Control

Blogger/Blogspot is owned by Google and they can delete you account without even informaing you. It can be because someone reported your blog as a spam blog or for any other reasons they won’t even bother to tell you. Its almost impossible to get it back. It doesn’t matter if you use custom domain with your blog or not, your blog can get flagged and deleted within minutes. Same goes with Wordpress.com blog.

With self hosted Wordpress blog, you own everything, and you can do whatever you want. You have complete control over your site.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

The most important thing a blogger needs is traffic. With plugins like All in One SEO and Automatic Google XML sitemap generator, you can optimize your self hosted Wordpress blog easily for search engines.

For Blogspot and Wordpress.com, it isn’t the option, you have too many restrictions and limitations. Forget top search engine ranks if you are using a free blogging service.

Monetization Through Adsense

The first step towards your adsense empire is getting approved for adsense. If you have a self hosted Wordpress blog on your own domain, and you apply with personalized email address, that is, you@yourdomain.com, there is much higher chances of getting approved.

With Blogspot blog, you need to have a very high quality blog to be even considered for adsense.

For Wordpress.com blog, you can’t use programs like adsense. Its against their policy.

Selling Your Blog

You can’t sell a Blogspot or Wordpress.com blog under any circumstances. Its against their TOS. Moreover, you can’t list these free blogs on sites like flippa, its against their TOS as well.

With self hosted Wordpress blog, you can always sell it at your price.

Plugins and Extensions

Wordpress.com and Blogspot are not in the miles radius of what you can do with self hosted Wordpress blog and suitable plugins. Need to show related posts, wanna create a classifieds site, want to start an article directory, you name it. You can do almost anything with a correct plugin combinations on a self hosted Wordpress blog.

Themes and Templates

There are thousands of Wordpress themes available, with some very specialized themes that help you create niche sites in a mouse click. But you need to host your blog yourself to use that.

Wordpress.com provides only limited number of themes, most of which are plain ugly. Blogspot does have many themes available, but you are very limited with what you can do with it. Unlike Wordpress themes, there is not much documentataion available for Blogspot themes, so it becomes very difficult to customize it at later stage.

People’s Perception & Effect of Social Media Websites

Most of the people don’t see professionalism in your endevour if you are using free services like Wordpress.com or Blogspot blog. One reason is that its free. Also, since too many spammers and blackhat guys use these free services for not-so-good reasons, people have stopped taking these free services seriously.

With self hosted Wordpress blog, on the other hand, they see that since you have paid for something, you must be serious about it.

Social Media websites such as Digg, Twitter, Stumbleupon etc. can bring a lot of traffic to your site, but again, people won’t consider your site to be worth re-tweeting, stumbling or digging if you are using a free service like Blogspot or Wordpress.com. Forget social media as a traffic source if you are using a free blog service.

Conclusion – Self hosted Wordpress blog is way better then Blogspot or Wordpress.com blog.

If you think that I have missed some points, or if you feel that I am biased towards self hosted Wordpress blog, then feel free to share your thoughts using the comments form below.

Open the theme editor in wordpress dashboard (Appearence > Editor) and open home.php file. If you don’t see home.php file then click on index.php file. Then look for the start of the wordpress loop,

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Now, just below this, add the line,

if (is_home()) if (in_category('7')) continue;

That’s it. Now the posts from category id 7 will not appear on homepage.

Note 1 - If you don’t know how to find the id of a category, then check this post.

Note 2 - If you are using a magazine theme or a theme that uses many loops on homepage, then make sure that you are editing the correct loop or you may break the whole site. If you are not sure about what you are doing, then let handyman do that dirty work.

First, log into your wordpress admin panel, then go to Posts > Categories. Now just hover your mouse over the category whose id you want to know, and look at your browser’s status bar at the same time. You’ll see the category id at the end. For instance, in the following snapshot, the category id is 7.

Enjoy!

Personally, I never use the visual editor. In the video tutorial below, I explain how to disable the wordpress visual editor from write panels,

Note – Learn basics of HTML before you disable the wordpress visual editor. If you want me to teach you enough HTML to handle the wordpress post/pages, then please contact me.