All the free blogging platforms (particularly blogspot.com), are actually a playground for amateur bloggers. I call them Pre-Blogging experimentation ground. They are good for acquiring basic experience with the blogging profession. But never dwell too long on blogspot.com or any free-hosting platform, they are dangerous comfort zones and resting grounds.
TENANT-LANDLORD BLOGGING
A ‘Tenant’ blogger is an amateur blogger that is dwelling in a free-host blogging platform. I also call them pre-bloggers because they are yet to acquire the necessary experience to move out and transit to self and paid hosting blogging platform. I always recommend that a pre-blogger should not spend more than 4 weeks of active blogging on a free hosted blog before moving to his or her own paid hosting blog platform.
Vanity of Labor
The first disadvantage of Tenant blogging is that, it is laboring to increase the rank, traffic, reputation, authority and brand name of the hosting platform to your own detriment.
I don’t want any of you to make the same ‘mistake’ as Philomena of Telenovela Love Garden In one and a half years, she labored to increase and turned the shadow of tenant blogging into a substance, making about a thousand Dollars monthly from her blogging activities there.
By that same space of time or less, she had increased her subscriber level by over 2,500 got to Page Rank 4, Alexa Rank 169,000 and a traffic of over 1,500 daily unique visitors as well as 5,000 page views daily. (What a wasted labor!) For that kind of labor on a paid hosted blog, her Alexa rank could have been in the region of 40,000!
For that kind of good result, if the labor was invested in her own, paid hosted blog, her monthly income could have been 4 times more than what she earned.
Lose Rank, Lose Subscribers
Another disadvantage of dwelling too long in free hosted blogging platforms is that, when eventually you decide to transfer to your own paid hosting blog, you will lose all your former blog ranks, authority, and even your precious subscribers. There is no carry-over. The only thing you can carry over is your former content and not you former credits or attributes. Maybe that is why Philomena is afraid of transferring her content to a new paid host blog.
Can’t Sell Your Blog
The third disadvantage of dwelling too long on free hosting blog platform is that, you cannot sell your blog. In the blogosphere, the older your blog, the more profitable and attractive it becomes to internet marketers and Dot Com merchants, who may want to buy it. These are a group of professionals who may not know how to build a successful blog from the scratch, but once it is successful, they know how to maintain and increase that success.
A free hosted blog cannot be sold because it is not yours; you are merely a ‘tenant’ dwelling freely in another man’s house, which you cannot sell without his consent.
I know of two blog that were sold this year (2007), CAREER RAMBLINGS by Jane May, for $20,000 and CASH QUESTS by Kumiko Suzuki for $15,000. The two blogs were less than 12 months old before they were sold. None of those two blogs had the traffic or page views level commanded by Philomena on her free blogspot blog.