Why Blog Hosting Is Important To Your Brand

A blog can be a crucial part of building a brand for a small business operation. This is especially true for professional or sales businesses, in which the public persona of the business owner is a vital element in the success of the business. It helps build your company's personality -- its brand. This puts you up front and personal and lets your customers, clients or patients feel like they know you, and, as any business consultant will tell you, people are always more at ease buying services or goods from someone they know.

Many beginning business owners make the mistake of choosing one of the free blog hosting services to host theirs in the belief that the free ones are easier to set up and just as good as a blog hosted on their own domain name. Others believe that hosting on a large blog site gives them a bigger audience for their posts. All three of those beliefs are wrong. In fact, the only advantages that free blog hosting offers over hosting your blog on your own domain is the price -- and even that is a mixed advantage. When you choose the free service, you're giving up the most important advantages blogs offer for building your brand: design freedom, name recognition and SEO advantages for the sake of a few dollars a month.

A blog hosted on your own domain is more professional. Any branding expert you ask will explain that a website or blog with its own domain informs customers that you are serious about your business and value its image enough to pay for hosting. Hosting your blog on your own domain also makes it much simpler for your customers or clients to remember the address and find your blog. Your blog address becomes one more brick to cement your brand in the eyes of your buyers.

You have more choices for designs and branding it when you choose blog hosting on your own domain. You are not confined to a few templates provided on a free hosting service. In addition, Google along with other search engines consider the domain name of your blog when they pull up results to search inquiries. Blog hosting on your own domain name gives you a boost in the search engine rankings.

As far as ease of setup, most web hosting services feature one-click blog installation for nearly all of the major blog platforms, which makes blog hosting on your own domain every bit as easy as putting up a less professional free blog. With all of those advantages, why would any business owner choose free blog hosting over your own self-hosted blog?

By: Henry Staller

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