Blogging with Blogger vs WordPress

Blogging is without doubt one of your most effective marketing tools for a small business. It can also be a way to begin letting others know of a business you are planning to start. It is easy, cheap and powerful, though yet often it is ignored for it’s business promotion and building potential. Some wonder where to begin, they wonder about blogging with Blogger vs WordPress.

If WordPress, WordPress.com or self hosted (aka. SH)? There are a number of reasons to use SH rather than WordPress.com though I’ll cover that in a later post.

First, you have your own domain with SH (self-hosted) WordPress. If you are a professional business person using your blog as part of your promotion, doing on WordPress is a no brainer. Or if you want to get business via a Blog, WordPress is really a no-brainer.

Second, you can do your own content without restrictions of having it being removed. If what you have to say some may perceive as being controversial, hosting your own gives you more freedom to say what you want, the way you want.

Third, with the plugin support there is with WordPress, plugins being scripts/little programs you can add for functionality and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) there is much more power to automatically add signatures, company contact info, social media info, etc. to the top and/or bottom of your blog posts.

Forth, features with WordPress not with Blogger:

• Title for your Blog Post: Custom title field gives you the ability to choose one Title for blog post and a different title for search engine results. This is a vital search engine optimization technique. More so important when you desire a long title for your blog post but don’t want it truncated in search results, you can choose the long one for site display and the shorter one for search engines. Blogger.com doesn’t have anything like that.

• Showing Images: The featured images capability give the ability to choose any image on your blog post to display as your post’s thumbnail. The position of the image on your blog post really doesn’t matter. You can also use an image that is is not a featured image and no one will see it on your post, it is only shown as thumbnail. This gives you verities of option to make adjustments to things on your blog as you wish. Blogger has nothing like those. The first image is what shows as thumbnail on Blogger whether you like it that way or not, you can’t change that.

• WordPress has a Media Library: All the images and videos you ever uploaded on your blog will be there in the library to be used anytime when you desire. If at some time you want pictures, you can  choose from the image library or upload a new one. Blogger doesn’t have this feature – instead, all your images are stored in a Google Picasa web album and I am sure most of you doesn’t know where in this case Blogger is more complicated.

Forth, themes you can use are endless, free, paid, self designed, you can give it a look that tells what you’re about. Themes are also referred to as templates.

Fifth, Matt Cuts, the Director of Google for Webspam and the go to guy for what is best to do for your Internet presence who not only says Google Loves WordPress, even though Google owns Blogger, he uses WordPress for his blog. He also says, although they’re pretty close to equal for SEO, because of the WordPress customizing features, you can be more specific about targeting your SEO. He also says in short, WordPress is a bit  more complicated to setup and manage that Blogger, though worth it for the better flexibility it offers.

If you are one who is currently using Blogger, perhaps this has given you some insight on advantages to a WordPress blog that you feel would be better for you. It may also have given you info helping you realize you’re fine with Blogger. I feel blogger is good for those who do it for fun, though for a business, or as mentioned, an upcoming business, I would recommend a WordPress blog.