I created a new real estate blog. http://njre.wordpress.com. I'm using one of their free templates. in fact, I'm not hosting it myself. Do you think using the template hurts my marketability? If I don't host it myself, what could be some of the drawbacks?
The only thing i'd suggest is to have it on your own URL ie blog.company.com rather than http://njre.wordpress.com/. Oh and take off the tag line "just another wordpress blog" from under New Jersey Real Estate.
I've seen alot of sucessful people use a free template on there blogs. but as Warebloke said, try getting yourself a seperate domain name instead of a .wordpress.. for some reason people dont seem to take non self hosted blogs as serious as private hosted blogs. Regards
That is it exactly. Buy your own domain name, somewhere like Lycos, Godaddy etc then simply follow the instructions on wordpress to change the domain name but try to keep to the format blog.company.com rather than company.com/blog
I was in the same place that you were, i thought i could make money from using a free blog and a wp template. I later thought about it and talked to some friends. Its best to wait to by your own domain and hosting. you'll get a lot of traffic because of many reasons.
move ur site at new server for increasing site visitors and keyword and site rank. yeah u r right sometime free templates don't work but u can use in future when u will have budget then get ur own.
What about template, i don't think it hurts, because you found good one, if you would use default that definitely would hurt.