Hernan Vazquez compares free blogging platforms like WordPress.com, Wix, Weebly, Blogger, and Tumblr. Free services lack custom domains, independent hosting, and marketing tools like pop-ups and retargeting scripts. He recommends starting free to practice, then migrating to self-hosted WordPress.org with your own domain when you need real flexibility.
Should you go for a free blog? That's a question that I'll try to answer on this episode. Hey everybody, what's up? Hernan Vasquez here, and I had this really, really great question, thanks, from one of you guys that, you know, I think it's a great question, which is, should I go for a free blog when I'm starting out? Should I go for a free website When I'm starting out, when I do not have a website, should I go for a free blog, a free platform? And you know, free platform, free blogs, they are really enticing, they are really, you know, they catch your eye because, you know, if you go to wix.com, weebly.com, wordpress.com, Blogger, Blogspot, Tumblr, those are all free platforms that will allow you to set up a free blog in minutes. And you know, there are a bunch of people that I know, successful entrepreneurs, that they've started with their own free blog. Like Seth Godin, for example, he started on Typepad, which is another free blog, and I think it's already— it's still on Typepad, by the way, which is great. Now, the question that you need to answer is, what I'll be using the blog for? Will it be to promote your ideas? Will it be as a marketing strategy? Will it be your life and blood of your business? Will it be for your company? What do you want to do on the blog? Do you want to just spread ideas like Seth Godin does? Do you want to capture emails? Do you want to do retargeting campaigns? Or maybe all of the above, right? So those questions are really important when you're setting up your first blog and should you go for for a free blog because here's the deal. Free blogs are convenient, they are easy to set up, they do not cost a dime, but there's a cost, a hidden cost, a hidden fee associated with that which is, which are rather limitations. You will be really, really limited in the amount of things that you can do with a blog. So for example, if you go right now to semanticmastery.com, or hernanvasquez.com, or rather blog.hernanvasquez.com. Those are self-hosted blogs. What does that mean? That means that we have our own domains, we have our own hosting, and we have our own WordPress.org installations, okay? And that's like, if you're trying to get real ninja and really advanced with your marketing techniques, with all of the little pop-ups and the capture pages and the capture boxes and, you know, the call to actions and the videos that you can implement and all of those kind of things which are really cool, it's super hard to achieve that on a free blog, okay? Because on a free blog you do not have access to hosting, you do not have access to a ton of things that make a blog a real professional blog, okay? So my suggestion would be if you're starting out, and you want to start blogging and you want to get and kind of start playing with the look and feel of, for example, WordPress, go ahead and make a WordPress.com blog, okay? Make something like yourname.wordpress.com, start blogging in there, start posting in there, but, and here's a big but, not a big butt with double T, a big but, This is a big but. If you want to upgrade, do not try to upgrade from WordPress itself, okay? They will offer you get your own domain, they will offer you get your own hosting. Do not do that because you will be limited for life, like literally. Because if you have like hernanvasquez.com and I have it on WordPress, there are a bunch of things that I cannot do. So the minute that you want to upgrade to something like more professional, to something that has your own domain, something that will allow you more freedom with what you can do and cannot do, just migrate to a new hosting and start, you know, you can migrate, you can actually migrate all of your content so it's not lost, but just start blogging on your own platform. You can install your own WordPress installation on your own hosting account and you can start from there, okay? So again, if you're starting out, if you're a newbie or you haven't blogged before or you have a website but you're not entirely sure if you could be blogging like once a week, just go ahead, you know, and start with your own WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogger, Wix, Weebly, but have in mind that at some point you will need to progress from that and you will need to have your own hosted solution. You don't have to do it on your own, you can hire somebody to do it, But just have that in mind, okay, so that there are no surprises after the fact, okay. There are a bunch of things that these companies will tell you that you can do that you cannot actually do because those are limited, okay. And they're free. What can you— what do you expect, all right? So get the credit card out of your ass and start paying for things. I'm just kidding. But anyways, guys, I just wanted to touch base on that real quick because that's a recurring question that I have been having. And if you have any other pressing questions, you know, those questions that cannot, you know, they don't leave you sleep, like, should I get a WordPress blog or not? Oh, what do I do? If that's your case, do not despair. Just drop them in the comment below. Take them out of your mind into the power of the internet, the YouTube power, and I'll try to answer them to the best of my extent and my experience. All right, guys? So I hope you love these videos. If you do, Drop me a comment, drop me a like, subscribe, and you can also join the Facebook group, and I'm gonna leave all of those links on the description below. Thank you guys for watching, and I'll see you guys on the next video. Bye-bye.
