You have known for a long time that your business needs a blog. You have tons of ideas about content. You might even have typed up copious quantities of notes in preparation for your blog ... when you finally get to it, that is.

The question many ask is, where should the blog be hosted?

Whoever owns the domain name of the blog host, owns the value contained in the blog.

In order to answer that question, know that whoever owns, and consequently controls, the domain name upon which the blog is located possesses the value in the blog.

A blog is valuable when it contains valuable information and has serious traffic. If and when your blog grows to that point, and as long as you have control over it, you have a number of options, including placing ads, either yours or someone else's, directly on your blog to generate revenue.

When someone else, either an individual or an organization, owns the domain name on which your blog is located, they own and control any downstream revenue opportunities should they decide to exercise that right. That might be perfectly OK with you, and companies like Google are very magnanimous about it, but just know that you are "planting trees on another person's land". You may well be doing it to, if I may stretch the metaphor further, bring shade or other benefits to your own land or self, but come time to harvest the trees, you have no call on them. They belong to someone else.

When you make a post to a blog whose domain name is owned by someone other than you, you are "planting a tree on another person's land"

The same principle is true of postings you make to blogs not owned by you. Whoever owns the blog gets the value, and whoever owns the domain name owns the blog. A professional blog posting is probably worth roughly $100, so consider it a real gift. (I'll talk about the dollar value of a blog posting in a future posting.)

• Professionally run businesses use a Content Management System (CMS) to manage their website. There are poor ones and there are excellent ones. SiteLeads.net website is managed using a CMS called Big Medium. Like any good CMS, blogging functionality is built right into Big Medium. The blog on SiteLeads.net is a part of the fundamental structure of the website and it is therefore owned by the organization that owns the domain name: SiteLeads.net.
• Look at the domain name of your blog. For example, the blog at http://portfolio-living.blogspot.com/ is owned by the owner of the domain name blogspot.com. Even though I can, for the moment, control the ads I place on that blog, that possibility could be changed in the future by the owners of blogspot.com
• If you are posting to a newspaper or other blog, know that the newspaper owns the value you create. They should be very thankful.

Having said all that, it is good blogging practice to make high-value blog posts to high-value and high-trafficked blogs in your own name. This can drive traffic to your own site, but more importantly, it will show that you make good faith contributions to communities interested in your subject.