77. Wrapping Up Your Blogging Questions

Stephanie Royer (00:00)

You've asked a lot of great questions about blogging this year, but we have a few more to wrap up before we head into 2026.

Welcome back to the podcast. If you missed last week's episode, we're spending this month wrapping up all of the awesome questions you've submitted this year. Last week, we tackled some great Pinterest related questions. Today, the focus is on some of the nuts and bolts of blogging. So let's dive right in.

I had a listener send in a couple of great questions about blog post images. Here's what she had to say. About how many images should be in each blog post? What is the ideal size for those images? Should they all be optimized for Pinterest? Now, I think blog post images are really interesting because they are essential for a good user experience, but they can also negatively impact user experience by slowing your website loading time.

So when it comes to deciding how many images to include in a blog post, it's important to maintain a balance between supporting your talking points with images while also making sure that your posts load quickly.

As a general rule of thumb, I start my blog posts with the featured image. The optimal size of a featured image will vary based on factors like your website theme.

After the featured image, I try to have one image for every major talking point because this breaks up the text and it encourages users to scroll. I like to crop these blog post images to a square for my own website. And the reason I do this is because there are plugins that you can use to block pinning for your non-optimized images.

A lot of people love those plugins like Tasty Pin. I don't like relying on plugins because I never know if they're just going to disappear or stop working. So I like to go into the non-optimized images and do that in the code. But as we all know, life gets busy and sometimes I don't get around to doing that when I just want to get a blog post out the door. And so, in that case, I like to have my blog post images cropped to a square because I know that at least those will look okay in the Pinterest feed if a website visitor decides to pin that. I do not like to use landscape ratio images on my website because if a user pins one of those, it will basically just look like a little sliver in the Pinterest feed.

I don't feel the need to have only those long pin graphics on my posts because I personally don't enjoy that as a user. So I choose not to do that on my blog posts. I typically just include one long pin graphic at the end of the post and then include a direct invitation to pin. And this is the graphic that I make sure is optimized for Pinterest.

I might include another pin size graphic maybe in the middle of the post if it's a really long post, but I have found that that's enough.

And I know I've kind of just dabbled in all three parts of this question. So I wanted to say optimal size of blog post images will vary based on the size of your website display. So what matters the most is that your images enhance the content of your post. They look good on mobile and they serve a purpose for the user.

And so if you're wanting very specific optimal sizes, I would suggest looking help documents of your theme, because they will often have suggestions. You can also just Google your theme and then put optimal image size, and you'll probably get some articles for that as well, especially if you use a pretty well-known theme like cadence or Astra or something like that.

So let's move on to our second question, which comes from a listener who is curious about the impact a free blogging platform could have on potential visibility. He asked, will we get traffic and be visible if we use a free blog site such as Blogger? Or does paying for a website help our blog stick out in search results?

I want to answer this question in two parts. And so the first part, when he asked, will we get traffic and be visible with a free blog site? The answer is yes, you can get traffic to a free blog. You just have to make sure that you take care of the SEO best practices and make sure Google can crawl your blog so that you can show up in search.

With these all-in-one platforms, I think a lot of times we just get on there and start blogging and kind of don't want to investigate some of those check boxes and things that are available. So if you can roll up your sleeves and kind of go in the back end and make sure that you've addressed all those SEO best practices, you definitely can get your website indexed and get some traffic.

You can also claim your Blogspot domain on Pinterest or really any free blogging platform as long as you can access the source code And once you've claimed your domain, you can have a business Pinterest account, you can create pins that direct to your blog. And so it really is possible to get traffic to a free blogging platform.

But now for the second part that I wanted to address, does paying for a website help our blog stick out in search results? And my answer is yes. And I also want to say that a free blogging site can also help you stick out and search results, but not necessarily in a good way.

In my own life, when I'm scrolling through a page of search results and deciding what I'm going to click on, my eyes naturally skim the URLs of the post as part of my decision making. It's a subconscious thing, but when I see a domain that ends in blogspot.com, that is all I see. I don't notice the brand name at all. I then just keep scrolling. There is just something about Blogger that can impact user perception of your brand and they could be less likely to click. Because your domain is part of the curb appeal of your website.

Authority is more important than ever when it comes to ranking in Google search. Even if you're the world's foremost authority on a topic, that authority can be undermined by using a free domain. But there are a few more drawbacks of using a free blogging platform, and that actually leads to our final listener question.

We're going to wrap up one final listener question today. This listener asked, "Is it worth it to change my wordpress.com website to a wordpress.org website?" So before we dive into the answer to this question, I wanted to do a quick refresher on the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. Wordpress.com is a free blogging website like the ones we've already discussed in this episode.

You can get started for free, but you will have a domain that says WordPress.com at the end of it. You can pay for additional features and customization, but at the end of the day, it's basically like paying to update the flooring and paint in a house you're renting. Your internet real estate is not your own.

On the other hand, WordPress.org is the free software that you can use to build your own self-hosted website. So just like building your own home, there's a lot more work and expense involved upfront, but then you have complete ownership and control of the final product.

So now that we've made that distinction, let's get to the actual question. Is it worth the effort to make the switch to self-hosted WordPress?

So answering this question is basically deciding if you want to rent your blog space or own it. And in doing this, there are three things to consider. And interestingly enough, these are also things that you might consider when you're deciding between renting or buying a home to live in.

The first thing to consider is whether this is going to be long term.

Our family has moved around a lot for my husband's job, but we've always purchased our homes because we were going to be in each location long enough for it to make sense. If you plan to dabble in blogging to see whether or not it boosts your TPT sales, I would keep that experiment confined to a free blogging platform. Or if you're seeing traffic on a free platform and you want to convert to self-hosted, just make sure you plan to stick with it for a while after the switch. Otherwise you likely won't see much of an ROI on that time and effort.

The second thing to consider is does my income support the expense? The difference between owning and renting a home is more than just comparing a mortgage payment to a rent payment. There are so many additional costs and financial risks associated with owning a home compared to renting. The same is true for building your own self-hosted website. You want to make sure that the additional costs of your website won't be a hardship for your business budget.

The third thing to consider is if you need or will need more room to grow. When our family made our most recent move, we considered renting in part because we just weren't sure how long we would be staying. But we quickly discovered that there were no rental options that provided the space we needed for our family and our large dogs. So we decided to purchase a home that was large enough for our family, but needed a little bit of work.

That way we had the physical space that our family needed. But it also gave us the opportunity to increase the return on our investment by fixing up the house while we live in it.

WordPress.com really doesn't give you a lot of room to grow. It serves a purpose and gives you a place to blog without a lot of effort or cost upfront, but you're pretty confined to the features available. However, if you're ready to grow and add more income streams to your business with your blogging efforts, you will want to switch to self-hosted WordPress. For example, if you'd like to monetize your blog with display ads, Premium Ad Networks will only approve your website if it's self-hosted.

If you want to create your own online store for your products, you'll need a self-hosted website. The best growth for your business will come from owning your internet real estate. But just like the age-old question of renting or purchasing a home, you have to decide if it's the best time to make that investment.

I have loved answering these questions today. I hope they've given you some food for thought as you make decisions about blogging for your own business. As I mentioned last week, I really am clearing out our queue of listener questions this month. We are going down to zero.

You can give us a head start for next year by submitting a fresh listener question on my website. Just head over to StephanieRoyerSolutions.com slash podcast to submit a question and I'll answer it in the new year.