Host Your Own Wordpress Blog To Get Maximum Benefit

Let me preface this by saying that I live and swear by Wordpress.  It’s useful and reliable.

That said, a lot of people who are unfamiliar with blogging give it a bad rap, because they don’t realize it’s power and how to utilize it.  Maybe they’re too cheap to spend some money on a decent host, or they just don’t know any better.  I’ve had quite a few twitter conversations with folks who look at the wordpress.com options and think that’s as far as it goes, and dismiss it at their own loss.

Wordpress by far, in my opinion, is the most powerful and customizable blogging platform today, used by CNN and other major outlets.  In fact, quite a few sites for large companies are actually modified Wordpress under the hood.

However, if you use wordpress.com, you are severely limited in your choices because with power comes responsibility.  It’s mostly for people just starting out, but if you’re serious about getting the benefits of blogging, read on.

If you want your blog to look like a big boy, you need to host it yourself.  That alone will open you to a host of options; a big part of our business is installing, customizing, and consulting around blogs.  So many look like junk or miss large, important parts because the people setting them up have great ideas but little knowledge on how to implement them.

Here are three of the many benefits of hosting your own install:

You get maximum SEO benefit. If you host the site connected to your domain, so for instance, blog.yoursite.com or yoursite.com/blog, you will be more search engine friendly with all the tags, etc.  If you do a separate site, whether it’s vox.com, typepad, wordpress, etc. you leak that pagerank and value.

You get the ability to maximize monetization. Adding advertisements from any network, selling them, putting in rotations with timing and percentages, links in RSS feeds - all possible with your own install.

Exact brand matching. With a skilled programmer/designer, your blog can match your site, be your site, and reinforce your brand.  If you’re an advertising or marketing pro, you know the value of this.