If you are considering adding a blog to help your business out you may be considering starting an account at a free blogging service such as Blogger or Wordpress as opposed to hosting your own blog.  There are advantages and disadvantages to using free blogging services and it helps to know what those differences are.

Let me quickly list some of obvious benefits of using a free blog service.

As the name implies, free blog services are free.  “Free” as in it does not cost you any money to have a blog hosted through them.  You do not have to pay for the domain name of your blog nor do you pay for any hosting fees.  All you have to do is set it up to your liking and you’re good to go.  Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Well, yes and no.

Yes, you will incur no costs for operating a blog through these services.  And they are generally hosted on servers that are capable of handling a lot of traffic.  But there are a few things you should know before you decide to take this route.

First, and most importantly, if you use a free blog service you must remember that you do not have total control or ownership of your blog.  You are limited in the scope of what you are capable of doing with your blog and you must abide by the Terms of Service agreement with your free blog service.  For many people, some of the limits free blog services impose prove to be too restrictive for their needs.

Secondly, you may want to consider what kind of image you are projecting if your business chooses to use a free blog service instead of hosting your own.  Many people know that you can pick up a domain name for $10 and hosting for less than $10 a month.  If you go with a free blog service you have to consider the image it may portray of you.  Do you want any potential customers to think that you can’t afford to pay about $10 a month to have a blog?

Now before anyone attacks my last statement let me say that I do know of some people that are running successful business blogs with free services.  They are using Blogger and they have been able to increase their sales and drive more traffic to their main site.  But I consider them to be special cases and not an example for most people to follow.

If you are serious about your business blogging then I would recommend that you invest in purchasing a domain name that is related to your company or industry and host it on a different server.  The small investment you make now for a privately hosted blog can turn into huge profits in the future.