We received a question yesterday from one of our One Night Site users. Chances are there are others out there with the same question, so as part of our Ask a Pro service we’re going to share the answers with you here.

What is a Pro Blog? And what are the benefits of building one?

I’ll answer the question in 2 parts.

1. What is a Pro Blog?

Firstly, there are a few ways that a pro blog differs from a regular blog.

1. A Pro Blog is a blog created with the intention of either promoting a business or making money by being a business in it’s own right.
2. Pro Blog’s have professional designs that make them stand out from the crowd. There are 2 ways to achieve this:
3. Pay a graphic designer several thousand dollars to design you a new site
4. Buy a Pro or ‘Premium’ Wordpress Theme for $20-$100
5. A Pro Blog is hosted independently either via a 3rd party hosting services (most common), or hosted on a companies own private network (for very large companies).

2. What are the Benefits of a Pro Blog?

According to blogherald.com, there are now over 70 millions blogs on the web. That’s a lot. The large majority of them are personal bloggers or people starting out with blogging without really understanding their options.

Pro Blogs Differentiate You & Your Business

If you use a free blog, you are going to look exactly the same as a good portion of those 70 million other blogs out there, as your choices of blog theme (design) is more limited, and people tend to choose one of the standard ones from a list of about 20-30 templates. Buying a Wordpress theme is an inexpensive way to ensure you are different and are presenting yourself in the best possible light.

Planning for the Future – The SEO Dangers of a Free Blog

There are 2 ways to get a Wordpress blog. Wordpress.com offers a free hosted service where you can set up a free blog in minutes (and look like everyone else). This is fine for someone who just wants to get some writing experience or to share there thoughts with friends and family and has no desire to profit from their blog. Alternatively, you can get the Wordpress software from Wordpress.org and host the blog on your own website (most hosting companies also have 1-click installation so you don’t even have to know how to do it).

But, and here’s the important part, if you set up a free hosted blog on Wordpress.com (or Blogger.com), the URL for your blog will be yourblogname.wordpress.com (instead of yourblogname.com if you host it independently). Now imagine 6 months or a year down the line. Your blog is starting to gain a lot of attention and you want to start making money from it. There are 2 problems:

1. Commercial blogs are not allowed on the free hosted services – so you can’t make a business out of it.
2. If you now decide that your company deserves it’s own domain (yoursitename.com) you will have to transfer it all over to your new domain via 301 redirects. Redirects within a site are fine, but moving from yourblogname.wordpress.com to yourblogname.com means you can lose your Google Page Rank and a lot of the search engine power you have built up since you started blogging, which can cripple your traffic and put you months behind.

In a nutshell, it pays to do it right from the start, and that means setting up an inexpensive hosting solution with your own domain. This can cost you as little as $5/month and is well worth the money.

You can build your own pro blog before bedtime with One Night Site’s free 14-step guide to a pro Wordpress blog.

I hope that answers your questions regarding a Pro Blog. If anyone would like to discuss this subject some more, please feel free to comment below.

Cheers

– One Night Site