What You Need to Know About Using a Free Blogging Platform
Do Free Blogging Platforms Work as a Promotional Tool?
Simple answer is yes of course they do.
Free blogging sites will work in all situtation's.
Here are the advantages and disadvantages of using a free blogging platform.
Advantages
The downsides of owning a free site are:
What's the Best Option?
If you're newbie, a free platform is a good way to learn the ropes. If you're serious about making money, you might want to consider going down the free platform route but adding your own domain name. This will keep your costs down, and will give you a website with good security, and basic templates that you can customise.
Why Blogger is a Good Platform to Start Blogging
When Google acquired Blogger way back in 2003, few people would have imagined it would still have existed today. But it's alive and well, and like many bloggers (myself included) still the best platform to use for blogging.
Like many blogging platforms, Blogger is no different, keeping up with the ever changing world of technology, it manages to stay ahead of the game. This is because its part of the Google family, updating many of its features, including web security, which allows its users a security with Https on all blogs.
Sure there are plenty of blogging platforms to rival Blogger, but unlike it's competition, Blogger is still free, and always meets every situation with more than enough capability.
Here are 9 reasons why you should use Blogger:
1. It's Free
As I stated above, yes it's totally free, and is therefore cheaper than everyone else. But that doesn't mean you can't customise your domain name.
2. Effortless Domain Integration
At the moment Blogger doesn't offer this option, they do provide you with instructions on how to customise your domain name. Your old Blogspot address will also do a simple redirect to your new domain name with the content from your blogger website, which is displayed under your chosen domain. Your visitors and followers won't be any the wiser. All search engines will use your custom domain name to index your blog, so you won't have any problem with people recognising your blog name.
3. Unlimited Free Hosting
Even though Blogger doesn't support PHP, for things such as contact forms, you can still use other free software for contact forms such as Cognito Forms, who will create and host your form, and all you need to do is simply embed the code on your site. Blogger offers an unlimited amount of pages on its platform, which most paid hosting services don't offer.
4. It's Part of the Google Family
Because it's part of the Google family you also get a Google account, which also comes with other free stuff, such as Gmail, Google Calendar account, and Google Drive. These tools can be used to improve and expand your presence on the internet. Being able to store valuable documents on Google Drive, or setting up a video channel on YouTube, all helping to make your mark online.
5. Straightforward SEO
SEO is made even simpler with Blogger, allowing you to label all of your blog posts, and write a brief description of each post before its published. Because its a Google product your guaranteed a well-coded, and hosted site. Other Google products that work hand-in-hand with Blogger include, Google Webmaster tools and Analytics. Google webmaster tools allows you to index your blog on Google search engine, giving you basic information about your websites performance, and keyword searches being done on your website. Google analytics gives you performance data that you can track daily, or as often as you like, to monitor your blog.
6. You Can Master it With Ease
Blogger really is an easy-to-use platform, even for a non-techie, the basics can be mastered within 20-30 minutes, without any help. In the past I've used WordPress, but Blogger still comes out on top (that's just my opinion). With a clean and simple layout and some really great templates to choose from, you can personalise your blog to make it look and feel the way you want.
7. An Assortment of Gadgets at Your Fingertips
Simple things like a header and pages, can be selected in the top part of your blog. Other gadgets like search bar, archives, Adsense can also be easily added. You can use the gadget call HTML/JavaScript Gadget which allows you to put any code in on your side bar or headers and footers.
9. Make Your Template So Much More
With the simple WYSIWYG system, a person without any coding knowledge can still customise their blog template.
Do Free Blogging Platforms Work as a Promotional Tool?
Simple answer is yes of course they do.
Free blogging sites will work in all situtation's.
Here are the advantages and disadvantages of using a free blogging platform.
Advantages
- Free blogging sites are created for those with less technical ability.
- You can easily set up a new blog, and customise it to make it more appealing. There are plenty of bloggers out there, (myself included) who have done this with no problem.
- If you don't have the money to start a self-hosted blog, it's a good way to get on the ladder of blogging.
- Once your site is set up you can start adding stand alone pages, then start writing blog content to share on social media. You can set up a Google Analytics account, and put your blog site map on Google search console so that it starts getting indexed.
- Site security and software updates are all managed by your free platform service.
The downsides of owning a free site are:
- You can't set up an online store, forum.
- You can't add premium plugins for extra functionality.
- You don't have a domain name for your blog, on platforms such as Blogger your URL will look something like this Karenauthor.blogspot.com.
- Your Google ranking may be lower than those websites with a domain name.
What's the Best Option?
If you're newbie, a free platform is a good way to learn the ropes. If you're serious about making money, you might want to consider going down the free platform route but adding your own domain name. This will keep your costs down, and will give you a website with good security, and basic templates that you can customise.
Why Blogger is a Good Platform to Start Blogging
When Google acquired Blogger way back in 2003, few people would have imagined it would still have existed today. But it's alive and well, and like many bloggers (myself included) still the best platform to use for blogging.
Like many blogging platforms, Blogger is no different, keeping up with the ever changing world of technology, it manages to stay ahead of the game. This is because its part of the Google family, updating many of its features, including web security, which allows its users a security with Https on all blogs.
Sure there are plenty of blogging platforms to rival Blogger, but unlike it's competition, Blogger is still free, and always meets every situation with more than enough capability.
Here are 9 reasons why you should use Blogger:
1. It's Free
As I stated above, yes it's totally free, and is therefore cheaper than everyone else. But that doesn't mean you can't customise your domain name.
2. Effortless Domain Integration
At the moment Blogger doesn't offer this option, they do provide you with instructions on how to customise your domain name. Your old Blogspot address will also do a simple redirect to your new domain name with the content from your blogger website, which is displayed under your chosen domain. Your visitors and followers won't be any the wiser. All search engines will use your custom domain name to index your blog, so you won't have any problem with people recognising your blog name.
3. Unlimited Free Hosting
Even though Blogger doesn't support PHP, for things such as contact forms, you can still use other free software for contact forms such as Cognito Forms, who will create and host your form, and all you need to do is simply embed the code on your site. Blogger offers an unlimited amount of pages on its platform, which most paid hosting services don't offer.
4. It's Part of the Google Family
Because it's part of the Google family you also get a Google account, which also comes with other free stuff, such as Gmail, Google Calendar account, and Google Drive. These tools can be used to improve and expand your presence on the internet. Being able to store valuable documents on Google Drive, or setting up a video channel on YouTube, all helping to make your mark online.
5. Straightforward SEO
SEO is made even simpler with Blogger, allowing you to label all of your blog posts, and write a brief description of each post before its published. Because its a Google product your guaranteed a well-coded, and hosted site. Other Google products that work hand-in-hand with Blogger include, Google Webmaster tools and Analytics. Google webmaster tools allows you to index your blog on Google search engine, giving you basic information about your websites performance, and keyword searches being done on your website. Google analytics gives you performance data that you can track daily, or as often as you like, to monitor your blog.
6. You Can Master it With Ease
Blogger really is an easy-to-use platform, even for a non-techie, the basics can be mastered within 20-30 minutes, without any help. In the past I've used WordPress, but Blogger still comes out on top (that's just my opinion). With a clean and simple layout and some really great templates to choose from, you can personalise your blog to make it look and feel the way you want.
7. An Assortment of Gadgets at Your Fingertips
Simple things like a header and pages, can be selected in the top part of your blog. Other gadgets like search bar, archives, Adsense can also be easily added. You can use the gadget call HTML/JavaScript Gadget which allows you to put any code in on your side bar or headers and footers.
9. Make Your Template So Much More
With the simple WYSIWYG system, a person without any coding knowledge can still customise their blog template.
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Hi! I did use Blogger as a blog platform, but for some reason, I started having problems with the post started blending in with the comments and I couldn't read either. So I transferred to WordPress. Now they're starting to become TOO technical about paragraph blocking and I don't want to lose my work due to a LITERAL technicality.
ReplyDeleteHow can I set up my blogger format so the posts don't bleed into the comment section? Thanks!
Is there a way to prevent this.
Hi Johannas, sorry to hear you had that particular problem with Blogger. You could save all of your current blog posts and move them to a new a blog. That way you can start fresh. I hope this comment is helpful.
DeleteAre there certain Blogger themes that would be LESS problematic than others. If I knew how to avoid that post bleeding, I'd go back to Blogger in a minute.
ReplyDeleteThe theme I use is "Simple", I tried to change my blog to a more contemporary look, but didn't like the layout and template.
DeleteThat might just help. Thank you.
ReplyDelete