17:14
Fitness 2021
 |
| you should buy a domain name for your blogspot blog |
I have had my main blog now
zulumuscle for just under 17 months, I have seen the traffic grow, because
of my efforts such as writing regularly and writing articles elsewhere for link
building, commenting on other blogs, submitting articles to article directories
and submitting every articles to bookmarking sites. For those same reasons I
have seen my blog lose most of its traffic. It has been a journey building,
having my house damaged and rebuilding for the past 17 months, I have survived
google update after google update, and now it seems my blog is coming out even
stronger than before. The first 16 months of my blogs existence it had a
blogspot.com after the blog name so that affected it in many ways which I shall
discuss below.
blogspot.com domain names suck
Hosting a blog on blogger is affordable well because its
free and it is reliable so you know that your site is always available. Just
because you are hosting your blog on blogger does not mean you have to have a
free domain name that ends with www.blogname.blogspot .com, for 10$ a year you
can have a www.blogname.com domain name yet many people fail to buy one. I was
one of those people but I always wanted to buy a domain name it’s just that I
did not know how I was going to buy it as no one in my household has a credit
card (we are against credit cards because you are spending money you don’t
have), I tried 4 months in to buy a domain name with my debit card but the bank
I was in said the card I had even though it was a visa was unable to purchase
things online, I could get paypal because putting money into paypal or receiving
money from paypal, heck verifying paypal in my country without having a credit
card is a pain in the ass. So you get why I did not purchase a domain name
earlier? That was ofcourse until a month or so ago when I found this local
website which sold domain name where I was able to pay for my domain name with
a local bank card (debit card); I was over the moon and purchased the domain
name immediately.
Country specific urls suck
Now let me get back to telling you why blogspot.com free
domain suck before I can tell you how me buying a domain name is connected to
this whole thing. See early last year blogger made it so if you were using
their free blogspot.com domain name, visitors from different countries will see/visit
different urls. Those from UK would see blognameblogspot.co.uk , Canadians
would see blognameblogspot.ca and a few other countries would see country
specific urls. What this meant was it was like you had many sites with the same
content and different urls. This sucked on many levels as this meant you would
now have to rank different urls for different countries, this would affect your
traffic and your pagerank. I for one saw this effect my blog was growing in
traffic for a while before the changes it had a page rank of 3 at one point then
the different country specific urls were activated and I started seeing a
decrease in visits and my page rank dropped down to 1 for the blog.spot.com
url, I did not bother checking the rest as they gave me insignificant traffic
except for blogspot.co.uk.
I started noticing that my traffic became one sided, by this
I mean before the country specific urls I was seeing growing traffic from all
countries afterwards other countries disappeared and my traffic became mainly
us, ca and uk. Brasil, germany, Poland,
spain etc. who seemed to be growing before dropped off the map. I tried
different things, still posted regularly but traffic did not seem to be
directly proportional to the work I put in like before. I got my traffic back
to the level where it was before at around 800-950 page views per day but I had
a hard time growing it past that point. These multiple urls certainly were not
helping if I wanted to improve global numbers, my link building was always
directed at my blogspot.com url and not the other country specific ones no
wonder my us traffic was growing to replace the traffic I once had from other
countries.
Have you ever seen a blogspot domain being number one in the
search engine for a competitive keyword? I haven’t and on the rare occasion
that it is, that’s usually right after google does one of its updates and
shakes up search engines and it’s usually a spam blog probably created for
linking purposes with garbage in it. People do not take a blogspot.com blog serious;
they do not click ads as much as they would in a private domain because they do
not trust blogspot domains becuse of the bad reputation that spammers give
blogspot domains. Many blogspot domains are run as casual blog sorta like this
one so no one really takes them serious. It is hard to build an authority blog
on a blogspot domain name. There are some really popular blog with blogspot
domain names but it’s much easier especially now with these country specific
urls to just buy a domain name. There are many of us with well kept, regularly
updated blogspot blogs who would be more successful had we used a private
domain name which brings me back to me buying a domain name. So this month I
got a private domain name and was expecting to lose some traffic first but I have
been surprised by the results.
What has been happening in my first month with a private domain name?
Well for the first few days, traffic went down because the
blog was still in transition, redirecting and whatever goes on behind the scenes
when you buy a domain name after more than a year using a free domain name. I
had nothing to lose since my page rank was so low and I had read that I would
not lose traffic as it would all be redirected to the new address. After the
redirection my traffic was back to normal, but what happened next surprised me,
I started getting traffic from terms I was not ranking for before, I also saw a
rise in traffic on a few day it was double of my normal traffic. This month is
not over yet I am just talking about these past 20 days. I have started doing
some linking work to make sure I rank my new web address well, because it was
not possible before with the free domain name. I also suspect people share
content more when it is a dot com then when it’s a blogspot dot com. I have
began to see increased sharing of my posts as well but that could be because of
my increased activity in social media, which I shall write about soon just to
let you know how I have grown my following on several different social media
sites. The traffic this month is right now equal to the most traffic I have
ever gotten in one month, even though I had a couple of days with just around
25% of the usual visits because of the transition and I have only published for
articles this month which is less than usual. I cannot wait to see what happens
next.
I have always noticed that other blogs in my niche did not
post regularly, they posted about 4 times per month and had 8 times my traffic,
with what I have seen so far it’s evident that the domain name plays some part in
that not only content because I have some good content and case studies, and
list posts. I used to post a lot in the
past with more than 12 posts per month but I slowed down to about 8 per month
for a while but my intention was always to post less but longer posts and focus
more on marketing because what’s the use of having great content if no one ever
gets to see it.
The next post will be about How I have been growing my
social media following so be sure to come back for that soon.
