---
title: "Counterpoints to “7 Blogging Beginner Mistakes”"
date: 2007-10-06
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2007/10/06/counterpoints-to-7-blogging-beginner-mistakes/
---
# Counterpoints to “7 Blogging Beginner Mistakes”
> **1. Not blogging on self-hosted blogs.**

Puiu's argument is that freely hosted blogs such as with Blogger and WordPress limit the amount of customization and control you have, and when you do decide to get serious and switch to a self-hosted blog, you lose all your subscribers.

He makes a good point here. A web host plan is fairly inexpensive and provides you with a ton of extra options for your blog. However, if I'm not mistaken, [Lorelle's blog](http://lorelle.wordpress.com) is a WordPress.com blog. And so are many other popular blogs. Content is king. While it's fun to customize and style your blog, the focus of my blog is to communicate, to write, to evaluate and analyze. I think I spend too much time playing with the technology and not enough time crafting thoughtful posts.

You can buy your own domain for $10 and point it to your wordpress.com or blogspot.com domain. You can also route your feed through FeedBurner without having your own web host. Then when you switch to a real hosting plan (but keep your domain), you won't lose the subscribers to your feed.

> **2. Not blogging out of passion, but out of lust for money**.

Puiu says to blog about what you're truly passionate about and not sell your soul for adsense money by writing posts that target keywords such as mesothelioma. While I agree that you have to be passionate about your topic, if you can make sufficient money blogging about mesothelioma, then by all means do it. It beats working a second job. Actually, if you can make good money blogging at all, wow. All the blogging jobs I've seen have offered meager pay. Still, there's nothing wrong with writing about dry topics for pay. In fact, many technical writers do it every day.

> 3. **Design cluttering**.

Puiu says to de-clutter your site from all the unnecessary sidebar content, spammy banners, and unaesthetic colors. I agree with much of what he says here. Cruise around the WordPress theme sites looking for attractive themes -- there's a 10:1 ratio of "eye-hurting themes" (as Puiu says) to pleasing ones.

However, I do value blogs that make it easy to find content -- with top 10 lists, indexes, related posts, classic post lists, and other useful features (which might be considered clutter). And even if the theme is ugly, I mostly read content through my feedreader, which strips out formatting. Content is separate from design.

> **4. Commenting issues**.

Puiu says to allow comments, respond to comments, and comment on others posts. Turning off comments or requiring registration takes away from the basic interactive foundation of blogging. Yes of course commenting should be open and encouraged. But the more popular your blog gets, the harder it is to keep up with comments. Soon you'll be spending as much time responding to comments as you spend writing new posts.