Monday, April 02, 2007

Is Blogspot Bad for Bloggers?

If you have been reading alot of blogs you have probably come across people who are evangelizing that being on Blogspot is bad.

The common arguments to support this claim are that
1. Most blogs hosted in Blogspot are spam.
2. It is hard to configure.
3. Your blog will not take off with Blogspot.
4. It gives bad representation.

I personally have nothing against these people. And I am neither Blogspot biased because I both have blogs that are hosted in Blogspot and some that have their own domains.

I just find these claims funny because when I look at my own data I find a different picture.

Let's tackle these claims.

1. Most blogs hosted in Blogspot are spam - We'll this is not exclusive to Blogspot because there are also a lot of websites in the internet that have their own Domain and yet they are spam.

A blog spam is not as bad as an email spam. Blog spams are unobtrusive. You can always ignore them and never come back. With email spams you can block them all you want but they always come back. And they could bring your network down with their sheer traffic consumption.

2. It is hard to configure - We'll if you are in Blogspot, Wordpress, TypePad, your own Domain, etc. configuration and design is hard that is why you hire web designers and web developers to do it.

If you don't want to hire you can still use these platforms using the provided template designs or
you could learn HTML and XML tagging and hack these templates yourself.

3. Your blog will not take off when you are hosted in Blogspot - Again I would like to believe this but personal research reveals a different picture.

Take a look at this list.

There are three blogs in the top 100 that are hosted in Blogspot. One of them of course is Google's own blog.

But as you can see you can still make it to the top regardless of where you host your blog. What actually matters is that you're blog is either useful or interesting.

4. It gives your blog a bad rep - My answer is the same as number 3. What matters is usefulness and being interesting.

Lastly, let me share with you my personal blogging experience. As I have said earlier, I have blogs that are hosted here in Blogspot and some that are hosted in their own Domains. And I regularly compare their performances.

I have one Blogspot blog that outperforms my dotcom blogs. In terms of revenue, it has earned thrice of what my DotCom blogs have earned so far. In terms of traffic, it has gained 3000% percent more traffic than my DotCom blogs.

So what makes this blog different from my other blogs? As much as possible I only blog about useful subjects. This blog I am talking about covers a technology that have very sparse reference material available.

2 comments:

Ron said...

Nice post -from a newbie blogger.

Personally, I found it easy to configure my blogspot blog. I've heard to learn a tiny bit of html code, but was able to find help easily enough on the web.

I still have a LONG ways to go before I consider my blog polished in any way, but I'm having a lot of fun.

--Ron

http://revolttoday.blogspot.com/

30-Something Girl said...

Blog lurker as well. I like this one.

I agree with Ron and wanted to add that your blog is only as popular and viewed as the time you invest in it and others (I'm guilty for not blogging on a regular basis)

Good job!