Monday, July 16

7 Reasons Why Blogger May be Better for your Business than Wordpress

There are  lots of smart folks on the web, and I try to visit their blogs to get the latest updates. For my own blogs, I am a Blooger user. Even with a background in HTML, I've never felt comfortable in Wordpress as I find the need for many widgets time consuming. So I defaulted to Blogger because it is just so easy to use. Also, I figured, if Google owns blogger, why would they give SEO prefernece to Wordpress blogs in their search? I never made sense to me. I visited My Blogger Tricks and found that I am not alone in my preference of Blogger in their post:
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"Wordpress frameworks both free and premium are coded using PHP as the platform language.  Wordpress for this very reason is Programmers' first choice. If you have resources and the potential to spend bucks to hire a developer who could configure and maintain your site, then wordpress is your best option without any doubts. But if you are not a professional in online business and have limited funds, then switching to this platform will cause you both money and pain. This is where individual bloggers fail to understand the maintenance requirements and trap themselves with the headache of tons of MYSQL errors and broken codes."
Here's some more information from their site that I'll bet you didn't know
Five Myths about Blogger
Following are some baseless statements that are often used by many online and this encourages small business owners to migrate to wordpress hoping that things would get better.
  1. Your Blogger blog is not actually owned by you:
    It is true that all your blog posts and pages are stored at Google servers but you have the option to backup all your files and images from the settings menu. You are free to migrate and leave blogger anytime you wish. You are not a captive here and deserve full Copyrights of your content. Your content stays highly secured at Google servers unlike a private-web host who can give you an unexpected dead call anytime possible.  It is a good habit to backup your Blog at least twice a week no matter what platform you use.
  2. Your  blog can be deleted anytime:
    Yes sure why not. If you are running porn, sharing racist content, distributing disturbing or explicit content and violating copyright laws then anyone would deserve a penalty. AdSense deletes the highest number of accounts then any other ad network, this doesn't mean, publishers should stop using it. As long as you are following any company's Terms of services then you are safe and protected. Further as I mentioned above you must keep a backup of all your data no matter you use Wordpress, Facebook or blogger. You are never the true owner of your data if its not backed up.
  3. Blogger blogs are not liked by Sponsors:
    We are using Blogger on this blog and we are running out of space to ad further ad spots. Our sponsors wait in queue. We receive both paid product reviews, campaign promotion offers and dozens of services per month alhamdulillAllah. If sponsors actually didn't like blogger then may be whatever you see on this blog is a lie. Advertisers don't really care whether you are using a free service or paid as long as you provide quality traffic in return to their product, own a loyal readership and good social rankings. All that a sponsor requires is your strong online existence. That simple. 
  4. Blogger blogs have poor SEO features
    This is the most biased kind of statement one could pass against BlogSpot blogs. How can a platform be poorly optimized when it is owned by Google itself? Since blogger blogs are not equipped with programmed plugins that does all the headache on your behalf, you will have to do some minor tweaks to optimize your template. The web is full of blogger tutorials so the community is always generous at helping others. Just recently Blogger team introduced Custom permalinks, 302 redirects, 404 error pages, custom robots.txt and  header tags and much more.Development is always going on and so far Blogger has introduced enough features to turn any blog into a traffic driving engine. Our blogger blog is ranking better on SERPs compared to our wordpress one. We even receive free traffic from the giant blogger directory itself. Google robots index and crawl the blog pages well and easily. Since the RSS feed is auto created and is hosted at Feedburner therefore it is well crawled by Search spiders. Traffic depends on your SEO skills and never on platform.
  5. Blogger blogs look unprofessional:
    Same can be said about Wordpress themes. The choice and customization of the template depends on the blog owner. Anyone would look ugly with a dull and grey dress or suit. There are thousands of well designed and optimized templates that you can download and install for free. Most users being non-techy often find it difficult to customize their templates but now the web is full of high quality designs that will surely turn your free blog into a pro one.
Who Should use Blogger?
Blogger blogs are free hosted journals that is operated by Google. It's the pioneer of blogging industry and has the highest undisclosed number of blogs to date. Millions of people use it for both personal and commercial purpose. The blog that you are reading at this moment is hosted at Blogger with no hosting payments at all. However we pay Hostgator only for the domain costs and extra storage space.
Since blogger blogs are coded in XML and highly secured therefore programmers have limited access to many functions and variables. This is one reason why big firms and professionals who want a easily configured platform don't find BlogSpot interesting. But wait, does that mean you should not favor it too?
Following are some limitations on content storage and bandwidth per user account in Blogger:
  • Blog description = 500 characters. HTML mark up not supported.
  • Number of blogs = 100 blogs per account.
  • Number of labels = 2,000 unique labels per blog, 20 unique labels per post
  • Number of pictures = Up to 1 GB of free storage. Stored at Picasa.
  • Number of posts = Unlimited.
  • Static Pages = Limited to 20 stand-alone pages.
  • Team members (those who can write to a blog) = 100 per blog.
  • Size of pages = Individual pages (the main page of a blog or archive pages) are limited to 1 MB
  • Size of pictures = Pictures are scaled to 1600px
After seeing the above limitations I think even some small business owners would rethink their decision and would switch back to Blogger. Blogger is best for individuals and people who may love to blog for Money or just fun. It will improve your web designing skills because there is a lot to learn here and can apply all HTML4, JavaScript and CSS3 creative hacks to your blog but with wordpress you are limited to plugins alone, no scope for learning in WP. Blogger is flexible, easy to use and highly secured and indeed any Blogger's first choice.
I think this blog looks pretty good, and my other one too. They are both hosted on Google Blogspot. What's your opinion?

2 comments:

  1. Hi Marsha,

    I 100% agree, and guest-wrote an article for Google saying much of the same! many of the sites that we've created you'd never guess were on Blogger including Concentrics Restaurants, Pinch Gallery, Ode Boutique, and many others.

    Something that people also never seem to talk about when promoting WP is the fact that your site's uptime is dependent upon the hosting provider that you choose to pay (Google's uptime is 99.999%) and that you'll need to know how to do periodic security patches and updates (not so with Google).

    Best,

    -David

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I totally agree. Fabulous jobs on those websites. Are they hosted on Google? I need to refresh my coolebaytools.com but an afraid of losing my very solid indexing. Maybe we should talk ;-)

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