Hosting a Blog on Your Own Domain

This time I would like to write about advantages and disadvantages of blogs hosted on your own domain name:
-You will have to pay for the domain name and for hosting your domain. This can amount to approximately $150 per year, but it varies depending on which hosting plan you will choose.
-If your blog is hosted on Blogspot you can incorporate AdSense, but Google will take part of the profit. However, you will not need to share your profit with Google if you decide to have your own domain.
-Other bloggers might show more respect towards bloggers who have their blog hosted on their own domain. That is because they might assume that such a blogger is more serious about blogging.
-If you have your own domain, you have a lot higher possibility to fully customize your blog. However, it might require some html and php knowledge. Make sure you learn some basic html before you decide to host your own blog.

I will leave you to make your own conclusions about hosting, because it really depends on circumstances. Overall, if you are really serious about blogging you may eventually decide to host your blog on your own domain.

The Art of Blogrolling

You might be unfamiliar with the term blogrolling. In case you are indeed unfamiliar with it, let me here explain to you that this fancy term is used to describe sharing links via blogs. You might be wondering at this point what the point of trading links is. By trading links with other blogs from your niche, you can get more traffic to your website and you can get more page views. If you are one of those webmasters who have a good set of blogrolling links, you should expect to receive more traffic to your blog. You can also help those blogs who appear on your blogroll receive more traffic.

Google Adsense

I would like to share with you a money making idea, which enables to monetize your website or blog. A lot of us have websites and want to make some profit out of them. Unfortunately, many of our websites cost us a lot of money, partly because of monthly hosting fees. These can easily amount to over $50-$200 per year. Taking this into account, it is always a good idea to look for ways to monetize your site. This should also be the case even if your website was only created for fun.

Now let us further analyze this opportunity. Website owners can enroll in Google AdSense to enable text, image, and even video advertisements on their sites. Ads are dynamically displayed � Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user�s geographical location, and other factors. This means that if you have, for example, a Canadian visitor, then ads are going to match his geographical location. Ads are also going to match the topic of your website. It is a Pay Per Click (PPC) type of advertising, which means that you only get paid if a visitor clicks on an ad. They also offer some advertisements which pay per thousand impressions, but the vast majority of income is received through PPC.

Please note that you do not need a blog to take advantage out of this opportunity � you can have a regular website. If you are hosted on Blogger, which is owned by Google, you will have the option to put ads on your blog quite easily, but Blogger will take a share of your income. That is why if you have a regular website, then it is a better idea to have it hosted on your own domain.

Plagiarism

Have you ever noticed that somebody on the Internet copied and published your articles on his website? This happens all the time, and I am wondering how dangerous plagiarism really is. If a person copies and pastes your posts, this must mean that your posts are very high quality. Only the best blogs on the blogosphere have their posts copied and published on other sites. That is why a typical blogger does not have to worry that much about plagiarism. Even if someone publishes something that you wrote, chances are it was done by an automated script. If you send an email to a webmaster of such a site, then you probably will not get any response. That is why I would recommend to relax and do not panic if someone copies your content. After all, plagiarism is even a bigger issue in college where students copy and paste articles from the Internet. Since your career does not depend on blogging, you do not have to worry about it as much as universities.

However, plagiarism is still a big concern, and it is especially dangerous if major search engines index the plagiarist�s post before they index the post on your website. If that happens then search engines might actually assume that you are the plagiarist. That is why you should be careful so that you will not be accused of plagiarism yourself. That might be especially a problem if Google does not index your website very often.