Blogging Wars - Wordpress Vs Blogger Part 1

There's a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with
bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about
control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible
blogging platforms. The average newbie now has "too many" options to choose
from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I'm always asked the question "Is Wordpress better
than Blogger?". The answer, of course, is "Yes". But to really understand
why, it's important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see
which one you really need.

You also need to understand that there are different versions of Wordpress,
the earliest now termed as "Wordpress" at Wordpress.org, and the hosted
version similar to Blogger now termed "Wordpress.com" which is of course
available Wordpress.com. Only the latter comes with free hosting on a
sub-domain account. We'll discuss this in Part 2.

For Part 1 of this article, we look only at the self-hosted version of
Wordpress. Here's the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it's much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own
Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you're set-up you
can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer's touch to your
blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don't know what
you're doing. Since you're going to host it on your own account, you'll need
to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a
database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with
Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade
and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn't allow categories. You can't sort your articles into
different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress,
not only can you add categories, you can also display each category
differently on your main page.
In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a
magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can extremely furstrating. It can take forever to
post articles, especially if you're making changes to the entire website.
With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system
with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating.

With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like "Shout Boxes"
that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and
nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However,
that's as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound,
not only can you get themes, additional "plugins" and advanced tools, you
can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform.

The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content
Management System or CMS. Unlike complicated predecessors like PHPPostNuke,
B2, Mambo or even Joomla, Wordpress is user friendly. Plus, the availability
of source codes in this open-source system coupled with a strong community
makes it possible to use Wordpress as an article management system,
classifieds system, direct-selling site and even a paid membership site.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won't say that it's bad. But after a while I
started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here's
why: Google Owns Your Content

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they
don't like what you're blogging about. You don't have absolute control over
your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is
hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you're free
to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want.
Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own
the database that holds your content! Don't forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There's this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor
Blogger accounts. I won't say that this is illogical, but from my
experience, there's no such favoritism.

I've heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in
search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users.
As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only "ping" a limited amount of sites,
whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog
directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms
of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There's no doubt that it's easier to get started with Google Adsense if you
have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a
Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are
owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough.
You'll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize
the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there's
even "Adsense revenue sharing" plugins around that allow you to share ad
revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you'll soon
discover what I mean. It's something you need to experience for yourself. I
can tell you one thing though - when you go Wordpress, you don't go back.

About The Author: Gobala Krishnan is a micro-niche specialist that coaches
Internet marketers to cash in on profitable markets using Wordpress and
secret blogging tactics. Get started now by reading a copy of his report
"Wordpress Adsense System" at http://adsense.easywordpress.com