Best Online Business

I've been busy this past few days answering comments on other blogs that I guest posted in. I also made a few friends along the way like Abhi Balani and Holly Jahangiri which I met in www.probloggingsuccess.com. By the way, guest posting and blog commenting is a great way to acquire targeted traffic to your site.

One reason why I am writing this post is because of Blogger. To give you an introduction, Blogger is one of the widely used blogging platform in the world. Alongside with WordPress, Blogger has its own share of users that are satisfied with its services. It's 100% free and easy to use which makes it more ideal for beginners.

If you have seen my "Appearances" page, you will notice that I had a guest post in HellboundBloggers (www.hellboundbloggers.com) entitled "Blogger vs WordPress - Reasons Why You Must Choose Blogger". This post had garnered a quite good number of views as well as comments from various Internet marketers. Each perspectives are unique and very informative. In short, it created a healthy conversation.

After my article was posted, another article in HellboundBloggers was published telling that Blogger is a mediocre platform. You can see that post on this link ->hellboundbloggers.com/2012/01/17/why-blogger-mediocre-platform/. This was a guest post by Gautham and it contains information why Blogger is a mediocre platform.

While the post contains some valid points, it was a biased article against Blogger that aren't researched thoroughly by Gautham. Now I don't want to defend Blogger here, I just want to say my own perspectives with regards to this great platform. He brought up 6 issues of Blogger being a "mediocre" platform. Below are my own analysis that Gautham pointed out in his article at Hellboundbloggers.

1. Limited template options

Blogger platform has thousands of templates to choose from. Templates are everywhere from various web developers that can be found in template sites. All of the templates are free to use unlike paid WordPress premium themes like Thesis and Genesis. So if you are a novice and don't have enough money to spend for hosting and templates, then Blogger is the best option for you.

2. Limited customization options

As I am reading Gautham's opinion about Blogger's customization, I am quite lost about his thoughts. It should be entitled "difficult customization" rather than "limited" because he's basically complaining about the coding of Blogger.

Let me state it clearly - if you want to make your Blogger blog look good, you have to put some great hacks to be able to succeed. It is true that coding is a drawback for beginners but you have to understand that it is the only way you can customize your Blogger blog.

So first off, Blogger is not really "limited" with regards to template and widget customization. If you search in Google with regards to various hacks or codes about Blogger, you will find a lot of tutorial in the Internet. It is not really difficult to follow these hacks as it is very simple and a one time customization effort. Some of the hacks that I applied on my Blogger blog are as follows:

• show elements in home page only
• show elements in post pages only
• adjustments on color and fonts of the template
• reply comment customization
• rotating ads
• customization of templates
• hiding some default widgets
• adding a favicon (not quite difficult)
• simple SEO customizations
• dofollow keyword comments (you don't need comment luv)
  

To give you an idea of how beautiful and customizable a Blogger blog can be, please see Abhi Balani's blog here -> www.oddblogger.com or you can view my other blog which is hosted in Blogger -> www.healthtalkbuzz.com. Limitations in Blogger is a thing of the past although you are right that it will need much more coding to succeed.

3. No plug-ins

This is one of the many issues that most WordPress lovers are saying against the Blogger platform. While the statement is true, it won't certainly hurt your SEO effort if you are managing a Blogger blog. First, Google is now basing their algorithm more on "content" not on SEO useless plug-ins that were mentioned on Gautham's post.

About guest posting, I supposed that you already knew that some Blogger blogs are deleted because of spamming. Spamming is a universal word that can be done in various ways. One of the rumored factors why these blogs are deleted is because they accept guest posts. But I want to make this clear, I am not sure of this so don't take my word for it. So it is better not to accept guest posts if you are in Blogger to avoid deletion of your site.

There are many plug-ins yes, but this will depend on the choice of the blogger if he wants to stay with Blogger or migrate with WordPress. As for me, I don't need plug-ins.

4. No permalink editing

This is one funny stuff from Gautham's post. Permalink has little to do with SEO. This is the problem with paranoid bloggers which are so into SEO. Permalink maybe important five or seven years ago but not today. You can basically add your keywords right on the title which is more important than the link itself. If you are so careless about your posting regimen, you will end up writing for Google, not for your actual readers.

5. CommentLuv does not work on Blogger

Another funny stuff! I mean what is so important about commentluv? Bloggers want these plug-in to just take advantage of the dofollow link juice that they will get. In fact, you will just get comments because they want to market their sites, this means that you will not actually receive real opinions but more biased thoughts towards your post.

CommentLuv is a great plug-in no doubt about that. But still, it's just a comment system and Blogger obviously has its own. By default, Blogger comment is a nofollow system but simple hacks or codes exist to make Blogger's comment system a dofollow. If you want to attract people to comment on your post by just giving a lot of link juice, you can do so by turning off the rel-nofollow attribute on your Blogger blog's template. If you want, I can give you a free tutorial on how to apply this hack.

6. Labels do not get search indexed

Let me get this straight. This issue confuses a lot of bloggers in Blogger platform. First off, the search engines don't index Blogger blogs using label searches because it has a different URL structure. This is included in the robot.txt file which Gautham mentioned on his post.

The actual labels in your blog are indexed right in the blog itself but the label search are not because it will look like duplicate content in the eyes of Googlebots. On the other hand, why would you like your labels to get indexed in Google if you are targeting people to visit your posts? Again, SEO paranoidism in the works people!

Okay, this are just my mere opinions regarding Gautham's post in HellboundBloggers. As you may notice, I never said that Blogger is totally better than WordPress because it is certainly not. The points that were raised by Gautham in his post is just cruel and unfair considering that he owns a blogspot blog.

Let me cite some known issues that concerns people to use Blogger platform.

• it is only for beginners
• it isn't for professionals
• you won't succeed using Blogger
• security issues (suspension and deletion without warning)

Security makes Blogger users to jump ship to WordPress. I don't blame them as I know that it is for their own good. But if you started your blog in Blogger, you just need to follow their terms of service in order to avoid deletion of your account. Blogs that were deleted are considered splogs which promotes paid to click programs (PTC), paid to surf programs (PTF) and paid to write programs (PTW) which are all illegal in the eyes of Google. This is just appropriate to keep things in order, the professional way.

Gautam's article is a good one that fuses healthy interaction between people in different perspectives with regards to blogging platform. I just hate to see people downgrading bloggers from Blogger platform saying that they are not professionals and mediocre. It is not the nicest thing to say as we are all bloggers here in the blogosphere. I am a Blogger user myself and I know that all issues stated in Gautham's post are overrated.

Whether you are in WordPress or Blogger, the most important thing is to offer your readers constant informational content. Platforms will not going to make you rich! It is your effort and skills that are most important if you want to have a successful blogging career.

To Blogger users like Gautham, my advise is simple - love your blogs and they will love you! You won't certainly succeed if you are not satisfied with your tools and effort. The same thing in blogging platforms. If you are in Blogger, love your blog to the fullest and it will certainly make money for you in the long run.

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