Benefits of Selecting a Custom Domain for Your Free Blog

 As a Blogger, whenever we start our Blogger journey, most of us pick BlogSpot.com or WordPress.com, as they are free, and our blogging investment is zero. This is always a safe way to start, but as a starter who is looking forward to creating a career in Blogging, this is a huge mistake. No doubt, self-hosted blogs are the best options for bloggers, who are looking forward to taking Blogging as a profession in the future. Though, in this post I’m not going to emphasize on benefits of self-hosted WordPress, but we will talk about custom domains.

Will be affected google search result when blogspot is redirecting to custom domain:

Now, let me give you example from basics, so all newbie can follow and understand why instead of using .blogspot or .WordPress.com domains or any other free domain name providers like .co.cc, .tk, they should invest minimum $2.51 (.in) to $11/year (.com, .org) for a domain name.

Many bloggers who blog using free blogging platforms eespecially blogger or WordPress usually don’t like to go to a custom domain rather they keep on blogging for years on the same sub-domain. They feel they are going to get the good amount of traffic or exposure and if everything goes well then plan for a custom-domain but it will be too late. In this post, I have mentioned few effects of not choosing a custom domain and few benefits of choosing a domain name early.

When I talk about choosing a domain, I meant have a top-level domain name like ShoutMeLoud.com, ShoutMeLoud.org, ShoutMeLoud.in and so on. I hope, by now you are clear about subdomains which you get from BlogSpot or WordPress and a TLD (Top level domain name).

Effects of delaying custom domain name:

• If you blog for say one year and can draw handsome traffic, then your blog will have its Alexa rank and page rank. So when you switch to a custom domain you would not have the same page rank or same Alexa rank but you have to start from the beginning. Your new domain name will be treated as complete new start and despite search engine friendly migration from Blogger to WordPress, your Alexa stats and PR will start from ground 0.
• When you search with your blog title, search engines will not index your newly added custom domain but for few days it would index your old blog address. It takes time for Google to pass on the link juice (after 301 redirection), from old sub-domain to new domain you have moved.
• Have you got a feed at feed burner now if you want it for you new domain you need to have one more so you will have duplicates of your feed so definitely your subscribers would split into two groups.
• Are you having accounts with Google analytics and webmaster tools then you need to update them too? Though, you can always use old analytic codes in a new domain, but as a Webmaster, I would not like to see the stats of new domain under the old name.
• Even if you have submitted your sitemap, for brand new domain, you need to submit sitemap to all search engines again.
• Need to update your blog address in all social networking sites and all profile, where you have listed your Domain name.
• Sometimes we don’t get a custom domain of our choice as someone else would already have registered it. This is a headache, when you plan to shift from sub-domain to custom domain under your brand, and then you need to work on re-branding from ground level zero.

Benefits of having a custom domain:

• You have a good exposure in search engines, which often like to index domains rather than subdomains like blogspot.com, blogspot.in or a WordPress.com
• You can also increase your chances of getting an approval for your Adsense account. Check out, how Ankit got Adsense account  approval with one-month-old domain..
• You can have your contact email like username@yourdomain.com rather than gmail or yahoo. This is free using Google apps and here is a complete guide on how to create Email ID for domain name using Google apps.
• You can publicize your domain name with ease rather than saying a long domain with blogspot.com or WordPress.com in the end.

Moreover, you will have a brand name from day one. Even here at ShoutMeLoud, when Harsh started his blog, he started with a BlogSpot blog under name virgintech, but later when he migrated to WordPress, he could not get TLD under name Virgintech but he got lucky with name ShoutMeLoud. Well, in your case, you are lucky enough to learn from pro mistakes and instead of waiting for long, you can grab a top level domain right away.

How to choose a custom domain.

• See that you always choose smaller domain names rather than longer ones because people often remember smaller names and not long names.
• Never choose a hard spelled domain name as it makes users land on someone else page. So see that you choose easily spelled domain names.
• When changing your subdomain to a custom domain never change the entire blog name see that you choose exactly the same name which your blog has if at all it is not available  then go for small alterations but not large ones, you may have chances of loosing your regular branded traffic.
• If you move your Blogging platform (Blogger to WordPress) (WordPress.com to Self hosted WordPress), make sure you go with 301 perma-redirection, so you can change name and don’t lose any search engine traffic.

And once you have understood the science of picking the best name for your domain, here are domain name suggestion tools, which will help you in mind-mapping and picking up a best name for your domain.

You can buy the domain name from  ShoutMyDomain or Godaddy. If you are using BlogSpot, this complete DIY guide will help you to add the custom domain to your blog.

Similarly, you can add domain from WordPress.com admin dashboard though I would always suggest using self-hosted WordPress instead of free WordPress.com blogs. You can refer to WordPress guide to getting started with it.

Now I think you might have got an idea of why a newbie blogger should start on his blog journey with a custom domain rather than free sub domains given by the blogging platforms.