Blogging has become a profitable business nowadays. hundreds of thousands of new websites are being created daily. People love to earn money while sitting at home. So, blogging is now top trend priority for every content creator.
There are many things you need before you start an earning blog. You need a Content management system, a domain, a hosting service, experience to write quality posts, SEO skills, and at least an ads partner or other skills to earn money from your blog.
Blogger.com: A free CMS and Hosting provider
There are many companies that provide hosting at varied prices. Blogger.com is a CMS created and maintained by Google. It is an open-source mechanism to create, and handle blogs. Here in this post, I have discussed the pros and cons of Blogger and Blogspot.
If you are confused about blogger and Blogspot, you can read my full post explaining the difference between blogger and Blogspot. Meanwhile, both are interconnected and work together to provide blogging services.
Advantages and disadvantages of Blogger & Blogspot
I have briefly described the advantages and disadvantages of blogger and Blogspot which are free services by Google.
Pros
1. Blogger is free
Blogger is a free CMS with all basic tools. You don't have to pay a fee or any subscription. You can use it free for a lifetime. The hosting is free of cost. You get 15 GB of free cloud storage from Google. This is what makes bloggers more attractive than WordPress to new bloggers.
2. Blogger is easy to use
Blogger is very simple and easy to use. You don't have to take intensive training to handle the interface. It is as easy as working on Wordpad. So, if you have little knowledge of blogging and CMS, blogger is a comfortable tool for you.
You can see some advanced features like inserting multimedia, hyperlinks, heading, and subheading in your posts. You can add bullets and numbers and tables to your posts.
3. Easy to set up a custom domain
If you want to set up your own custom domain on blogger, you can easily do this. The setup mechanism is very easy and there is a lot of textual help available on the blogger help page. You can watch videos on youtube too.
Remember that blogger is associated with the domain blogspot.com. When you create a free new blog at blogger it has to become a subdomain of the primary domain "blogspot.com" So, you have to choose a subdomain name as the URL of your blog. For more details, you should read my post on the comparison of free blogspot and custom domain for your blog.
4. It supports a variety of themes and templates
Blogger gives you many local themes to choose from. You can select a template and use it on your blog. Blogger also supports third-party themes.
You can make changes in the design and layout of your blog. Blogger also has an all-in-one interface for writing posts, customizing your theme or blog layout, handling admins, stats of your blog and earning.
The admin tools and the earing tab are present in your screen. You can quickly move to any segment of the panel.
You can also know where you can find the latest free and paid blogger themes.
5. Easy monetization and ads integration
Being the product of Google, blogger has an inbuilt monetization option. You only enable monetization and the rest of the process is very easy. Blogger automatically adds an ad code in the HTML of your blog.
There is no limit of third-party ads, affiliate marketing and other monetization option in bloggers. Bloggers are free to use any valid and approved monetization method on blogger blogs.
6. Blogger is secure
WordPress and other CMSs provide you with a variety of paid tools to make your website or blog secure. But blogger has its own built-in security feature. No one can hack your blog. But in the case of WordPress and other blogging platforms, you have to purchase security packages costing you hundreds of dollars.
7. Multiadmin, multi authors, and transferable ownership
Selling and purchasing Blogspot blogs is very easy. Blogger allows you to add as many as 10 admins and countless authors to your blog. It is, therefore, a good platform for the people who want to work as a team. It helps the bloggers in solving problems and extending technical supports to remote colleagues and friends.
It is quite easy to change to the owner of a blog. You can easily make anyone an admin and remove yourself from the admin list. You can learn more on how to change the owner of the blogger blog.
8. SEO ready Designs and coding
Blogger's default themes come with inbuilt SEO. You don't need to purchase expensive SEO plugins and services. But if you want to enhance the SEO, you are free to make any changes in the HTML of your theme or in your published or unpublished posts.
You should read the difference between on-page and off-page SEO.
Cons
Here are some disadvantages OR cons for Blogger.
1. You are not the real owner of the blog
Although Blogspot gives you full administrative access and privilege, you are not the owner of your blog- the owner is Google. You create content, make some basic changes in admin settings, publish and share your posts, but you don't have access to the hosting database and resources. You have fewer administrative previlleges.
You only use a dashboard. You don't have access to the root directory of your hosting space.
2. Paid custom domain
You must remember that a free blog on Blogspot is actually a subdomain of the domain "blogspot.com". It does not give you the full identity of your own brand. So, you have to purchase a domain name in order to get your Brand name as your URL.
3. Less help and support for users
From its side, Blogspot has a low level of user guide and support. Although there are many helpful articles related to issues a user may face with free service, yet it is not enough. There are few help forums available by Google to help the users.
There are other nice websites that have written many free articles addressing any type of problems users face with the free Blogspot service. If you have any issues you can search it on Google.
3. Less efficient comment system
For the readers of the free blog on Blogspot, there are two options to sign in to comments: native blogger comment system and URL with name. There is no social media integration. You can also comment anonymously.
There is not option to attach files or multimedia.
4. Fewer additional plugins
The free blog on Blogspot offers very narrow options for choosing any additional third-party plugin. Wordpress has a huge variety of plugins for various purposes- Bloggers simply doesn’t have any. Users have to rely on inbuilt plugins. The full control and desire of looking prominent fail with a free blog on Blogspot.Conclusion
The features that Blogspot lacks are required on an advanced level of blogging. So beginners can fully benefit from free Blogspot service. I am still using free blogs; I am using them for having backlinks to my own websites and blogs.As the SEO of these free blogs is done well, they rank quickly in search engines if you post quality content. Bloggers then use this platform to have more visitors to their own hosted blogs.
For an advanced user, blogger is not the right place. Professional blogging needs many things that Blogger is unable to provide.
For an advanced user, blogger is not the right place. Professional blogging needs many things that Blogger is unable to provide.
I still like the blogger for its simple and organized CMS. When I first used Wordpress, I got confused and it took me months to handle the things on Wordpress. This is how WordPress offers a bulk of options and plugins.
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