Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous blogging or to take arms against a sea of niche bloggers, and by opposing conquer them?

OK, that is enough of my poor paraphrasing of William Shakespeare.

This is as you might have guessed about blogging for profits or just blogging for attention or to get the word out about something special to you or just blogging to vent.

The real question is should you use a free blogging service or spend a little money and set up your own blog on your own domain?

The answer to this question, as with almost all internet marketing questions, is “It Depends”.

If all you are doing is providing your personal opinion about celebrities, politics, your personal life, what your group or organization is doing and not actively seeking to make money with your blog. You will do find with the free blogging services like Blogger.com or WordPress.com

If you are planning on doing blog marketing to create a profitable blog you should really look at this as running your own business and this means you will have to spend a little money.

How many of you actually believe you can run your own business without spending any money?

Seriously, if you try to start a business offline you better have thousands of dollars and a good line of credit.

To start a business online, especially with a blog, is a fraction of the cost of starting an offline business.

For under $50 per month (a high estimate here) you can get your own business up and running online. What offline business can you run for $50 per month?

I told you that $50 per month was a high estimate and what does that include?

• Domain Name= $0.83 per month (based on $10.00 per year)
• Hosting = $10.00 per month. Yes, you can get it cheaper but this is for a reliable hosting account with room to expand and no additional cost.
• Autoresponder = $20.00 per month. This is the best way to stay in contact with you customers and potential customers, without getting your site shut down for spamming.

As you can see that comes up to $30.83 per month and the autoresponder is optional (though highly recommended) when you are first starting out. The $20 that is left over from the $50 estimate can be used for other things like education and advertising.

There are other expenses that you will have but I am guessing you already have those expenses, such as; a computer, internet access and an email account.

Why do you want to set up your blog on its own domain?

The answer to that is because it will make it much easier for you to turn up high in the search engines and get traffic to your site.

With blogs, particularly WordPress blogs, you have these things called plugins that you can easily install that will optimize your blog for the search engines, set up RSS feeds, allow others to bookmark it and many, many other things.

These options are available with most of the free services.

I won’t tell you that you can’t make money with a free blogging service but I will tell you that it will take a lot more work and a lot more time to get where you want to go.

What does this boil down too? Basically, if you are planning to make money blogging you should plan it like a business and budget some money to get your business started.