I have been thinking about buying a custom domain for a while. I am comfortable with Blogger and I can afford to host any number of posts per day without worrying about the storage, bandwidth and stuff etc. So after 2.5 years, I chose to go with Blogger + Custom Domain option (here’s a tutorial on setting up custom domain in NEW blogger).

I registered www.howtoliveonline.com with godaddy.com and now, this blog is hosted on Blogger with a custom domain name.

Now, if you are still on the wall to go for your own domain or not – here are my arguments for it. I am sure you can find humpteen number of such posts – but I am going to point you to some of the best articles on this topic. Start with Internet duct tape’s The Biggest Mistake a Blog Can Make is Not Owning Its Own Name – or at least remember the fact that it is indeed a biggest mistake a blogger can make.

1. Custom domain is NOT that costly: Is that too much, if I ask you to spend a $10 to get the professional image in the blogospehere?. Cut down a meal buddy, just spend $10 and buy a .com domain (or spend $1 for yourname.info – if it is available). Even if you write 1 or 2 blog reviews, you can earn $10 which would get back the domain cost you spent. I will tell you how to earn that much (for a start) using pay for review sites.

How to easily find a domain name?
My personal favourite for searching a domain is instantdomainsearch – which suggests if a domain name is taken or not as you type the letters. It by default searches for .com, .net and .org domains – the most commonly used domain extensions.

And also, another recent find is Domain Fellow – here you choose a keyword and a category of your website / blog – then it suggests some 20 domain names with added prefixes or suffixes. It also

2. Social web pages: If you are tired of submitting to Digg like social news sites, you know this. The users tend to look down on the blogspot / wordpress domains (I know some bloggers are too good for it). So, why not have a custom domain?

3. Personal Branding: Even if you rip a Blogger template like me, just customize it until it looks very unique and special for your niche area. Design a header image – very important element of the design layout. Well, Sanders says that going further saying you should always buya domain with your name or kids name (they will thank you in the future ).

4. You will get more affiliate sales: I didn’t say this. Mal Keenan says that you can have your own redirection urls for affiliate pages such as yoursite.com/adsense.php – which will mask (I know its evil) the affiliate url and forward the visitors to the affiliate website in a clean way. If you own a domain, you can work with advertisers to have a page for you or promotion code (because, you sound professional) for you and much more . Details here Boost Your Affiliate Profits with Your Own Domain Name

5. You will get more review offers: If you are with PayperPost, BlogforProfit, Blogitive kind of write-review-get-money sites, then it is really worth to invest your first earnings in a domain name. Advertisers choose to go for bloggers with their own domains rather than blogspot or typepad.

In the second part, we will put forth our arguments for Blogger. Oh yes, I know you can use wordpress to customize a lot and build a pro site – it has got extensions and hacks like no other blogging software. But, for dummies like me – who got used to Blogger’s drag and drop design layout and widgets – Blogger serves the purpose. I am planning to host my first wordpress blog (for a photography theme) in 2 weeks time.

6. Blogger hosts everything: Yes, how much ever you write – they host. Texts, images and videos (Youtube or Google Videos) – you can host anything and smoothly integrate with Blogger. No need to worry about storage limits.

7. No limit on Bandwidths: No need to fear for the Digg effects. You need not pay for bandwidth usages.

8. Pagerank will not come down: And if you have a page rank associated with Blogspot blog, when you move to your own domain (Custom Domain Blogger option), will not drastically change (say from Pagerank 5 you can come down to 3 or 4). But, be sure update your links weherever possible (with other blogs and directories). More details at the A Consuming Experience’s post Blogger, Google Apps, GoDaddy: custom domain hosting for blog and site, and buying your domain

9. URL redirects and forwards: When you point your custom domain to Blogger, it automatically redirects http://yourblog.blogspot.com to http://www.yourblog.com. So, if you want to redirect http://yourblog.com to http://yourblog.com, then read this brilliant little tweak The Best Setup for Custom Domains with New Blogger or finance buff’s post Upgraded to New Blogger with custom domain.

Also, there is no problem with the feeds – because Blogger changes the feed url to yourblog.com/atom.xml (instead of yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml) and hence your old subscribers will continue to get their feeds as usual (I dont find any problem with feedburner).

10. And there is Google Apps: Yes, you can add many more email boxes – like feedback@yourblog.com, questions@yourblog.com and more.

Why wait? Shift now to your own domain. If not, tell me why wouldn’t you go for it?

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