Pack solves 80% of your on page SEO hurdles faced by other websites.
7. Avoid Momentum Loss - If you decide to switch accounts or URLs on someone else’s network, it’s nearly impossible to retain the same links from other sites and audience traffic. When you blog on your own domain and decide to change names (domain), you can always  redirect that traffic and everything else (backlinks, PageRank) keeping your audience in tact.
8. Build an Asset - Authority and trust is the goal with readers and search engines. When you blog on another network, you’re losing the opportunity to do this for your own website. Having your own domain and building content is an asset you’re that just keeps growing and growing every year, like an IRA account.  In the meantime you can also get paid dividends via relevant advertising. It’s the difference between owning or renting.
9. The Blog is More Sellable - You can’t sell a Blogspot, Wordpress.org, Typepad, Ning, or Tumblr mini-blog, it’s not yours. Increase your income by selling a blog you’ve worked hard to build a following on instead of increasing someone else’s fortune by providing content to surround their ads. You can also make money in the mean time on the way to your exit plan by selling ads yourself either through Google AdSense or one-on-one deals with relevant advertisers.
10. Professional bloggers do it - As well as the famous and infamous. The ones who teach how to blog professional recommend you do too and above are a few of many of their reasons why.

For almost five years, Neil Lemons has worked behind-the-scenes to help create exposure, traffic, leads, and sales through major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Calling upon his diverse background in copywriting, advertising, marketing, and sales, he has been learning traditional SEO and SEM tactics since 2004.  He is the lead SEM Strategist at MarketingZen.com, an outsource marketing  company For more information on online marketing contact The Marketing Zen Group for a free site evaluation.

Flickr photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/38654720@N08/

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