Has anyone else ever noticed or felt discriminated for having a free blog on WordPress.com?
When you are trying to pitch for a paying gig from a corporate, offering to be their roving blogger/brand ambassador/service or product reviewer or how about if you have tried to reach out to a celeb/author you admire and wanted to do a mini-interview or get a couple of exclusive sound bites to add to the post you are doing on their book/music/movie/show and then when you mentioned you are on WordPress.com conversation just went and lost momentum, they stopped responding to emails and PR department just told you they would be in touch when they had a moment…
I have been in a room full of digital specialists and content creators and when I mentioned my blog ending with WordPress.com could almost hear the audible eye rolling and suddenly felt like a small speck even though in some spheres I might be said to have a strong digital presence compared to the Specialists who wanted to pay me with exposure when I am the one who could give them more exposure than they have…. *Mic Drop*
I have had Web hosting companies offering me all sorts of packages to migrate my blog to a self-hosted one so I could monetise my site and have all absolute control over all my content and what I can do with it then having to adhere to WordPress’s Terms and all the lovely ways I could turn my site into an e-commerce site and the advantage of having a professional website with its own domain without the WordPres.com tag.
Going self-hosted has its merits and it’s a route I would recommend to someone who would start their site with a primary focus of monetising their site or intending to set an online shop for their products e.g books or as a marketing site for their business….
Most webhosting firms (at least as I have observed from local webhosting) seem to assume your primary goal is to have lots of traffic and probably run Google ads for money and dabble in affiliate marketing
This is all good for some but it leaves out the ones who write in their blogs because they have always written, in notebooks, letters, diaries, Hi5, Opera mini blogs, geocities atrocities (Thanks BritchyOne) Facebook notes, and now blogs, who write for the therapy and the habitual flash inspiration of getting something off your chest and of course the community.
I remember asking someone trying to recruit me to move my site to one hosted by their company, what would happen when I die or when I defaulted on payment and I was told that well the site would then shut down and eventually disappear… “No thanks “ I thought to myself as one of the reasons I started the blog was a fanciful dream at immortality
Sometimes I like to kid myself that my blog one day may have an importance similar to the one rock paintings of old have to archaeologists; but to future generations, historians in understanding what happened to the Millennials before The Great Whatever…they will call it
And then I discovered the WordPress community!!!! The are some awesome humans out there with incredible experiences to dish out and I feel honoured to share my tangle of words amongst them. Just to mention a few: fix a glitch in yesterday’s post Maria(Sweden), Kappa (Greece) Josh (Country Southof Canada), Josephine(Ghana), Mable(Uganda), Mfon(Nigeria), Nobuhle (Zimbabwe), Benjamin (Uganda) Makupsy (Zimbabwe)
When I saw one of WordPress Flash Sales I immediately jumped onto a paid plan and secured my domain BecomingTheMuse.net Why Dot Net because it was cheapest one of the available options and also so I could make a silly play on me being a spider on the World Web Web… NET you see (this seems funnier in my head)
WordPress offers 4 plans (I really wish they changed their billing cycle and had quarterly or even monthly options but no, they bill annually making some of the plans rather crazily priced)
Owning your domain does give you a certain level of confidence and you can sign up for a service such as Zoho Mail to get a personalised email and they have a promotional forever free plan, which is pretty sweet. You can now contact my people on TheMuse@becomingthemuse.net and they will get back to you about featuring you on my site…. Feels good to say that
~B
PS WordPress low level plans give you rather limited options compared to the versatility of a self-hosted site but sometimes all you want is just a place to write and not tangle around with SEO, Analytics, Plugins, Custom Themes and all that stuff all though you can with the higher level plans but oh you pay for it
I’m not smart enough for SEO and all that shittery. I don’t aim to do anything big with my blog either other than help people procrastinating when they should be doing More Important Stuff ? This was very interesting though, I enjoyed reading, as always. It’s the wordsmith thing
Here in Uganda when you self host people kinda hate you, they think you have gone places and reached the highest ranks and you don’t need them.
Anyway me too someone a reader (who happened to be a wordpress developer and a blogger from Pakistan) of my blog offered me a domain on wordpress because they admired my blog so I accepted on condition that we co own it and contribute together but I still have my old usual blog.