What will you do if there is a real estate that you can buy for 20$ a year or you may rent it for free. Will you buy it or rent it knowing fully well that it can easily fetch 20,000$ after 2 years? What will call someone who decides to rent it because there is a 1% chance that it may result in a grand 50$ loss to him.

That was easy wasn’t it? Now let us say what you get into when you decide to create a blog a free blogging platform like wordpress or blogger.

1. There is a good chance you will never see any payout from your blog. WordPress does not allow you to post advertisements. Blogspot allows you to put advertisements but then I doubt many advertising networks will be too keen to accept something.blogspot.com
2. You are bound by the stupid rules of the blogging platform. They may change the rule any day they want and you will loose a blog that you developed over years of hard work. I have been astonished by the number of people that have lost perfectly genuine blog because the stupid software thought they were spamming.
3. You can not extend your blog to anything additional. If I wan, I can add a forum, a private members only area or anything else to binaryday. Can you do that on your  something.blogspot.com?

I can go on and on about why it is stupid to have a blog on a free platform. However before you curse me and leave, I will request you to go to the top of this post and read my real estate example once more. That real estate available for 12$ a year is a self hosted blog with your own url and own hosting space. I am sure you know a lot of people who make a decent amount of money from their blog. If you do not then I shall suggest that you read December earnings report of 15 bloggers.

You are lucky if you have not already created your blog on one of these free blogging platforms. Create a self hosted blog today itself. If you already have a blog on one of these free blogging platforms, then you are in luck. Harsh at shoutmeloud provides a very valuable service of migrating from free hosted blog to self hosted  platform. No that is not n affiliate link nor Harsh has paid me any money for linking to his page.

P.S: Feel free to contact me at ask[at]binaryday.com if you need any clarification regarding how to get complete website for less than 20$ a year.

Other posts of mine that you may like to read

1. A simple framework to select topic for blogging
2. 25 Factors that determine your adsense earning andList of Indian Advertising networks
3. 6 websites to get your indian startup profiled and get free backlinks and
4. My roadmap to blogging success

I have read more than 25 really good blog posts about how to select a topic for blogging and they have suggested different methods including passion, keyword research, income analysis, competition analysis etc. These posts left me confused even after more than 4 years of blogging and they are supposed to be read by beginners!!!!!!

My framework is really simple. Just identify all the topics that you are interested in and then rank them from 1 to 5. 1 being the most attractive and 5 the least attractive one. Sum it and you will be surprised by how easy it is to identify the topic of your choice.