Google's Blogger allows you to start a blog very quickly and easily. You just need an email address and give a title to your blog. For example, if you want to call your blog, awesomescifitvshows, then Blogger, will give you a URL of awesomescifitvshows. blogspot.com. This depends on the availability of the blog name. The popularity of Blogger over the last few years has resulted in most of the easily available and popular names, themes and pop culture references being used up, so you will have to be really creative if your topic is a popular one.
Google also allows you to register a domain name through them for $10 a year. Google will then redirect the domain that you bought to your Blogger account. So if you bought the domain awesomescifitvshows.com through Google, you will get the benefit of having a custom domain without the ''.blogspot.com'' ending and still be able to use all the features of Blogger. So basically, for $10 a year you get to host your blog on Google's servers and do not have to keep up with any updates, bugs and fixes that you would have to if you had used any other web hosting company.
The themes that Google offers for free can be customized to a certain extent. But if you want a really professional looking theme, you will have to buy it from a third-party and install it on your own. Google also allows its highly successful AdSense program on its blogs. This will allow you to make some money from your blog if your visitors click on the ads that Google will display on your blog. AdSense works on a per-click and per-impression basis. The ads displayed are based on the content of your blog.
But do not expect to start making thousands of dollars every month using this program. Running a blog to earn money through AdSense is not a very effective strategy or a good use of your time. There are other more efficient Internet Marketing methods such as Amazon's affiliates program or selling ads directly to companies if you have your own website.
Google will allow any kind of material to be displayed on its Blogger service but Adsense will not work on blogs with adult content. Also, a blog having such content will display a content warning page. Overall, Blogger is very liberal in its policies with exceptions to illegal and extreme material.
Google's liberal usage policies have resulted in Blogger being used as a way to churn out webspam and low-quality blogs which are just a way to drive traffic towards certain sites. But there are still high profile bloggers who have stuck to the service.
The name WordPress covers both the free blog hosting service WordPress.com and the free content management system (CMS) available at WordPress.org. Both of them are often confused with each other because of which users refer to them as .COM (the free blog host) and .ORG (the CMS) when discussing them. Here, we will be talking about the .COM version.WordPress.com is behind Blogger in total number of visitors to its site as per Alexa rankings. But it is rapidly gaining in popularity because it is seen as a more user-friendly format and offering more features than Blogger. WordPress, like Blogger, allows users to redirect their blogs to their custom domain name, but the domain mapping has to be done by the user.
It is also pretty strict in defining the parameters for its users. Low-quality, spam blogs are not allowed. Blogs that basically scrap material from other sites, or that outright steal content are also not allowed. WordPress wants high quality blogs with actual content in them. To further discourage spam blogs, it does not allow most users to have Google Adsense or any of the other similar advertising programs on its blogs.
Only users who have monthly pageviews of 25,000 or more and have appropriate content are allowed to turn on AdSense and Skimlinks for their blog. WordPress also does not allow paid and sponsored posts and links to sites which encourage paid posts. Neither does it allow promotion of get-rich quick schemes. WordPress keeps a list of all the banned sites and a list of all the practices that it does not want on its site. Blogs with legal mature material are not removed but simply made less visible throughout the WordPress site and also excluded from the global tag listings.
WordPress, on its own, will run ads on its users blogs. This is done to help it keep the service free and give the users great features for free. However, for users who do not want ads displayed on their WordPress blogs, they can pay $29.97 a year to keep their blog ad-free. A few other upgrades are also available on WordPress.com. WordPress has several themes, including a few paid themes available.
The site also has an integrated stats system which makes it easy to track how well your blog is doing in terms of popularity. WordPress is also considered more SEO friendly than other blogging sites. One of the best features of WordPress compared to Blogger is the WordPress forum. The active WordPress community can help you out with several tips and help guides. All this has earned it praise from its members for keeping the blogging service high-quality.
