WordPress.com or WordPress.org – What's Right For My Business? Part I

Ok, this is important. We need to talk about it so you don’t go running off and starting a WordPress.com blog for your business.

I get this question a lot , and it seems like a simple question, right? It really is simple once you understand the benefits of each and how they are similar, yet very, very different.

Let’s look at WordPress.com first.

Benefits:
- It’s free (yay!)
- It’s WordPress (woo hoo!)

Negatives:

- You’re limited in the number of themes and plugins you can use. Branding is difficult.
- Your blog is not on your domain. If you ask me, yourcompanyname.wordpress.com looks amateurish. You don’t own WordPress.com, so why would your business blog be there? I would never suggest to a client that they use WordPress.com. Ever. If it’s not good enough for me, it’s generally not good enough for my clients. If you’re serious about your blog, go with the serious option.

- WordPress.com is actually run by a company called Automattic, and they have some very interesting terms of service that you must agree to when you sign up for a free WordPress.com account. Let’s take a look:

“By making Content available, you represent and warrant that: the Content is not spam, is not machine- or randomly-generated, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);”

Two parts of this scare me: “…unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites…” and “…or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites…”

Automattic doesn’t define “unwanted commercial content” – so if you’re blogging about a new product your selling on your main business website site and link to the product page from your WordPress.com blog, you may find you have violated the terms of service.

Also, innocuous links back to your main site from your WordPress.com blog may be considered an attempt to “…boost your search engine rankings” since links are good for ranking.

And if you think that’s bad, try this term on for size:

“Automattic may terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately.” (Emphasis added to scare the crap out of you.)

So let’s get this straight…you work your butt off to create good content one a business blog, and one wrong link or mention of something commercial and it could all disappear? Exactly. Is this what you want for your business?

Now, I’m not saying you’ll lose all your posts and access to your account, but why take that kind of risk with your business?

Here’s another thing to consider. Let’s say you have your WordPress.com blog for three years and have lots of yummy links to it and from it and let’s say it has pretty go search engine ranking for some sweet keywords. What if THEN you decide you want to move your blog to the self-hosted .org option. Migration is a bitch if you do it yourself…you’ll probably end up paying someone to do it for you. Plus, you’ll need a new theme, new widgets, new coding – see where I’m going with this?

It’s a pay-now or pay-later deal. Creating a WordPress.org blog on your own domain isn’t that difficult or expensive. If you’re serious about blogging for your business, it’s actually an investment that produces a return on your investment.

Coming up…part two.