make money on the internet

In my quest to determine which free blogging service is better, I spent some time reading other people’s views as well as trying out both Wordpress and Blogger. Blogger is of the course the grandfather of free blogging while Wordpress is a relative baby in terms of internet time.

Blogger recently upgraded to new Blogger with added features and new themes. A big step forward for the new Blogger is that you can now use your own domain while being hosted by Blogger. I had an original Blogger account which laid dormant for a year because it was slow and buggy. After converting to new Blogger, I discovered that there was a bug which caused problems with displaying images for IE.

Wordpress comes in 2 flavours – get a free blog on the Wordpress network or install the Wordpress software and run it from your own web host. I’ll talk about the former as the latter is a whole different ball game.

User Interface
Blogger has more user friendly features in its what-you-see-is-what-you-get text editor with one click buttons for fonts, links, text alignment and other formatting functions. When uploading images, you can select the alignment of your image and standardize sizes according to small, medium or large.

For Wordpress, you need to know some basic html coding to format your text and images. This may not be a problem for the more html savvy but I believe the majority would have some initial frustrations in having to handle html.

Winner: Blogger

Features
Blogger does not have a categories feature. It uses ‘labels’ which groups posts according to what you assign. I find this rather messy. Wordpress allows posts to be categorized easily and this shows up as a list on the blog.

For Blogger you have to save your text as a draft manually which then brings you atuomatically to the posts listing – rather daft. Wordpress has an auto-save feature which is handy and definitely useful. Wordpress also allows you to create standalone “Pages” which usually appear at the top of the blog.

Blogger has a space limit of 1MB for each post and if you hit the limit after a few hundred pages, you will have to delete old posts to make room. There is also a 300MB limit for images. Wordpress has a 50MB for images but no limit on posts, pages and comments. A way to get around the image space limit is to use a third party image hosting service like Photobucket and link your images from there.

Wordpress allows you to password-protect each post. Blogger doesn’t.

Wordpress has built in blog stats which shows referrers, search engines, tops posts and clicks by visitors. Blogger does not have any these and although you can get a free site monitor service, it is useful to have.

Winner: Wordpress

Templates
Blogger template designs are limited in number, quite conservative and some templates look dated. Some customization in terms of colours and editing html is possible but it cannot match Wordpress which has lots more templates to choose from. Designs are more sophisticated and some are quirky and unique. You can also customize Wordpress templates by adding widgets or edit the stylesheet if you are html savvy.

Winner: Wordpress

Monetization
Blogger has a built-in Google AdSense feature which allows you to select and configure the ad sizes and placements for your blog. For Wordpress, you are forbidden to add any advertising including AdSense, Yahoo, Chitika Malls. Paid posting such as PayPerPost is also not allowed. So if you are planning to start a blog to earn money, forget Wordpress.

Winner: Blogger

Ultimately, the most basic question to ask yourself when choosing a free blogging service is whether or not you are going to monetize it. It is a real pity that free Wordpress does not allow advertising. The only way you can use Wordpress for a money-making blog is to use a web host. You do need to be prepared to do some hands-on code editing but like everything else, once you get the hang of it, you have a site that is uniquely yours.