I am seeing a lot of blogspot owner are starting to have adsense but my advise is always have you domain. Although blogspot allows adsense, it is always good to carry your own identity rather than carrying blogspot identity.
Domain is something like a property in the World Wide Web, it is valuable if you market it enough. It would be good to switch from Blogspot once you know you could earn USD7.99/year from adsense (I register mine from Domainsite).
One main reason I stressed on this issue is because of this few reasons:-
- PageRank – Once you obtain some pagerank, you are more confident that you are able to earn some money from your website, but if you were to transfer to a new domain, you will be almost like starting all over again. A few months is lost for the page rank to tranfer.
- URL- You may not even get your dot com domain anymore. Lets say, you got riceblogger.blogspot.com, but when you are thinking to change to riceblogger.com, it is taken, you will have to change to dot net or use another domain.
- Visitor forwarding – Visitor will have to remember or bookmark another domain, and you have have a chance to lose your visitor
- Flexibility – There is more flexibility, whereby you could host your domain or having blogspot host your domain. Although hosting your own domain using WordPress or MovableType is always better, blogspot is a cheaper alternative. There is also choice to look for free hosting which allows adsense and your own domain to start your blog cheaply for the first year.
- Book your name/domain – Grab your name now before someone register them when they see the potential in your domain. There is too many people buying domain mainly to park and park. This is because they know that there is only one dot com domain. If you try to find a single word (any single word from dictionary), you will know that it is almost impossible to find a dot com domain.
This does not only apply to bloggers but to businessman, small business owners, restaurant owners and anyone who is interested to take part in the Internet race.
It is quite shocking for me to see a clothing store with the ability to rent a ground floor shoplots at Bangsar, Malaysia unable to pay for a domain and maybe some hosting. If you passby or shop there you will know this shop call “Little Black Book” with their domain being http://littleblackbookmy.blogspot.com and having a gmail account. They are proudly printing them at every single tag on the shirt and in front of the shop.
I would say that this depends on the blogger’s preferences. I started out blogging with Blogger and got a PR5. It is with Blogger that I learnt so much about blogging.
It is rather risky for blogger wannabes to get their own domain. Very often, most of them will give up for many reasons and the bad thing is they bought their name as the domain when they started and when they want to sell it, nobody wants it.
Wayne: it is nice to hear some feedback regarding this. Don’t you think PR5 at wayneliew.com is worth an extra USD7.99. With the current google updates, I think it will be hard to get PR5 again. I would be happy I get a PR3-4 next updates.