You read the title and went.. huh? I was watching a commercial on Ronald McDonald House Charities and my mind went to those small change boxes of going to charity. You do not think about it and you simply put the change in that box. The change is then collected and given to the charity. But who gets the tax exemption from it. Not you of course, but McDonalds does. Your charity just became a tax deduction for either McDonalds or its franchise (not sure of the exact accounting involved as I do not own a franchise.). Just by taking a few extra steps, you could do a decent donation through Ronald’s website and actually count the donation as a tax deduction for your own hard earned money.

Well, the same logic can apply to blogging through third party domain names. Now every authority site is out there saying claim your blog. Since we are an authority, your blog will show up in search engines faster and you will get more traffic. Of course many lazy people take the easy way out and sign up to these blogs. Just in real estate internet world, I can claim 10 main authority community sites offering agents with their own free blogs. Of course this shortsighted strategy misses some long term issues. What is the catch??? Well actually there are plenty of catches based on the type of blog.

#1 You are not branding yourself but the other domain’s website. Blogfreecommunity.com/realtora.php does not exactly say realtora.com, does it? The blog will never truly belong to you as it is hosted in a third party domain.

a)If that website ever is sold, or owner dies and your blog suddenly dissapears, all your work goes puff.

b)Your blog is an advertisement tool for third party domain to encourage your competition in your area to blog alongside you under the same domain.

c)Majority of the links that are gained due to your creative work helps increase the authority of the hosting domain name rather than yours (assuming there are links to your site from that domain name or else the entire authority is of the domain name and not your site).

d) Your creative work usually brings the sale/lead not to you but to the blog design owners (though I have heard of a few minor exceptions.).

#2) Housevalues just spent 2.75 million dollars to be a minor shareholder in ActiveRain (the link has a a point to it). One of the main reasons for funding is to fund Active Rain’s “outside blogging platform”. The plan behind the platform is simple. Active Rain has 66K+ members and quite a bit of them want to brand themselves with their own domain name. Of course, a blogging platform has a price that comes along with it. In Active Rain’s case they claim it to be 100 bucks a year per agent.

Of course, such a platform will also come along with their ad text link at the bottom of the page. It will also always be hosted in a third party server because the platform provider will always have a right over some “proprietary” coding. Point a and b (from above #1) still apply. Point c is partially true as you still give a sitewide link to the blogging platform owner. Only Point d gets a little better in terms of lead generation.

As I quote a fellow real estate agent buddy of mine, that blogging platform is 2.75 million dollar worth of link buy for Active Rain. Of course, it is wrong to go after only Active Rain as there are dozens of paid blogging platforms. Even Wordpress leaves a link as default. The difference is though ladies and gentlemen, you get to play with the code and remove the WordPress link. You can customize the code and the look as Word Press is as much as you want. Also WordPress is mostly free (except for a few true power blogger options which 99% of bloggers donot use.). Oh yea, and the code is yours to keep.