In my recent posts on free hosting, I spoke about some of the ways this can be helpful and some of the ways it isn't. I also stressed "beware of free stuff which appears to be helpful." I should add here that this means, don't expect anything for nothing.
All free blog hosts (and free web hosts in general) will only offer you the use of their service if you carry advertisements which benefit them. In terms of free blog hosting, this has varied effects.
The first of these the jury is still out on, but some SEO followers say that free hosted blogs do not get so many clicks via the search engines as those hosted under your own domain on a paid host. This is difficult to assess, because Google, for one, keeps its search criteria close to its chest and is constantly changing the rules. I think that, on the one hand it depends on the quality and age of your blog, but on the other hand, having browsed different search engine ranking systems, it appears that several click to the host rather than to individual blogs. As I said, the jury is still out on that one ....
But what about the different free blogging hosts; how do they compare for access and intrusive advertising?
By far the biggest adult blog host is Thumblogger. Owned by Twan, a friendly guy with some great ideas. When you sign up to Thumblogger (and/or its younger sister, Sensual Writer) you are given free access to several of Twan's other tools, such as RSS2Anywhere, Gallery2Blog and My Feed List, plus (of course...) the ability to use the Blog Submitter, which sends your new blog to 15 adult blog directories. There is also an Adult Webmaster Group, which is one of the most helpful and friendly adult webmaster forums on the scene.
In the case of why Thumblogger is free yet has so much on offer, it is because Twan uses advertising on your blogs. This consists of a bar across the top of the blog which contains adverts and links to Adult Friend Finder, plus a very small link at the bottom of the blog which offers Thumblogger's free blog hosting service. The top bar is reasonably unobtrusive and the colour can be altered to match the colour of your blog (colours are limited though). When your reader scrolls down the page, the top bar is soon out of site, so it isn't really much of an issue. The same applies to Twan's other free hosted adult blog service - Sensual Writer, which is based on the Wordpress theme.
On the other hand, my searches via numerous search engines have found a large majority linking straight to Thumblogger/Sensual Writer rather than to individual blogs. For my part, I find Thumblogger a very useful service, with many quite sophisticated tools for the adult webmaster, but my Thumblogger blogs do not bring me many sales (and vary greatly in the number of clicks they receive), while my Sensual Writer blogs bring me thousands of clicks, but again, limited sales. Could just be me though ...
Twan does have a relatively new free blog host called Sexus Blogs. Being new and fairly undersubscribed (as yet), Sexus has the advantage of loading quicker and the only advertising it carries (at the moment) is a small advert at the bottom for Sexus Blogs. Sexus doesn't have all the 'bells and whistles' of Thumblogger, and enables access to only some of the tools available to users of Thumblogger and Sensual Writer, but it does seem to bring me many clicks and quite a few sales on the one blog I have there. However, getting a Sexus blog listed in Technorati seems to provide problems yet to be sorted...
Other adult blog hosts vary in the way they advertise on your blog. Some, like XLOGZ, put a fairly noticeable banner across the top of your blog, advertising sites the owners of XLOGZ work for as affiliates themselves. To have this banner removed, you would have to allow the hosts to use your blog for a post of their own each week, not an option I think many bloggers take up. In any case, once you scroll down the advertising is gone, and there is nothing on the bottom at all. However, you do have to look carefully at your blogroll when you start up a new XLOGZ blog, as it will contain links to the owners' sites and, as XLOGZ uses Wordpress themes, their links, beginning with an 'A' will be at the top of your blogroll. You do not have to remove them, but again, many bloggers do.
As a blogging host, apart from the aforementioned 'things to look for', XLOGZ is pretty good. They use Wordpress RSS, so you are able to use feeds on your blogs and, as with most other free blog hosts, they give you so much free image space for your banners and blog pictures. They also have their own forum. As a place to promote your sponsors, however, I personally have found little benefit in the way of sales, apart from the fact that the blogs that I have there send surfers to my other blogs and that is why I continue to use them. Scanning of search engines revealed a similar tale to those relating to Thumblogger blogs. XLOGZ gets the clicks in the vast majority of cases - not individual blogs. What I have also found with my blogs on XLOGZ, is that, although some of them have been going as long as my Thumblogger blogs, and have comparable content, their Google Ranking is much lower. Whether this means anything in the long term I wait to see.
Going back to the use of host advertising on your free adult blogs, some services, like Blogtur (which also hosts more 'general' blogs), have a fairly thick advertising bar at the top and bottom of the blog which appears to stand out quite a lot. The only way around this is to pay 50 dollars per month for each blog you host on Blogtur, which, to me, seems like a pretty expensive option! I haven't tried Blogtur, so I cannot say much more than that, apart from the fact that the servers seem quite fast and the blogs are Wordpress based, so pretty easy to use, but it does appear to be limited in any extra tools you may wish to utilise.
Blogbugs is another free blog host I have yet to try. This time mainly because the templates there seem pretty awful and the thick advertising borders top and bottom (I think personally) give the blogs a 'tatty' look. I have yet to find a blog on Blogbugs which I find appealing to look at. This could, of course, be the result of people trying to adjust the blog html without giving much thought to how things look, but there are an awful lot of blogs on Blogbugs which look pretty tacky. I know that many people associate tackiness with porn, but I find that some of the blogs actually hurt my eyes to look at, what with the very bright advertising borders and the poorly displayed content .... Having said all that, however, Blogbugs does offer RSS feed posting, which is an advantage Blogtur (which has better looking templates) appears not to have. If I get really desperate for new hosting, I suppose I could try them out ...
On the subject of obtrusive advertising, one little blog hosting company I use has so much advertising on your blog (mainly in the form of pictures from their own sites), that it must be impossible for the surfer to know where the line is drawn between your blog posts and the sponsor's advertsing. This little company is niche specific (Big Boobs). It is called The Breast Files. I host a blog at this site, purely because it is somewhere I know people looking for big breast blogs are going to go, and I post there to my blog, reasonably regularly and have had a few sales from this source. But I wouldn't recommend it as somewhere to post your only adult blog. Certainly not if you are trying to make a living from adult blogging anyway. You blog has no individual identity whatsoever. It just disappears in a sea of sponsor's theme and sponsor's boob pictures. Even if you click on the title you are likely to miss the actual blog and end up at the host's pages instead, as my blog title is over one side, masked in the constant blue background.
But there is one advantage that I have from posting a blog at the Breast Files, and this applies, in a limited sense as far as I can see, to having a blog at Blogtur and Blogbugs. These hosts all have a directory and list of recently updated blogs. The 'biggies' - Thumblogger, Sensual Writer and XLOGZ do not. At the latter you can post your blog entries in a sea of silence and just hope they get picked up by surfers on blog directories (as we know, they won't get picked up by technorati, even if you do ping them).
This brings me on to the last free blog host I am going to discuss here and that is Porn Live News.
Porn Live News offers a Front Page, where surfers can find all the blogs on the site, via the directory (allotted by category), by a list of recently updated blogs and via the 'top blogs' section in the centre of the page which has pictures from each 'top post' that day. At one time, it seemed as if the 'picture' bit was reserved for particular members, but just lately I have found my blogs up there in glorious technicolour porn along with all the others on the 'top list'. The result - my blogs literally got thousands of extra clicks and a few more sales too. I like Porn Live News!
The layout of blogs on Porn Live News is simplicity itself. There are only three themes to choose from and all look pretty similar! The effect is to make every blog posted there look as if it belongs to a group, rather than being an individual. This could be seen as a disadvantage, but it seems to work out very well. There are no 'fancy themes', but neither are there any horrible clashing ones either. The interface is pretty basic and you need to know a little html to use it effectively, but it isn't hard. The site owners are very generous with their image uploading limits, so most sites have loads of banners and very big pictures, in contrast to other sites, but no garish clashing colours. There is advertising on your blogs, but it is fairly subtle and easily missed when a banner is stuck in front of it.
Porn Live News looks like somewhere you would go to search for porn, and after all, that is what it is all about. It is fairly cheap looking, but it isn't crass. There are no 'bells and whistles', but there is the ability to feed your blogs with RSS and this works reasonably well. Overall, Porn Live News does what it says it is going to do - it hosts your blogs for free and it promotes them at the same time and, in my humble opinion, it does the job better than anyone else.
But when all's said and done (and I've said a heck of a lot here!), It is not an easy solution to use free blog hosting (or free website hosting) only. At some time you will probably think about buying a couple of domain names and getting some paid hosting. It's something which has worked best for me and I am in the majority.
Free hosts are free because they use your creativity to help them sell their goods. It's not a bad system, but it is far from perfect.
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