Blogging | Buying Your Own Domain

Today I'm going to be doing my first in a segment of tips, tricks and things I have learned during this last year as a blogger. Now before I get into my first 'Blog Tips' post I in no way am an expert and I'm not claiming this is the fountain of youth or holy grail equivalent to blogging nuggets, but this is just my opinions and little things that I have found to work for me, and I'm going to start of with buying your own blogging domain.

As you guys may have noticed recently I have purchased and upgraded to my own domain, www.granitecitygirlblog.co.uk as opposed of course to www.granitecitygirlblog.blogspot.co.uk for me it was a decision a good few months in the making. In fact last year I made a deal with myself that if I kept up my writing and still found myself as passionate about blogging in a years time then I would buy my own domain and work from there, which as you can all see I have.

Before buying my domain I decided it would be best to find out a few of the ins and outs, perks and pitfalls if you will, that come hand in hand with buying your own domain, which is something I am hoping this post can help all of you with any questions or queries you might have revolving around domain purchase. I have to be honest in that my main reason for purchasing my domain name was really to drop 'blogspot' from my URL, that can pretty much sum up how little I understood or knew about the benefits that come with owning your personal domain name, but upon a little research (admittedly after I bought the name) I found domain purchases can bring a whole host of benefits to you the blogger.

Blog Ownership

Owning your domain takes the who out of the question of ownership. Funnily enough on researching domains a bit further you'll find that this content you may have worked very hard for, perhaps for years can all disappear at the click of a report button never to be seen again. With your own domain you are in control and have ownership of the platform in addition to the content (but I still suggest you back up your work somewhere more concrete you know... in case of apocalypse)

Increased Traffic

Since buying my own domain name I have noticed an increase in traffic being referred to blog, and as much as I would of course like to believe it is due to a step up in content we can actually trace this back to my new domain. When your address contains blogspot.com Google and other search engines will tend to index these whereas when people search for your unique domain address you will usually come out on top of the search engines.

Credibility

At risk of sounding incredibly vague, it just sounds and looks much better to drop your host. By creating your domain name you are creating your blogging brand and at the end of the day who do you want to be promoting? Blogspot? Or you? Brands will want to work with you a little bit more and you'll get that little sense of pride from typing your new domain name that is genuinely just yours.

One thing I will say however is that setting up your domain name is relatively easy, I personally purchased mine through GoDaddy who, to give them credit, did try to set up my domain but I think a few wires were crossed and all the did was make the domain a forwarding to my blog - which of course is not what I wanted. But by reading the instructions on Bloggers and GoDaddy's websites carefully enough I was able to set it up myself (and if I can do it, believe me you can too!)

Hopefully some of you have found this interesting, helpful or somewhere in between, I really just want to share a few things I have learned and found as a blogger this last year and I hope to share more knowledge I may accumulate in the months going forward. If you have any questions on how I set up my domain, what I have found the differences to be or if you just want to ask me a question in general be sure to leave a comment below, come share it with me on Twitter or if you just want to keep up with my latests posts be sure to follow me on Bloglovin.

Until next time folks, I'm off getting tecchy.

H.Elizabeth xx