Tag: WordPress

Categories
Blogging Catalyst Paid Tools Product Reviews Tools WordPress

Catalyst Theme Review

Yup its all changed around here again! Well not the content just he look and feel (ie if you are reading this via RSS – click thru !). I had hoped that going from Thesis to Frugal would be my last major change.  However Eric Hamm -the guy who created Frugal – upgraded the product so much – it now has a new name – Frugal is now Catalyst !

Catalyst actually came out just before I took off for a 2 month overseas trip with a 10″ netbook – netbook are good for lots of things but doing site design is not one of them!

When I got back I had a look at Catalyst and upgraded some of my niche sites with it. I liked it – but it didn’t have Frugal’s easy to install front page – with a wide choice of widgets. So I  didn’t upgrade this site. Then back in February Catalyst upgraded to 1.1 – and YES now there are EZI Widgets – which allows a flexible front page – like Frugal’s – but with even more options!

Still I hesitated – this site is a pain – it has a number of different looking posts and pages,  I didn’t really want to think about it.   Finally though I had to bite the bullet and get on with upgrading from Frugal to Catalyst – why?

  1. They have a discount for new sign ups of 25% (and incentives for affiliates) – so use the code: CATWP25when you sign up HERE – discount good to the 31 March 2011; (And yes I get an increased affiliate percentage in March too…);
  2. I think I can add value to Catalyst and do a series of tutorials here that will help the CSS-incompetent, design-disabled of you – you know people just like me!

I’ve already done a post on Catalyst’s SEO Options and I also what to talk about how to use Catalyst with the Keyword Academy’s Postrunner and also how to use it as a static site rather than a blog.

But I guess I should explain how I adapted the look of the site here.  I could have reproduced the look of the old site – but I decided to keep the general layout but change up the details and the look of the site.

From an SEO point of view its important not to make huge overnight changes to the main pages of your sites – or if you do be prepared to accept that your ranking will fluctuate until Google comes to terms with the changes.

How To Make a Catalyst Site Look Like This Site.

  1. Install Catalyst 1.1.1,  then install dynamik child theme and activate it.
  2. Go to dynamik options/import/export – and play around with installing some dynamik skins until you find something you like (I think this is fluid blue).
  3. I kept the same top navbar – but used a custom menu which is new in WordPress fairly recently – much easier to manage the order etc than remembering to change priority on individual pages.  Set the option Core Options/Navbar
  4. I dropped the header image – instead the header is plain text. The graphic of my sitting on the beach is a no-repeat image in the body background.  I played with the header dimensions until they were something that I liked – 930px x 75px
  5. To do the front page and also some of the featured content: I used Ezi Wiidgets and setup a front page with 1/1/3 layout PLUS 2 feature widgets above the content (not showing on the front page but they do on other pages) PLUS a “fat footer” of 4 widgets. Each Widget can be styled separately so I add a custom style to the top of the front page and use Custom CSS to make its background yellow. The middle widget  and the bottom three widgets on the front page are all featuring a single page (excerpts in the case o the bottom 3). This is why Catalyst is so easy to get up and running with – widgets are easy to rearrange and the Catalyst specific excerpts widget makes it easy to feature content from a specific page (an improvement on Frugal where you tended to write the content in text widgets which doesn’t have enough spell checking for me.)
  6. Although much of my site has a single right sidebar some major pages I prefer to minimize distractions on so they have no sidebars – for example any of the pages on the top navigation or the 3 along the bottom of the front page.  I use Advanced Options to create a custom layout with no sidebar – and then edited each page to use the “nosidebar” layout I’d just created.
  7. I’ve put most of my signup and navigational aids in the fat footer which is throughout the site -maybe its a mistake – no one will ever sign up again – but I prefer that stuff out of the way.
  8. I used 2 Ezi Top Feature widgets to create the two boxes highlighted below the header (again with custom CSS to change the background). These I chose to display on posts but not pages.
  9. I created a custom widget which shows grey at the bottom of my posts to display my TKA advertisement.

Hope this helps for someone who is trying to combining a fairly general blog with some rather specific pages!

Categories
Catalyst Lis Recommmends Paid Tools Product Reviews Tools

Impact Page Builder Review

It's still lissowerbutts.com - just not as you know it

Hi – its OK its really me Lis! I just moved the furniture around a bit!  BTW if you are reading this via the RSS feed you may want to click thru as I am talking about the look and feel of this page in this post – you kinda have to be here! Anyway as you might have gathered this post is promoting Impact Page Builder – why? Well because I have building up your trust so that you would buy lots from me and pay for the overseas holiday to somewhere warm!

Well to be honest from what I’ve seen no one makes any serious money promoting stuff that is one off purchases like Impact Page Builder – the market is just too small and  there is no agressive upsell or membership sites – which is where the money really is at!

Anyway getting back to Impact Page Builder. This is a brand new plugin from Eric Hamm – of Frugal Theme fame.  Well its been out a couple of weeks – it took Leo’s newsletter to wake me up to its potential. (If you are not subscribed – you’re an idiot – subscribe).

Impact Page Builder – Key Features

In their own words – IPB allows you to:

Our Template Builder gives you everything you need to create attractive designs quickly and easily. Our real-time interface lets you see your template take shape before your eyes as you make adjustments. Even the code changes you make to a Template’s Custom CSS are reflected instantly.

Each Impact Template has 15 empty Hooks, such as ‘Before Header’, ‘After Sidebar’, ‘In Footer’, etc. You can use these to hold anything from WordPress Widgets to custom Text, HTML & JavaScript.

With WordPress 3.0′s new Custom Menus feature, you can create and use Template-Specific NavBars. Run an unlimited number of interlinked mini-sites with unique navigation from a single domain!

  • Its a plugin – not a theme – Impact works independently of your theme – and therefore works on ANY theme.
  • Impact Page Builder gives you total control and the ability to create page/post templates.  You can create a new template for just one post on your site (as I have done here) – or you can several templates – one for your landing pages, one for your squeeze pages, one for your blogging ramblings.
  • Impact is (mainly – see below) a WYSIWIG page builder – change the layout – the widget areas – the change will reflect on the screen in the same way I understand Headway does.
  • Impact  has a slick download which directs you immediately to the support forums if you have questions or issues – I did have a problem (of my own making) and the support was fast and effective.
  • Unlike many themes and plugins  IPB offers free upgrades for life.

Impact Weaknesses

  • The product is new – I think the Impact Page Builder team will bringing out skins to allow those of us who are design disabled to make a site look good without knowing how to create a design from scratch.  So at  the moment if you are design challenged – you will get something that looks like this page! (And yes I tried using Firebug – but it doesn’t help me very much!).
  • Eric is using eJunkie for IPB’s affiliate program – I personally prefer the idevaffiliate manager which they used for Frugal.
  • The use of custom widgets for each template is going to end up with a LOT of widget areas in your “widgets” menu!

Who is Impact Page Builder For

  • If you are building “supersites” as The Keyword Academy calls them – you need this plugin – it allows you to completely “silo” (as Leo calls it – your site so that every menu and link on a page is relevant to your keyword for that part of the site.
  • If you are developing sites for local businesses – then using this plugin (and the developer’s version allows you to deploy to client’s sites) on top of a basic theme may well give you all the flexibility you need if you know a bit of CSS
  • If you are developing mini-sites which require different pages – such as opt in pages, downloads for products etc etc i.e. if you have started googling “landing pages in WordPress” – then IPB is going to cost you less than those templates – and gives you much much more.

Who Should Give Impact Page Builder A Miss

  • If you are just developing Adsense minisites then you are probably good to go. Its only when you want to start customising parts of your site and/or doing very “special” pages that the value of this product will be obvious.
  • If you a buying it – just to see – don’t –  IPB, like most themes and plugins – does NOT offer a money back guarantee – if you think about it for 5 secs the reason why is obvious. So take the time figure out if you have the need before you buy!
  • If you haven’t got any traffic yet – well the design is pretty irrelevant isn’t it? Build more links first!

Impact Page Builder Template on This Page

Yeah well I never said I was a designer! But what I did was something like this:

  • added a text title;
  • added an image to be used as the overall background;
  • added a widget area below he title area and added a custom menu to it;
  • changed the colours and look of the menu by using custom CSS – hacked from code provided for the purpose in the support area;
  • added another widget area above content and added a big affiliate banner to it;
  • as I am using this template on a post rather than a page my  other plugins included “related posts” and “sexy bookmarks” are still showing  – but nothing from the site’s standard theme (Frugal) is.

So what do you think?  To me IPB is a game changer for the whole paid theme space.  For the same price of a single license of a premium theme (including Thesis and Frugal) you can buy a developers (unlimited) version  the Impact Page Builder plugin ($88) and have way more control than any theme can offer you. To just try it out you are looking at $44 for a single site license (and you can upgrade to the unlimited version by paying the difference later if you wish to). I just hope that Eric manages to get word out and get critical mass in the market  before the inevitable knock-off’s start coming out.


Categories
Search Engines SEO Tutorial WordPress

Free On-Page SEO Tutorial – Using Your Keywords In Your Site

Perth from Rottnest - Passive Income Rewards!
Perth from Rottnest - Passive Income Rewards!

OK so this is part 2 of my free on-page SEO tutorial last time we talking about what is a keyword – today I’m going to tell you what to do with that keyword – now you’ve found it.  So let’s say -your site is about – oh I dunno – websites for small business maybe?

Ideally – if I wanted a site completely focussed on websites for small business I would do the following:

  1. I would  try to get the exact domain name match e.g. websitesforsmallbusiness.com (or net or org) – there is definitely a bias from Google in favour of exact match domains (this does not extend to .info, .ws. .biz .co or any other extension). In this case those domains are unavailable and I wanted to focus the site on a particular country, so I went with the .co.nz extension.
  2. I would include the keywords I was targetting in the  blog’s title – sometimes you can’t get, didn’t get, didn’t think before you established a website – so end up with a stupid domain name e.g. lissowerbutts.com – but you can still target a totally different keyword by using the title tag. Ideally though I’d have had an exact match domain name.
  3. Then I’d add the keyword again into my tagline.
  4. I’d head over to the permalink settings and change them from the default for WordPress – which is the ugly ?p21 format and make them %postname% so that now I would have “pretty” urls like http://websitesforsmallbusiness.co.nz/website-package which include the page’s and post’s titles.
  5. If I wasn’t using a theme such as Catalyst which includes SEO options  I would install a FREE plugin such as  all-in-one-SEO or Platinum SEO. I would tell the SEO options it to NOT noindex categories and tags and other pages.
  6. Using those SEO options  I’d add the main keyword into the title and  meta-description of  my homepage, and it and related keywords in the  overall meta tags of the blog.  This counts for very little – Yahoo may still use meta tags, Google probably doesn’t. Google may or may not use your meta description in  your site’s search engine’s listing.
  7. Now having done all that – I would add some posts and pages – which – obviously – would talk sometimes about websites for business in NZ or websites for small business or even cheap websites for NZ business – all obviously closely related.
  8. If I was feeling really ethusisastic I would add some optimized images. Now Google is pretty stupid – its only a computer and tell that the bunch of pixels at the top of the post are about the consequences of  earning a passive income online.  So I told it! (Yeah I know its a stretch but I don’t have an image of banknotes lying on the beach!).  BTW traffic you get from Google’s image search are notorious for only staying long enough to steal your images, they are useless as readers or revenue sources!  To optimize an image do the following:
    1. change the name of the image – before you upload it – include your keyword in the new image’s title – mine is now called https://lissowerbutts.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Perth-From-Rottnest-passive-income-reward1.jpg
    2. then when you import the image – make sure the title, the alt-title, the description and the caption all to include the keyword of interest.
Perth from Rottnest - Passive Income Rewards!
Perth from Rottnest - Passive Income Rewards!

Targeting More Than One Keyword on a Website

All of the above was an example of a small and focussed website. Not all websites are like that – this one sure isn’t it – it ranks quite well for its main keywords passive income online and related terms.  But I also rank for terms utterly unrelated to those. How does this happen – well I do two things – I add relevant content. For example I rank  quite well for the term postrunner and postrunner review – that’s entirely deliberate. This is what I did – I wrote a post: Postrunner Tutorial –  used the keywords and related terms in the title, at the start of the post and at the end. I didn’t try for any particular number of times – I didn’t unecessarily captialise, bold or italicize the term – though it was natural to use it in sub-headings that happen to be bolded…

Then I wrote another post – also about Postrunner – I linked the two together – simply to tell my readers that there was a previous post that they should maybe read first – and to tell the search engines the same thing. I used the same category and similar tags for the two posts.  Google now knows that I have quite a lot of i.e. more than one page, about this particular topic – that gives my pages a boost up the rankings,and hopefully a double listing (if I use exactly the same anchor text linking from each post to the other).

Ultimately you can get one website ranking for a bunch of unrelated keywords – and even it you started totally wrong – you can change everything up but adding titles and revising posts and get the same effect in the end.  The key though is to get the site ranking for one keyword first – once you have the first ranking it will be quicker and easier to get subsequent rankings.

So over a couple of thousand words that’s pretty much a free on-page SEO guide. Its really not that hard – and almost all of your effort should actually be directed at getting backlinks for your site !

Categories
Making Money Online Search Engines SEO Tutorial

Free On-Page SEO Tutorial – Part 1 What Are My Keywords

Wildflower display, spring, Kings Park, Perth, WA

A few months ago I wrote a Scribe SEO review which created a lesson in online reputation management in the comments – which was interesting  – but hardly the point. My point was that there is nothing difficult or technical about “optimizing your blog for SEO” – and I promised that I would write more about on page SEO. A promised and then I promptly forgot about. But I have had more than one person contact me about a free alternative to a tool like Scribe SEO – so here is my version of it.  Its free – its here, you don’t even need to subscribe for the e-book – frankly there is not enough to write to fill an e-book – well not the important stuff anyway.

Baobab Tree - Native to the Kimberley's this example relocated to King's Park, Perth, WA

I am NOT an SEO Expert

I can do SEO, I know what I need to know to rank sites in Google. I am not an innovator, and I don’t do a lot of testing. This seems to appeal to the inner Geek – I am a part-Geek but not with SEO. I do practical SEO which works for my sites.

SEO Changes

SEO=search engine optimization – but what we all really mean is Google optimization – Google is the only game in town because it has so much of the search traffic.  Ranking top in Yahoo or Bing is nice but pretty worthless as far as search traffic is concerned.

BUT Google changes all the time – most recently was the so-called MayDay Update – which caused angst and concern throughout the online Internet Marketing world – if you haven’t heard about it – don’t worry – and save yourself several hours of reading – don’t Google “Mayday update”

On Page SEO – A Practioner’s View Point

Not every post I write here is focussed on getting search engine traffic – in part this is just a social blog which allows me to connect to readers – and mix it up a fair bit.  That’s OK and it doesn’t affect the site’s rankings for  the keywords I DO target. Because Google ranks pages not sites in general. But before we even get to where you should be using  your keyword on-page lets step back to ask the most basic question? If you have a popular site you can get traffic to any post – just my publishing it! But if you want to draw in new readers the easiest way is to have at least some posts which are keyword focussed.

What Are My Keywords?

You can’t rely on any tool to tell you what you keywords are! To do so is like sitting down and writing a novel and then working out what the plot is! You must have at least some idea before you start!   Which is not to say that you should completely ignore market demand. If you want to write about garden design – it doesn’t require a genius to know that anything with the words “eco” or “green” in the title may sell better than others.

But even if you are short of ideas – Google will help you for free!  In particular Google will tell you what terms they think your search is related to.

Sturt's Desert Pea, Kings Park, Perth WA

For example – go to google in and  type indigenous landscape design. Google will tell you what it thinks you mean in two ways: as you type in the drop down it will offer alternatives, and at the very bottom of the page – you will see “searches related to indigenous landscape design ”

Now this particular keyword is an excellent example of having to know something about your niche and the way that niche uses language. Indigenous means “the original people (or other things: plants etc) of an area” – any biologist, anthropologist, zoologist would know that. But in Australia it is also the term very specifically used quite often in the media – where an American might talk about Native affairs or Native title and a New Zealander would talk about Tangata Whenua or Maori title – politically correct Australians would use the term Indigenous to reflect the people who were living in Australia when the Europeans happened upon the so-called Terra nullius. Aborigine is incorrect (it excludes Torres Strait Islanders and implies that almost all of the original Australians are the same race (they are not)), and native is associated with previous racist policies of white Australia.

Now having lived in Australia I know that Australia has huge issues with using the land inappropriately – e.g. commercially growing rice (which needs huge amounts of water) in the semi-arid Murray-Darling basin.  Even home gardeners seem to grow far more more roses and  lawns than the local flora (which is quite beautiful – I am using this post just to show off some of my better shots of it LOL)

So with that background when Gordon from Indigenous Landscape Design Australia asked me about a free alternative to Scribe SEO a thought his site was a really good example of a site which is doing most things right – but could be improved with a few additions. First a note about

Country Specific Keywords

Almost nothing is more country (if not region) specific than anything related to gardens and gardening. The information is specific, the plant varieties are specific and the stuff that grows in Cairns certainly won’t grow in Tasmania or Alberta.  If you are targeting a specific country – get the specific countries TLD in this case .com.au – but also co.uk, .ca. .co.nz etc.  This is the biggest hint to Google that your site is relevant to  a single country – in fact the default now is for Google to show “sites from NZ” if I search from Google.co.nz – which is the default browsers for users in NZ. It doesn’t really matter where you sie is hosted (US is generally cheapest) – but you do need that TLD as a big hint in the domain name. As we are talking about an Australian site with an Australian  audience I am using the Australian Google from here on:

So from google.com.au

as I typed in indigenous landsc… I got suggested:

  • indigenous landscapes – too broad
  • indigenous landscape design Australia – nice lots of searchers will add their country
  • indigenous landscaping – possible – might be too broad
  • indigenous landscaping ideas – excellent seracher wants info
  • indigenous landscaping omaha – huh – don’t think so
  • indigenous landscaping systems – hmm maybe – I don’t know enough about the topic to comment

once I insisted on searching for my original term – at the bottom of the page I got the related terms of:

Even More Related Keywords

So armed with this knowledge – and what very little I know about the topic – I head off to Google’s free keyword tool . Set the results to the relevant country (in this case) – toss in all the terms I think might be relevant from the above search and voila:

A note about search volumns and cost per click. This tool is designed for the USERs of Adwords ie the advertisers who pay for those  Adsense ads that some of us make money from. This doesn’t mean its not useful even if you are not an adwords advertiser or publisher. If someone is paying to advertise for a term such “landscaping design” there is probably some chance of making money from it. Though if you change the search volumne over to “exact match” you will see that its not a huge volume. Even if you get the “not enough data” against a term – this doesn’t mean there are NO searches – again you need to know your  market. Almost all New Zealand specific terms come up with that statement (there are only 4 million of us living here) – but that’s not to say that people don’t search for “small garden design” in NZ! It just means compared to the global demand for a term  like  “erection problems” its not very high!

Wildflower display, spring, Kings Park, Perth, WA

You don’t necessarily need high search volume to make money if you are offering expensive products and services e.g. a garden design service.  But you do need to be using your customers language – and Google is offering you these suggestions because this is what your customers are using to search in Google for. Yes “outdoor landscaping” is a tautology – but 58  people a month in Australia search for it!

Now this site may be too specific – Gordon is already #1 and #2 for “indigenous landscape design” out of over 3,000,000 results. This suggests that there is not much competition  and probably not much demand. But he will know what the demand is by checking  his  Analytics or other stats package –  once  you get to the top of the rankings you will know exactly what your traffic is!

And while you are there – your statistics are another excellent source of keyword ideas – people will find your site by using the oddest searches – and your stats should show you these.

Maybe I was wrong,  perhaps  my free on page SEO guide should be a book! Anyway its going to be a multi-part post obviously! Click here for part 2: Using Keywords in Your Site

Categories
Back Links

Self-promotional backlinks – which don’t annoy

Photo Credit: PoppyKay
Photo Credit: PoppyKay

For important new developments at todaydotcom check out my update : is today a scam?

The importance of backlinks we have discussed before. Many sites allow you to link to your own sites – two that I use are hubpages and today.com which are sites which pay you to blog. Today particularly require that to earn their payment per post the content must be original and not self-promotional. This appears to confuse people – and yet although many of my posts promote other sites I have none have them been flagged.

1-Feb-09 Update – today has now tightened up and will not pay the per post fee if you have a link to any site you own or to any article on hubpages , AC and similar sites.  You still get the traffic payment.

What’s the secret – write an original article, related to the same topic – add a link somewhere – not an obvious one – just a link with the text that you are are trying to rank for in Google. There’s a link in this paragraph which is relevant to the broad topic of making money blogging but this post would get approved if I had a blog on the theme of making money online at today.com

Approaches to avoid :

  • quoting content – even if you wrote it and can do so legitamtely – and saying something like “read more here” or “for more information click here”;
  • disguising links by hiding them in a full-stop (period) or linking in a misleading manner i.e. using a misleading anchored text – this is against Adsense’s TOS anyway;

You must provide original and complete information for the reader without them needing to leave the site that they are on.  I generally write about topics I know well on these  blogs I find know well.  Every post on my two today.com blogs has been approved and here are some of examples of promotional posts which are acceptable:

Christmas in Australia

Underground in Coober Pedy

Child Star in Australia

Note too that not every post does have promotional backlinks – the overall pattern matters too. Sometimes I don’t link out at all – sometimes I link to authority sites such as commercial businesses

Basically every post stands alone if you have an interest you can read it from start to finish without needing to click. The link is vaguely related to the content matter though – which makes it a valuable backlink to have in Google’s eyes  – the links to my sites in this post are less valuable because this blog isn’t really about travelling or Australia!

What’s a Backlink?

Now just to take a step back –  I’ve been asked more than once in forums and elsewhere “whats a backlink”.  The answer is simple people, its just a link to another place – a piece of underlined text (usually) – which when you click or hover your mouse over it shows another web-page.

3 Simple Steps to Create A Backlink

An example is easiest:

  1. type in the worlds “Baby Boomer Gear”,
  2. highlight the words and then click the chain (link) in WordPress (or most other on and off line writing packages these days including hubpages)
  3. it asks me for the url – if I then copy or type in http://www.cafepress.com/babyboomerbuzz
  4. the end result will looks like Baby Boomer Gear and Maren has an anchored backlink for her Baby Boomer store!

Thanks for the question Maren – the only dumb questions are the unasked ones you know!

Categories
Article Marketing Blogging Search Engines

Getting Paid to Blog

I have been having fun over at a newish website which is offering free WordPress blogs – a bit like the free wordpress.com site really.

But not. WordPress.com you aren’t allowed to make money so you can’t link to evil, wicked money making sites, which means that when you do blogs often get shutdown. But of course some of us crazed money making types are always looking for new place to develop my own backlinks.

So when I heard that a new site was offering not only free blogs but also offering a $1/post I got interested – the rather long review is my blogging for $1/day hub but the short version is:

  • get approved (live in the right country the usual suspects plus Australia/NZ/Western Europe/India),
  • write a post 100 words minimum, original content, not illiterate,
  • get paid.
  • Get second blog, repeat, get paid a total of $2/day. I

It won’t last for ever, eventually you will have to get some traffic to continue being paid but its a nice little business model – from my point of view anyway!

Now $2 is hardly a massive income: but the cool thing is this: the links are do-follow and you can of course anchor them. So far I have not had any posts rejected and have placed up to 3 “self-serving” links in them!

Slight caveat once the post is approved for payment its locked and you can neither edit it or delete it, you loose the rights to your content. If however you post an image they don’t take the rights: only on the words.

As a freelance writer I can trade 100 words for a free backlink and $1 – hell I can even trade 250 words because those tend to get indexed in the big G!

Another thing that is rather cool is that your blog is a subdomain and there are some nice name still available: one of my blogs is Australia Today (check the url).

In the interests of fair play: they do pay for referrals so if you sign up via the flashing thingy on the right or via one of my today blogs (click on the “get paid to blog” on the right) I get paid – well actually I won’t unless you actually put some effort in and do 10 posts – its not hard – that’s a total of 1000 words for goodness sake – I can do that before breakfast! And you have 3 months to do it in. And then I get paid and you get paid – and you get a blog and backlinks and you can do with it what you want. It really isn’t a bad deal.

Of course if you don’t want me to get the commission that’s cool too – I’ll get over it eventually – probably ….. 🙂

Categories
Blogging

Why a Blogger blog?

Update: I moved – this is no longer a blogger blog: and heres why I moved from Blogger

Some of you may be wondering why I am using the free blogger hosting to run this blog. After all I pay for hosting which effectively allows me to run unlimited domains so why would I not just run another blog there: after all all I need to pay for the domain nae – which can be had for $1 if I don’t mind a info tld.

I started on blogger but moved away from it when I discovered the power of


Thanks Blogger.com
Originally uploaded by Shavar

WordPress. Now for some purposes I think blogger has a place in my empire. Horses for courses and here are some of the pros/cons that I can see.

Advantages of Blogger (Blogspot) Blogs

  • they get indexed quickly in Google: not surprisingly because Google owns blogger! This blog got indexed inside about 48 hours.
  • out of the box bloggers are well optimized for SEO purposes. You can do the same for WordPress blogs of course: but that’s the point you have to do it – and many people don’t;
  • it’s idiot proof: its very,very easy to set up a blog. if you can write a HubPage you can set up a blogger blog, even my Internet challenged brother could do it!
  • you can easily add Adsense and other Affiliate advertising: in contrast free hosted WordPress.org blogs don’t allow you to monetize;
  • for those looking for a keyword focussed domain name it might be easier to get cheaplaptops.blogspot.com compared to cheaplaptops.com (don’t bother they are both gone and no they are not my sites!)
  • blogger blogs are hosted somewhere different from the rest of your empire – if something happens to your web hosting at least your blogger blog will still work;
  • you get traffic from blogger itself: people seem to surf blogger looking for something to read – though I doubt that its very well targeted traffic.
  • its free and I doubt that that will change

Disadvantages of Blogger (Blogspot) Blogs

  • its not an open interface so you don’t have the huge range of plugins and themes available for self-hosted WordPress. if you want a super-slick, beautifully designed blog then stick ith self-hosted WordPress. If you just want something functional that works blogger will do fine;
  • all domains include .blogspot.com as in http://100sites-lissie.blogspot.com: if you get good rankings and backlinks for that url and them decide to move later to your own site e.g. http://100sites-lissie.co.nz then you will lose all that age, backlinks and SEO advantages and have to start again. If you expect to move to your own domain later then do so, sooner;
  • you are basically renting, or squatting as the rent is free, on someone else’s site: they have no obligation to keep on providing the service and one day your whole blog may just go away, I tend to think if that happens we may have more serious things to worry about than a blogger blog!

For those interested in the use of blogger blogs with Adense to make money from Niches check out Grizz’s: Make Money Online Blog: Check out the “Make Money Online Lesson’s” series towards the bottom right of the main page: don’t be put off by the length of his posts: its deliberate and he explains why.