Blogs

Blogging can take a lot of time. You need to create ongoing original content to keep traffic flow. Once you stop posting, your traffic will start to slack off as people look at blogs as being up-to-date with events and information, many do not read “older dated” blogs.

If you are wanting to start your own business at home or just looking to earn extra money online, having a blog as a “store” does not look very professional, nor does having free hosting for your blog.

The URL of your blog may be very long and difficult for someone to remember. mygreatstore.wordpress.com

Create a website

Once you create a web page for your site, you don’t have to continuously update it.

Owning a domain name looks for professional for a business. If are thinking of starting your own home business and can’t afford even basic hosting and a domain name, then you may want to look at other options for making money.

Easier to create hierarchical navigation (home page, tier one, tier two)

See more information about Blog vs Create a Website.

Wordpress.com

Hosted by a third party and if you wanted your blog’s name to be thegreatestblog it would be thegreatestblog.wordpress.com.

If you use wordpress.com to host your blog, you will be very limited to the look of it. You are also not allowed to use any affiliate links or any advertising that you would get paid for (ie: Google Adsense, Widget Bucks, etc). If you do use affiliate links within your posts and you are reported, you could end up having your entire blog suspended.

Creating a blog using .com just for the sake of creating inbound links to your oun website (or another 3rd party site) is also against the Terms of Service (TOS).

To create your free blog using wordpress.com, you need to decide on the name and if it is available, create your account and you’ll be blogging within a few minutes.

You get many different layouts with the free blog. You can customize the look and feel by moving different sections around and even uploading your own header to the blog.

But you cannot upload any available plugins using wordpress.com. They do have a few already on your free blog to help with spam, but that is about all.

If you are looking to blog to make money online, then wordpress.com is not your answer.

Wordpress.org

This is used with a paid web hosting plan. There are many affordable web hosting plans that have a quick installation of wordpress so you don’t need to download from the wordpress.org site and upload to your hosting plan.

Many are turning to creating blogs instead of websites as they are very easy to install on your hosting account.

When you purchase web hosting and install a wordpress blog, you have complete control of it. With hundreds of plugins available, you can make it search engine optimized, add Google Adsense, create a sitemap for the search engines to spider your site better, and much more.

You also have hundreds of themes available which you can customize with your own colors and how the blog will look on your site.

If you are on a limited budget, but want to create a blog to make money online, you can get web hosting and register a domain name for about $50 a year through GoDaddy. Their basic hosting package has plenty of space to get you started.