It's OK to Use Blogspot to Make Money

I've had the question or suggestion here more than a few times about "getting a self-hosted" domain for the blog. While this is advised by many moneymakers, the Monetizer is here to tell all those who shun using Blogspot blogs that you can in fact make money and profit from them. A blog I recently discovered, Make Money for Beginners (also hosted on Blogspot) sums it up very well. Grizzly, the blog's author discusses the concepts of making money online vs. building up your snazzy looking brand/authority. For example, you can have a fancy looking Web 2.0 blog full of style and pizzazz, but usually this is best for building yourself as a brand and making yourself look good online. It can most likely help you if you get into the realms of serious e-book sales or affiliate marketing. There's nothing wrong with that. There's also the concept of making money, and using free methods to do it. Since Grizzly discusses the topic for beginners, he points out that using Blogspot is a good way to go. A free investment that makes you money is better than spending for hosting, wouldn't you agree?

Now, the Monetizer has had hangups and irritations with Blogspot as well. For example, the other day I went through and realized I needed to add sitemaps for all my blogs to Google webmaster. This can be quite a chore to do with Blogspot. Usually you can just enter your Blog's URL and "atom.xml" at the end as a sitemap, but sometimes it will report errors and not index properly. There seems to be an issue related to RSS feeds on Feedburner and your original Blogspot feed, but I haven't quite nailed this down yet. Another issue comes when submitting this blog to search directories. Often times they won't allow you to submit something if you don't have an email address from the same domain. There's no "@blogspot" email addresses, yet. Wordpress on self-hosted domains will obviously give you greater freedom and ability when adding a sitemap or having an email at your domain. It also gives you total ownership, at a price of course. It will make your site a brand, and give a site you can be proud of. You really need to determine your goals though. Having a flashy site to impress people and gain as many loyal fans, or making money through simply set up blogs and sites.

The choice is really yours. You can easily build 1, 5, 10, 100 Blogspot blogs and make your own personal army of "free" moneymakers. They do make money folks, so don't think having a domain and self-hosting is the only route to go. It may be advised by A-Listers and those who have built themselves into a brand (or those trying to). But if you want to make decent money, Blogspot can work just as well.

I'd also encourage readers to check out Courtney Tuttle's challenge here. It involves getting yourselves top search rankings and is definitely worth learning as it can help drive traffic to your blog while you're sleeping.