Blogging Wars -
Wordpress Vs Blogger Part 1
Author: Gobala Krishnan
There's a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has
nothing
to do with bloggers dissing each other on their
respective
websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by
several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging
platforms. The average newbie now has "too many" options
to
choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is
hotter
than ever.
At my website and blogs, I'm always asked the question
"Is
Wordpress better than Blogger?". The answer, of course,
is
"Yes". But to really understand why, it's important to
look at
both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one
you
really need.
You also need to understand that there are different
versions
of Wordpress, the earliest now termed as "Wordpress" at
Wordpress.org, and the hosted version similar to Blogger
now
termed "Wordpress.com" which is of course available
Wordpress.com. Only the latter comes with free hosting
on a
sub-domain account. We'll discuss this in Part 2.
For Part 1 of this article, we look only at the
self-hosted
version of Wordpress. Here's the comparison scale:
1) Ease of Set-up And Use
Yes, it's much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com
and
get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10
minutes
flat. Once you're set-up you can start posting
immediately. If
you want to add a designer's touch to your blog, there
are also
tons of blogger templates available for free.
| Installing
Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don't know what you're
doing. Since you're going to host it on your own account, you'll need to
download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a
database, and run the configuration script. |
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However, if you know which hosting account to get,
you can
choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do
a
one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your
Wordpress
platform.
2) Customization & Advanced Use
Blogger doesn't allow categories. You can't sort your
articles
into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the
platform. With Wordpress, not only can you add
categories, you
can also display each category differently on your main
page.
In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your
Wordpress into a magazine-like portal.
Publishing with Blogger can extremely frustrating. It
can take
forever to post articles, especially if you're making
changes
to the entire website. With Wordpress, publishing is
much
faster, although if you load your system with all kinds
of
bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating.
With a Blogger account, you can get additional features
like
"Shout Boxes" that improve interaction on your site. You
can
also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you
can add
to the core template files. However, that's as far as
you can
go with Blogger.
With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche
as that
may sound, not only can you get themes, additional "plugins"
and
advanced tools, you can also extend Wordpress to far
beyond just
a blogging platform.
The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete,
user-friendly Content Management System or CMS. Unlike
complicated predecessors like PHPPostNuke, B2, Mambo or
even
Joomla, Wordpress is user friendly. Plus, the
availability of
source codes in this open-source system coupled with a
strong
community makes it possible to use Wordpress as an
article
management system, classifieds system, direct-selling
site and
even a paid membership site.
4) Copyrights and
Ownership of Content
I started with Blogger and I won't say that it's bad. But after a while
I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here's why: Google Owns
Your Content |
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Google has the authority to shut down your
account without
warning if they don't like what you're blogging about.
You
don't have absolute control over your own blog. With
Wordpress,
you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your
own
account. You have full control over your content.
With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not
Wordpress.com),
you're free to write about anything you want, and use
the
software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to
publish to your own domain, but they still own the
database
that holds your content! Don't forget that!
5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic
There's this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger,
they
tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won't say that this is
illogical, but from my experience, there's no such
favoritism.
I've heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and
ranking
high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger
users.
As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.
When you post in Blogger, you can only "ping" a limited
amount
of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you
can
ping as many blog directories as you want, and start
getting
more traffic.
As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only
slightly
ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and
building
large amounts of traffic.
6) Money-Making Potential
There's no doubt that it's easier to get started with
Google
Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can
now
apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not
entirely
surprising considering the fact that both are owned by
the same
company.
With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default
installation is
not enough. You'll need a couple of plugins and even a
better
theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However,
this
seems to be getting easier and there's even "Adsense
revenue
sharing" plugins around that allow you to share ad
revenue with
other contributors and writers for your blog.
When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense
websites,
you'll soon discover what I mean. It's something you
need to
experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though
- when
you go Wordpress, you don't go back.
About The Author: Gobala Krishnan is a micro-niche
specialist
that coaches Internet marketers to cash in on profitable
markets using Wordpress and secret blogging tactics. Get
started now by reading a copy of his report "Wordpress
Adsense
System" at http://adsense.easywordpress.com
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