Why your Blog needs its own URL (and Brand)

Do you have a hosted Blog on Blogger, Wordpress or one of the many other hosted services? Chances are if you do, your Blog’s address is something like yourblog.blogspot.com or yourblog.wordpress.com. While it’s cool to have the opportunity to use these powerful services for free, with their ease of use and quick setup, they do come with a big drawback. The drawback is the long URL attached to your Blog’s address!

The whole point of a Blog is for your voice to be heard. In order for you to be heard people need to find you. In order for people to find you, you need to easily accessible. In order to be accessible you should have a easily remembered/recognized URL/Domain name. Is yourblog.blogspot.com easy to remember or recognize? If your like most people the answer is no! In order to stand out and be found you need your own unique URL. You need a URL that instantly identifies you, or your brand. Let’s say your Blog is about Car Advice. Carblog.Wordpress.Com tells me your about cars, but will I remember that URL next week? Will I initially take you seriously when other Car Bloggers have their own Domains?

You will have to have really good content in order to win me and most others over. Now let’s say you decide to get CarBlogger.com instead. The name is catchy, easy to remember and since you took the time to buy the domain your instantly more credible! The steps you need to take are two-fold. First you have to figure out what your Blog’s Brand is, it's Goal's and what it's target audience is. After you’ve figured that out you need to choose a domain that will instantly tell your audience what you’re all about. One exception would be a personal Blog, or a self-branded Blog (Like Michael-Wayne.Com, ZacJohnson.Com, etc). So if your Blog is about Sport Cars rather than Cars in general I would suggest a name like SportCarBlogger.com rather than CarBlogger.Com – target your niche as much as you can.

Once you have acquired your domain, you can either have it professionally hosted or you can point it to a free hosted Blog at Wordpress or Blogger. Even if you point your unique URL to a free hosted Blog, your viewers won’t have to type in a long and hard to remember URL. Your chances of being remembered will greatly increase as well. Once you’ve setup up your own URL, you then need to create a professional email address that uses the URL, such as Joe@SportsCarBlogger.Com. For more information on this read my article on Why You Need A Professional Email Address. Just so I don’t leave you hanging, if you use the ad below you can purchase a domain from GoDaddy for only $7.49 and save $1.50 off of their regular $9.99 pricing.

What do you think? Do hosted addresses bother you too? Comment and let me know what you think? If you DO buy a domain, post it here via the Comment system so I can (and others) check it out!

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Why your Blog needs its own URL (and Brand)
Monday, 24 November 2008