Is Blogger or WordPress Better for Blogging?

One you have decided to start a blog, there’s a strong chance you will ask the same question that most beginning bloggers ask… Is Blogger or WordPress a better choice to use? In this post I will discuss some pros and cons of each.

1) Blogger

Blogger.com has some good benefits; probably the most obvious one is that it’s completely free. It’s also incredibly easy to set up and use. It only takes a few minutes to get a blog up and running, even for beginners and people with no tech skills at all.

They also have some easy add-on “gadgets” to easily customize your blog. With a few mouse clicks you can add a list of followers, a search box, Google Adsense code to monetize your blog, photos, videos, links, create a poll, etc… There are several things you can add.

The biggest downside of using Blogger is that they own the blog, not you. So they can shut it down at any time for many different reasons, and it does happen to people quite often. You are also limited to what you can do with it because you don’t actually own it. And there’s a lot less options than there are with having your own domain, hosting, and a different blogging platform such as WordPress, which I will now discuss.

2) WordPress

There are actually two ways to create a WordPress blog, but one is far better than the other and that option is what I will mainly be discussing. The first way is to create a free blog on WordPress.com and it will be hosted on their servers. This is similar to Blogger, only worse for most internet marketers, so I am not even going to go into much detail on that option.

When you hear someone say, “WordPress blog” they are almost always talking about the wordpress.org blogging software that you use with your own domain and web host. This is by far the better WordPress option and is the one that gives you full functionality with almost unlimited things you can do with it. You own this type of blog so it’s yours to do as you wish. But this option is not totally free because you do have to pay for hosting and a domain, the actual WordPress software is free to download though.

If you choose the free wordpress.com version they don’t allow you to place commercial advertisements on your blog. It would be for personal use only and no affiliate links or contextual ads are allowed. There are other restrictions as well. This is bad for internet marketers and that’s why I say not to use them. If you host the blog yourself with the wordpress.org version on your own hosting account, you can do whatever you want with it.

Another great thing about WordPress.org is that there are thousands of great themes and plugins available for practically anything you want to do. Almost anything you want to add or change about your blog most likely there’s a plugin to do it. The downside is that it can be confusing to configure and learn what to do with all this stuff if your technical skills are minimal.

Overall, I would say there’s no doubt that using the wordpress.org software with your own domain and hosting is definitely the best option long term. However, you don’t have to choose one or the other – you can use both!

Why not build your main blog on whichever you feel is the best option for you after reading this post and then create another one on the other platform to use as a 2nd tier blog to help feed your main one? That’s a great way to do it. Or run two blogs that share slightly different information and target different keywords within the same niche. No need to limit yourself to one or the other when you can do both to keep from putting all your eggs in one basket.

Having a blog has become an integral part of building a successful internet marketing business so pick a platform and get one started right away!

Posted in Blogging

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