Why You Should Use Custom Domain Name for BlogSpot Blog

Why You Should Use Custom Domain Name for BlogSpot Blog

Most of the newbies who starts a blog, prefer to use BlogSpot as their blogging platform. This actually makes sense, as BlogSpot is free, and you need less technical skills to get started. From a learner perspective, it’s a zero investment, and return is high. With BlogSpot platform, we get major benefits like

Free, Unlimited bandwidth, Unlimited storage.

Though storage is not unlimited but we have plenty of options like creating different author profile and use them to store images and files. The only thing which they might not like with blogSpot is .blogspot domain name, which can be easily fix by buying a custom domain name.

Usually a blogspot URL is something like domain.blogspot.com, and a custom domain name is www.domain.com.

For the record, WordPress is much better blogging platform, and according to July 2013 report, 19% of websites in the world is powered by WordPress. Anyways, this is a completely different topic of discussion, and if you want to read about it, here are two resource:

• Why WordPress is better than BlogSpot
• WordPress or blogger: Which is better for SEO

Even though, if you plan to stick to BlogSpot platform for couple of months, a good idea is to get a custom domain name for your blog. This will help you in many ways, which I have explained below:

Why you should buy a custom domain for your blogspot blogs?

Buying a domain name is cheap :

Buying a domain name is pretty cheap, you can easily get good domain name ending with .com or .org in between $10-$13. If you are really low in budget, you can consider buying a .info domain which will cost you between 1$- 2$. You can buy .com domain name for cheap from ShoutMyDomain..

Social media sites :

BlogSpot being a free platform, is often targeted by spammers, and this is one reason they are less likely to be trusted by people on social media sites. When you use a custom name for your BlogSpot blog, this removes that first impression of a free blog. Do remember,  Social media users doesn’t hate blogspot but they don’t even love it.

Web promotion:

Talking about web promotion , which starts from social media sites to link building, most of top websites doesn’t like giving a link back to blogspot domain. If you will notice WordPress Blogs blogroll, it will be hard to find a BlogSpot domain there.

Seriousness towards blogging :

You have been working a lot on your blogspot blogs, but without a nice layout, template and domain name, people will not feel that you are very serious about blogging. One simple reason you are not ready to spend few dollars for thing which you love.

Branding

Using your custom domain name, you can use it to brand yourself easily. Use a nice logo, favico and banner to brand yourself. You can look for wordpress like blogspot themes to give a entire new look to your blogspot blogs.

Google Apps

With custom domain, you will also get facility to use custom domain based Email address, and you can have email address of your domain name. Like I have admin[at]shoutmeloud.com

SEO advantage:

Later on when you plan to migrate your blog to WordPress, custom domain name will ensure that you will not miss out link juice, and your migration will be more search engine friendly. I have talked about this in detail here: How BlogSpot users can prepare for WordPress migration.

How to start with custom blogSpot domain ?

So, if you are convinced that you should have a custom name for your BlogSpot blog, here is what you need to do the next.

1) Find a domain name: First thing you should be doing is, find a perfect domain name for your blog. Don’t use your personal name, rather use something which is brandable and memorable.  Search for a domain name using any of these 5 domain name suggestion tools.  You can refer to How to select great domain name and how to find best domain name for some additional tips on selecting name for your domain.

2) Follow this detailed guide on setting up custom domain name on BlogSpot.

Go ahead, and give a cool custom domain name to your BlogSpot blog. If you have any question, feel free to ask me via comments. If you find this article useful, do share it on Facebook and Google plus.

Read more: Why You Should Use Custom Domain Name for BlogSpot Blog 
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