What Prompted the Move to My Own Domain

Moving Working at Home on the Internet from the Blogger Platform to my own domain using WordPress has been rewarding and frustrating at the same time. Especially when you consider the fact that I have been Blogging since October 2005. I had well over 300 posts on Blogger and had established a bit of a following.

Changing after so long (and having about 100 links from other Blogs) was a difficult decision to make. But, I think in the long run taking the risk of moving to my own domain will have a positive overall effect on Visits, Pageviews and SEO in general.

These are the Major considerations I took into account in making my decision.

~~ Ego… I always wanted my own domain.  When I first started out I looked into setting something up, but didn’t have what little money it takes to get a server and domain name.  All in all it is a good thing that I waited because I most likely would have tried something with MCBS Consulting in the URL.  That would not have been any better for SEO than using the mcbsconsulting(dot)blogger(dot)com that I ended up using for almost 9 months.

~~ Blogger… If you use Blogger or have followed my posts for the past few months, you know that they have been having major problems.  They have been down at least once a week, sometimes for days at a time. Since I try to post at least once a day, this caused problems in trying to write and post as often as I needed.

~~ SEO… Working at Home on the Internet is what this Blog is about, and even using Keywords (difficult on Blogger) and Titles for optimization, the Search Engines also look at the URL.  Since the old one was mcbs and on blogger, it may have confused the spiders when they crawled, not being able to see the correlation.  The new URL should help at least in this aspect of SEO.

~~ Stagnation… Working at Home on the Internet with the Blogger(dot)com URL reached a plateau around 2 months ago.  It hasn’t really varied from day to day, week to week since.  The only exceptions were the two interviews I did with Liz Strauss and Darren Rowse.  Most of the visits I got for 2-3 days were referrals to read the interviews, then right back to the stagnant level I was maintaining. I hope the move to workingathomeinternet.com help to improve SEO enough to boost Visits and Pageviews from the various search engines.

There are a lot of other less dramatic reasons for changing, like being able to pre-post and the ability to use categories with one click among others. Once I considered all of the available options, I think I made the right decision in moving.

Even with the potential loss of readership and fewer pageviews, I would recommend to anyone considering using the Internet for ANY Business, get your Own Domain when starting out. It is a lot easier and less stressful than trying to change from an established site hosted on someone elses domain.