Pros and Cons of Free Blogging Services

Updated on August 10th, 2016 by Quertime Writer in Blogging

Weblogs could be used for recreational purposes or for serious minded business publicity and advertisement. They are basically online journals where users post stuff that relates to things that interest them. They can be owned or created by anyone who wants to create or have one. The delicacy of the matter lies in coming up with something interesting and different every time for your blog on a regular basis.

If you are not into the complicated procedures of designing a website for your regular posts and blogs you need not look too far. There are easy to use free blogging websites available on the web which has made creating a blog an easy task. All the challenging tasks including the HTML and web publishing is performed by the website that is providing you with the blogging facility.

A few examples of free blogging websites are WordPress, LiveJournal and Blogger. After you have registered yourself and made an account on a free blogging website, you will be assigned a web address to your blog. This is the address to your blog site that you can share with your family and friends for them to take a look at your blog.

Things You Need To Know

Before you begin with setting up a blog for yourself there are a few things that you need to ponder over. You need to first decide as to what the blog is going to be for? It is always a good idea to have specific blogs. So think of a theme according to which you want to create your blog. Specialized blogs attract more attention and are considered to be more dedicated and dependable. The second consideration would be as to how often you intend to regulate it and post entries.

Once you have made up your mind about the sort of blog that you want, it is the time to decide which blogging service you want to use. If you are a big fan of Google, you can simply register yourself at Blogger as it is a part of Google.

After creating your account you can choose a theme to personalize the layout of your blog and then you can start posting and blogging. Your post can include text, audio, pictures and even video files. You can limit your blog to a certain group of people or you can make it public. You can also limit some aspects for specific people, for example, you can disable commenting for them.

It is better for blogs to be written in a simpler language as this makes for a larger number of visitors to understand. Your readers can include all age groups and ethnicities so it is always a good idea to keep the sentences simple and short. Also mention your subject of discussion as often as appropriately possible as this makes for a better search engine ranking for your page.

The Advantages Of A Blog

There are many benefits of using a free blogging service.

In case you are hosting your own blog then it may take longer than it does in creating a blog through a free blogging service.
The best part about having a blog which is also an advantage over having a website is that blogging software takes care of the SEO checks and balances all by itself without you having to worry about it.
Blogs will not only optimize your pages for the search engine, but will also link them with each other and with the posts that you publish. This in turn helps the web crawlers to index your entire site. Blogs really look after your site as a mother would look after her child.
Another technique that the blogs follow to improve upon your search engine ranking is that they use appropriate keywords in the Titles, Meta Tags and URLs of your blog pages.
A very interesting thing about blogs is that they will automatically organize your pages and posts in an order most preferred by you. The order could be according to chronology, kind, calendar or labels.
Blogs also have an advance feature of search, where you can search the blog for specific entries and posts. This really adds a lot to a comfortable and easy browsing on your blog, not just by the web users but also by the web crawlers.
The RSS or really simple syndication is another feature that would help in promotion of your blog. RSS will work for syndication and distribution of your fresh blog content to blog search engines. Readers can also subscribe to the RSS feed. This will enable the users to have your blogs delivered to their email inboxes directly.

The best way to gain traffic to your blog is by having specific blogs. This makes for easy recognition and popularity. Users with the same interests as yours will visit and become fans. All you need to do is provide the content and be more regular in doing so. When you are writing about things that you are zealous about others will also notice and join your venture.

Blogs are not just an effective way of expressing your thoughts on a particular topic; it could also be a medium to interact with like-minded people. Those happening to be on the same wavelength can share their opinion on your blog posts through commenting and discussion. This way you will not only be generating more traffic and readers for your blogs but will also build up a treasure of distinctive info on topics of interest.

The Disadvantages

There are a few disadvantages of using free blogging services rather than hosting your own blog.

One of them is that the domain to your blog is not really something that is owned by you. It is owned by the website that is providing you with free blogging services. Also the real ownership of the blog is not really yours.
Another disadvantage is that, in future if you ever decide to shift to having your blog on your own domain, you cannot really pull your readers along with you to that site. There is a whole new beginning to build your web presence.

Keeping the above points in mind, it totally depends on your preferences on the kind of a website you prefer and the things you are willing to compromise with.

Author: Scott Heron

Scott Heron is a freelance SEO based in Edinburgh. He has been promoting websites through SEO, PPC and content marketing. If you require any online help, give him a shout.