Wordpress.com proves why you’re always at the mercy of free blogging platforms

The news that Automattic has finally rolled out email subscriptions on WordPress.com goes to prove the point that, no matter how good a free blogging platform is, you’re always at its mercy when it comes to features.

That might sound obvious, but it’s something that’s easy for new bloggers to overlook.

While it’s wise to keep a blog simple, features such as allowing your readers to subscribe via email are near essential when it comes to marketing, because many visitors don’t know what RSS or care to learn how to use it.

If you host your own blog, it’s not a problem because you can either find a plugin to handle email subscriptions, or get Feedburner, Aweber or some other third-party service on board, because you have the ability to add custom code.

You might think I’m about to negate the arguments I raised in my “Who is Posterous good for?” post. In fact, Posterous — though socially well-connected — currently offers even less features than WordPress.com, though it’s arguably a lot easier to publish multimedia rich content to.

I think the free blogging platforms are very good for allowing new bloggers to cut their teeth, despite the issues surrounding starting a blog without a custom domain name and then having to migrate later if the blog becomes popular (all major free blogging platforms allow you to use your own domain name, but I doubt many newbies take advantage of that).

Seeing what I consider basic functionality only just added to WordPress.com proves that, if you want total control over your blog, you do need to self-host.

And, if you’re serious about building a business from blogging, but don’t have all the technical know-how just yet, it’s still worth getting help to host your own blog, because it will be infinitely more customisable further down the line when you decide to tailor it to exactly your own needs.

Hats off to Automattic for adding this feature to WordPress.com. Just remember that you can do so much more with your own version of WordPress.

Who is Posterous good for?

Posterous has caused quite a stir in the blogging world, because it all but removes even the moderate level of complexity that other blogging platforms tend to put in the way of simply publishing.

The service has even managed, somehow, to alter my view a little on using free, non-self-hosted blogging platforms, though I’d still say it’s not for everyone.

The fact is, most people can benefit from having a platform that’s easy to post multimedia content to on the fly and integrating with social networks even if they are au fait with the likes of WordPress, TypePad and Movable Type.

Of course, personal blogs will work just fine on Posterous, but also higher flying media professionals who want to share a lot of content with people, are often on the move with their smartphone, record and/or link to a lot of videos and podcasts, and whose personal brand is based more on the raw content than slick design.

Posterous designs aren’t shabby, by any means, and can be customised to a certain extent, but even if you use your own domain name or subdomain, it’s still obvious you’re hosting with a third party.

If you want to make money directly from your blog, by displaying ads for example, then you’re out of luck with Posterous (at the moment) though there’s no obvious restriction on linking to affiliate sites.

However, if you run a number of blogs on other platforms, Posterous could well be an easy platform for publicising them. With good social media integration, while your Posterous blog may not directly lead to increased revenue/sales, it’s another way of driving visitors to other projects.

You can post pretty much anything to Posterous, but it does seem to lend itself well to shorter or media rich posts. It’s also ludicrously easy to set up multi-author blogs, just by authorising the email addresses of all your writers.

Even if you use your domain for other types of content, such as a forum or a shopping cart, if you can change your domain name records you can set up a subdomain for the blog portion of your site, which then redirects to the Posterous servers, while the rest of your content remains on your own server.

In fact, the only time I’d suggest avoiding Posterous (unless you’re paranoid about the service shutting down and your content disappearing) is if you have a very strong design identity, or you need a more complicated blog setup that only self-hosting will allow you.

In reality, most of us could do with cutting down the complexity of our blogs, and Posterous might just be one way of doing that.

What do you think of Posterous? Do you use it for any of your blogs?