Free Tools vs Your Own Website

What type of budget you would like to have for your blog, and what you are going to do with it will help make these decisions.  In general, if you want to make money on your blog you will be limited on the number of free tools you could use.  If you are just keeping a personal blog, the free tools might be the way to go.  Some of the benefits of your own website are that you have more control over how to post items, more control over the advertising you can implement, you can add more functionality, and you can have your blog as one of the pages (like we do).

You also will be in charge of more components of your blog if you own your own site.  For instance, you will be in charge of loading a theme, putting in the code for advertisements, and many other back-end items.  Some hosting solutions offer to load WordPress, Themes, and other popular software for you.  Most hosting companies make it really easy to load items onto your site, but others require you to know some basic back-end things.  For the most part, the back-end processes are not that complicated.  If you know how to copy files on your computer using a folder tree, then you can probably find your way through loading files via ftp (ftp is basically a secure way of transferring files).

There are plenty of hosting sites out there, look around, see which is going to be the best for you and your budget.  Starting a free site is as easy as going to Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, or BloggersBase.com.  I will go through some basic steps of setting up a free site in the next post.  If you decide to start a blog on BloggersBase, be sure to find and friend me:  http://www.bloggersbase.com/users/Ben/ 

If you haven’t been following my other blogs, you might want to check out this post on Click Into Action.  It gives a brief overview of some of the items you will need to start a site (you can ignore the PayPal account item since that is applicable only if you are getting into affiliate marketing).

Hopefully I didn’t overload you with too many things to think about over the last week or two, but drawing up plans like these are so important, just like drawing up building blueprints. 

I will leave you with those things to noodle, and will return in the next post with a real example of setting up a blog on a free site.  I will create the post in a couple of days, so come back quickly. 

Do you have any suggestions on which free tool to start with?  My first site was a blogger site, but obviously I also use WordPress & BloggersBase.  What would you like to see first?  Any questions I can help with?

Ben