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How Blogger Prevents You From Getting More Traffic
I’m not a fan of Google’s Blogger, the free blogging platform of, well . . . Google. 
In a private discussion forum, I answer a member’s question by laying out the case for why she (and most others) should avoid using that platform. The most compelling of which is that it prevents you from using two of the most power blogging tools out there.
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Hi Petra,
Lots of good advice here. I agree that IMC’s Blogging For Dollars is good to have in your toolbox. I first started getting my clients into blogging back in 2003. After applying some of the things I didn’t know, let’s just say it’s ridiculously easily to remain on top of the search engine rankings.
Since then, there are tricks I’ve learned that should be included in an unauthorized edition. Hmmm . . . there’s a product idea: “Blogging For Dollars’ Missing Manual.”
For your blogging platform, I would steer away and far, far away from any of the free platforms like Blogger because of the many serious limitations, the most egregious of which is that you can’t create permalinks.
You can Google “permalinks” for its definition and a fuller explanation but for brevity — it’s the difference between sending someone a link to a specific post and sending them to your blog homepage and then leaving up to them to scout out the actual post.
Most won’t go through that hassle unless highly motivated and that’s not hard to imagine when you put yourself in your readers’ shoes. Which would you rather be sent — an article/webpage/email that references a specific blog post, but you have to hunt through the blog to read it? Or the link takes you straight to that particular post?
Blogger doesn’t allow you to do that.
Few professionals stay with Blogger long. As they get more adept, they migrate to other platforms that allow more flexibility. Increasingly, the platform of choice is WordPress (www.wordpress.org) . It’s also free. There are two flavors — self-hosted (you use your existing hosting service) and hosted (www.wordpress.com).
The hosted version also limits your ability to customize and make changes as you become a more skilled user, but hey, some like it.
Almost universally, all my clients use WordPress for many of the reasons I delineated here — especially when I tell them that they’ll eventually migrate to a better platform anyway, and what that costs in man-hours and resources — so why not just start from the place you’re going to end up?
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How about you? What blogging platform are you using, and why? Uhh . . . you are blogging, aren’t you?
By Walter |
Topics: Client Top Secret, Inside The Mind, Pro Analysis |