Last week, I posted a question that a new reader had for me. She basically wanted to know whether or not to switch her PR3 wordpress.com site over to a wordpress.org. Oh, and in case you were wondering, I asked her permission to post it on here.
Here’s essentially how I responded to her:
First, congrats on your stats!
In hindsight, it would obviously be a much easier decision if your site was newer. If it was me, I would switch over.
Although it may be painful in the short term, I would like my own domain for the long haul. I would look at it as an opportunity to do things better a second time around and treat the first site as an incredible learning experience.
If you’re planning on hanging around for a while, cut over now. The longer you wait, the harder the decision will be.
Many of you were spot on: she should make the switch! Although some hobbyists could simply keep the site and be totally content, it does not make sense to stay at wordpress.com. Among many reasons, you should want to own your own content and showcase your own domain.
She already purchased the domain so she was obviously already leaning toward that decision. All we did was provide an awful lot of reinforcement.
As one visitor mentioned, she should also be leveraging her wordpress.com site to help accelerate her new site’s growth. I would use the wordpress.com site to provide a ton backlinks so it will add related-content support and give it some PR juice. Don’t we all wish we had a head start from a PR3 site when we first started!