Here's 7 reasons why Blogspot users should get a Dot Com domain:

1. Unless your blog is already well know, having a blogspot in your url might deter some readers from visiting due to the huge amount of spam blogs created using blogspot.

2. Create a trademark for yourself and your blog by getting your own Dot Com domain.

3. A Dot Com domain definitely sounds better then a blog url with blogspot in it. Besides it's much easier to recall a "Dot Com" blog rather then a "Dot Blogspot Dot Com" blog.

4. If you use blogspot in your blog's url, you are riding on blogspot credibility instead of your own.

5. Get your own Dot Com domain while your blog is still in developing stage. That could to prevent any loss of feed subsribers if you decide to switch to a Dot Com domain during the later stages.

6. I don't know about you, but the changing my blog's domain name from blogspot to Bloggerfocus Dot Com has provided me with the extra motivation to post regularly.

7. Sell your Dot Com domain later for a higher price. Pizza.com was sold for a cool $2 million! That's 10,000 times the amount originally paid by some dude to register pizza.com 14 years ago.

Got more reasons to why you should have your own Dot Com domain name? Post your comments along with your blog's url here. Accepted comments will be added into this list along with your blog's url. 50 Entrecard credits will also be credited to you for each accepted comment.

I announced last night that I've moved officially moved over to a new domain last night, Yay. But I see you asking, "If you have moved over to Bloggerfocus.com, why are you still using the 4u2invest.blogspot.com url?" I wish it was that simple especially for someone who has no relative experience with DNS or CNAME.

Flashing back to last nite, before I went to sleep, I thought I had managed to get the new domain name running on my site perfectly. Everything seemed to be working fine, blogger.com redirected my blogspot page to the new domain name, the links are working fine after configuring my feed to point to the new domain. I went to sleep feeling rather thrilled and satisfied with my mini achievement. Phewww.

I tried accessing my new domain again after waking up this morning, expecting to see my webpage displayed on it. To my utmost dismay, something else appeared. I was served with a page as shown in the picture below:

What on the earth just happened? Did I not point my CNAME to blogger's server? It must have been something that I've done wrong last night. Some setting that I've done at Zoneedit that has not taken affect until the DNS server for Zoneedit informed the rest of the other DNS servers about the changes while I was sleeping.

You see, last night, I tried using Zoneedit in an attempt to associate my CNAME domain (www.bloggerfocus.com) to ghs.google.com as as per stated in the instruction provided by blogger.com. It was sort of a trial and error thingy with Zoneedit (there was no step by step guide on how to perform CNAME setting in Zoneedit) where I tried different types of setting with my CNAME. I guess one of the settings worked until it got deleted by me when I tried out something else a few hours later.

The bad thing about associating CNAME subdomain, in this case www.bloggerfocus.com, is that you don't see the changes instantly. You've got wait for your changes to be propagated to other DNS servers. That could vary from a few hours to a couple of days. My curious testing with Zoneedit has resulted in my domain name going bonkers, firstly associating with google server and then with some other IP. Boo Hoo.

So I decided to take the hosting of my domain name to a more user friendly 3rd party site in order to try associating again my subdomain to google servers. Lucklily, a simple Google search led me to this FREE domain name hosting site called feeddns.afraid.org.

Thanks to last night's trial and error with Zoneedit, lots of google searches on CNAME and FeedDNS user friendly interface, I believe I've managed to solve my problem once and for all. To confirm whether my associating was done correctly, I use this tool called NsLookup to check. If you see the picture below, my query on NsLookup for www.bloggerfocus.com(the subdomain of bloggerfocus.com) shows that it is pointing to ghs.google.com

Now all there is to do is to wait for FeedDNS DNS server to propagate the changes to the rest of the other DNS servers out there. I hope it will work. Fingers crossed.

Note 20 Mac 3.31pm: Sweet success, I've managed to get http://www.bloggerfocus.com/ up working. Now I'm waiting for blogger to redirect all queries from bloggerfocus.com to www.bloggerfocus.com. This function is offered by Blogger.

Note 20 Mac 3.45pm: Blogger has redirected all queries for bloggerfocus.com to http://www.bloggerfocus.com/. This is great. My blog is back running again.

Note 20 Mac 5.00pm: My site is down again. I still don't understand why. Perhaps I should give it some time. Last check with NsLookup showed that my subdomain still point to google server. Shall leave it for 24 hours and see how it goes.

Note 20 Mac 10.00pm : My blog is back to www.bloggerfocus.com again. Redirected all queries for bloggerfocus.com to www.bloggerfocus.com again. Hope the problem is solved.

Note 21 Mac 1.00am : Thing are not settled yet. I resorted to move my domain name hosting back to Zoneedit. I've just remembered something, some changes that only can be done at Zoneedit.

After 3 years of blogging inconsistently, I've come to realize that there are a couple of reasons that lead to the quick demise of my blogs. These are the top 3 reasons why:

1. The lack of readers visiting my blog. I thought I had quality content, but why aren't there any readers after 3 months?

2. The lack of resources to guide me on how to improve my blog outlook. Even if there are, some are just too complicated to understand, not to mentioned implementing them. If improving your blog is that easy, there would be not be so many sites out there offering help and advice.

3. The internet is a cruel world. I've made my shares of mistakes and got demotivated when I realize I was forever blacklisted, especially if it involves abusing advertising. Yes I admit I was naive when I started blogging. The classic scenario of having a standard template with lots of ads in it and hoping for money to roll in.

Looking back, I realized that there many bloggers out there who face the some problem as well. Then it dawn to me that there should be a site that provides solutions and advise for many aspiring bloggers out there.

That lead me to start 4u2invest.blogspot.com.

While producing articles for 4u2invest.blogspot, I had my fair share of researching and reading. The reason? I did not want my articles to be just another cut and paste from a variety of sites. In addition, I wanted my articles to be simple and easily digested by readers.

A week ago, while doing some research for my article, I stumbled upon an article about the benefits of having your own custom domain. I decided to dig deeper. 10 more related articles later, I was convinced that having a blogspot in my url wasn't going to help my blog in terms of reaching a wider audience.

I immediately embarked on a search for a suitable domain. Thanks to MakeWords.com, I was able to find the domain name that I wanted in double the time by utilizing the site's domain name generator. To keep the story short, I bought the domain, registered with ZoneEdit.com, parked my domain in their server and defined my CNAME, did some configuration to the custom domain setting in my blogger account and I was up running. (Believe me, its not that complicated to use your own custom domain while using Blogger.com to host your blog. I shall be coming up with the guide soon.)

That my readers, was how Bloggerfocus.com got conceived.

Cheers and Happy Blogging.

From,
sksee
Bloggerfocus.com