Blogspot BloggingBlogging on blogspot has of late become  popular in Kenya. More and more people are taking to blogging while there are those still wondering what the fuss is all about.

There are those who have been blogging in Kenya for a long time and majority of these blogs are on blogspot. These are “the Kenyan Bloggers.”

This term blogging has lots of different meaning to different people, for those of you reading this article and are wondering what I am on about, let me try to demystify blogging by explaining what my understanding of blogging is or the meaning of a blog.

 Blogging on Blogspot: What is a blog?

In the simplest words to blog is to write your opinion, idea,valuable information and/or advice on a webpage. This webpage can be on a blog type of a website or part of a website.

Passion BloggingThe main difference between the normal Kenyan websites (brochure websites) and  a blog website or the blog part of a website to  is the need to constantly update or post articles. To keep a blog growing you have to update it regularly.

A blog can have the same functionality as your personal diary. You can combine text, pictures, video and music (audio content). Most blogs allow visitors to leave comments on the articles written therein. You can also have links to other webpages or websites on your blog.

Blogging can therefore be defined as creating content for your webpages.

People blog for various reasons, there are those who blog to educate, others to share their personal experiences hoping to help others going through the same, others need a platform to vent or critic especially on politics or local news while other just blog to belong and have nothing valuable to share!!!!! (how sad).

All in all blogs have become an integral part of internet marketing.

Why a blog on blogspot?

For some strange reason,  a vast majority of the Kenyan blogs I have read are set up on Blogspot. This makes me wonder whether I am missing something? To satisfy my curiosity, I went out of my way to find out why Kenyan bloggers have this liking for blogspot, so let me share some of my findings.

One of the main thing i noted is that to have blog on blogspot is as easy as sign up for a email account and is FREE, all the more reason most people are attracted to it. Blogspot.com is a Google web publishing service under Blogger, which is also hosted by Google. So when you setup a blog on blogspot you get a .blogspot.com subdomain, meaning that this blog is only your for the period of time Google keeps Blogger on board.

Google has made it extremely easy to set up a blog, therefore I understand the  attraction for those IT challenged to turn to blogspot for solutions.

Can you set up a blog elsewhere, other than on blogspot?

There are other blog platforms you can host your blog on for free, but a  friend rightfully enlighten me, there is nothing free in life more so  on the internet. So why not own your blog.

Buy your own domain name and set up a simple blog and start putting your thoughts or whatever you want to share with the rest of us down.

When I talk about buying your own domain name and setting up a blog, you must be thinking how do I expect you to set up a website with no IT background, believe you me, you do  not need to be IT savvy to be own and run your own blog on a domain name you have bought.

The advantages are numerous, just like owning your own home verses living in a rental house, and just like a rental property the landlord can decide to demolish the structure or transfer ownership. So what happens to your blog then?

By the way I am not advocating you damp your dot blogspot, it is a nice subdomain to have but rather challenging you to work towards owning a piece of the world wide web by buying a domain name preferably a dot com and set up your blog website on it.

so let your blogspot be the last rental property you cling to.

Written by: 

Pauline is the CEO at Allen Cole, also consults for iWork and Elite Writers Hub. She works with small and medium size organizations to increase their visibility online through corporate blogging, content creation, website development and social media engagement.