Recently updated on February 26th, 2023 at 11:13 am
Blogger and WordPress are the two popular blogging platforms. You can publish your personal blogs for fun or use them to make money online. They both have millions of users, and plenty of new blogs are being published every single day.
But, there are few differences between these platforms that must be discussed before choosing the right one.
In this article, you will find the benefits and drawbacks of each platform and get to know, which platform is the best for money-making purposes.
Benefits Of Blogger:
Blogger is a free blog publishing service that is owned by Google. Each user can use a Google account and create a new blog. The process is very simple because you just have to visit the blogger.com, choose a subdomain, and create your first blog.
Once you have launched the blog, you are ready to start creating the core of the website – content. Most of the online business models require content to make money, the more content you have the bigger earnings could be.
Within the content, Blogger allows you to put ads if you get approved by Google and use affiliate links. These are the most effective strategies to make money from a blog.
Many beginners get started with Blogger because it is free, or just because it is super easy to use. But, if you want to make your website stand out, you may not find enough options from the Blogger.
Not having enough options to customize your blog is one of the negatives. The overall design and templates are limited, and there are no plugins like on other blogging platforms. It negatively affects both – your and the user experience.
When it comes to your chances of making money, there are three main problems:
First, you don’t own your blog. You get a subdomain by Blogger, but the subdomain belongs to them. If something goes wrong, you may lose your blog and everything that you have built.
The subdomain creates problems on SEO as well. You can’t build authority because your blog is a part of another website, so the competitors who own their domain names have a big advantage over you. It does not mean that you can’t make money, but you will have lower rankings and traffic in the long run from Google.
If you plan to get traffic from search engines, which is definitely recommended, Blogger may not be a good option.
Pros
-It’s free
-Beginner-friendly
-Create a blog and publish content fast
Cons
-Blogger has a control of your website
-You have a subdomain
-Limited templates and no plugins
-Bad for SEO
Benefits of WordPress
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) and is the most popular website builder in the world. There are more than 1.1 million new registered WordPpres domains every 6 months, and the number is growing fast.
Even the biggest world’s brands, like BBC, Bloomberg, Microsoft and more, are powered by this amazing website building platform.
Most successful bloggers who utilize content marketing and make money use WordPress for their websites. It is not as simple as Blogger to use, but it’s more diverse and functional.
If you decide to create your website with WordPress, you will get complete control of every aspect of your blog. You can choose themes, customize each feature, add any type of advertisement, and make any edits you want without needing any technical skills.
Starting with the things you can control, there are a lot of free and premium themes to choose from. They determine how your website will look and can improve the web design of your site significantly.
The best part part about WordPress is that you can unlimitedly expand your website’s functionality by installing different plugins.
Currently, there are over 44,000 different WordPress plugins and all offer different features, like social media integrations, email forms, security systems, pop-ups and plenty more.
There are also SEO plugins that can assist you to get better rankings on Google. They will help you to enhance your content for the best organic traffic results, and the most popular for search engine optimization is Yoast plugin.
Developers create new themes and plugins every single day, so you will never stay out of date. There are free or premium versions of WordPress themes or plugins. While there are chances that you might want to upgrade your theme to premium, it is unlikely that you would ever want to upgrade your plugins as they are quite packed with features in their free versions.
The only thing that comes at the cost with WordPress, is that you need to pay a few dollars per month for hosting and a domain name if you want access to all these benefits.
But, WordPress isn’t an exception for that. If you want to have your unique domain name (without subdomain), you will still have to pay for domain and hosting whatever website building platform you are using. And it’s cheapest with WordPress because it’s free.
Lastly, you need to manage the blog. It is not only about creating and publishing content like on Blogger, but there is a learning curve. You will learn how to use the plugins and the themes even if they don’t have anything too technical.
Once you master them, you will be able to run a fully functional website that gives a unique user experience, and earns money.
Pros
-Complete control over your domain name and website
-Unlimited themes and plugins to customize your blog
-Plugins to make your blog SEO friendly
-Responsive web design
Cons
– Not so beginner friendly
-You must buy a domain name and hosting provider
Blogger vs. WordPress For AdSense
Google AdSense is an advertising network that you can use to monetize the traffic of your blog. If you get approved for the program and install their code, they will automatically put ads on your website and you can make money each time that visitors click on them. Google AdSense is the best advertising program on the internet with millions of members, and it’s a great way to make money.
Most AdSense sites target keywords to get traffic by creating quality content. So, the focus of this strategy is based on your SEO skills. You need to optimize your blog and your posts for SEO.
Some people believe that Google will increase the rankings of websites that are created on Blogger because it belongs to Google. For the same reason, they expect more earnings with AdSense.
Today, Google does not rank well Blogger websites, and you can check that by yourself. Try to type several phrases on Google and run a search. It’s very unlikely that you will see any results of websites with the subdomains.
If you find a keyword that has websites with any type of subdomain on the first page, that means it is an easy target, and you could easily outrank it with your own unique domain.
Google AdSense only cares about providing quality content to the visitors, and in Google’s eyes, the website with a subdomain doesn’t look like a quality source of information. Google prefers websites with premium domain names that follow its ranking factors, and WordPress websites fit better in this category.
WordPress allows you to optimize each page of your site, optimize your images, create a great user experience, and work great for mobile phones that can generate a lot of traffic.
If a Blogger website and a WordPress website has the same numbers of traffic or uses different sources to get visitors, WordPress has an advantage as well. It’s easier to test your ads on a WordPress website, and there are plugins that help you to find the best placements, sizes, and formats.
Also, Google Analytics and Search Console are super important tools to monitor your visitor’s behavior and ranking key phrases. They are also crucial when advertising with Google ads and every successful website that makes money uses these metrics.
Unfortunately, you don’t have access to these if you are using Blogger. Google only offers these tools to self-hosted sites.
Blogger vs WordPress For Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketers promote other people’s products and make commissions. There are plenty of techniques to achieve that, but you need a website. So, the question is which platform is the best for this business model. Again, WordPress has an advantage here for many reasons.
First, if you want to apply an SEO strategy, which is again, highly recommended, affiliate marketing has no difference from AdSense. WordPress can help you get better results from SEO and bring a thousand times more visitors from Google.
If you want to get traffic from other sources like social media or paid advertising, the results from the traffic will be the same.
However, WordPress has better user experience and looks more professional than Blogger. People are more likely to stay longer on your WordPress and engage with your content, simply because of the better-looking website and the URL.
You can expect more clicks on your links and get better conversions, even if you have the same amount of traffic.
Lastly, many affiliate marketers create funnels, email forms, sales pages, and other promotional pages to sell their products. These pages must look great and convincing.
WordPress has many plugins that can help anyone with email marketing. Even beginners can handle these plugins and promote their links. If you use Blogger, your sales page will look like another page of your site.
The risk is another factor you should consider before starting affiliate marketing on Blogger. If you have bought a domain name and have a hosting provider, you are free to do whatever you want on your website. However, Blogger has rules that you must follow.
If they believe that you have violated their rules, they may delete your website, and all your hard work with potential earnings would be gone.
Conclusion
The only advantage of Blogger is that you can use it for free and publish content instantly. If you have already written an article, you can create a new website, add the content, and publish it in a few minutes.
This process can be fun for people who are only passionate about writing and don’t want to make money online. However, WordPress wins every other part of the game. It is a better option for every online business model, which works well with search engines and user experience.
If you are serious about earning money, it is worth to put the time into learning WordPress. As a beginner, you may need to play with some themes and plugins before feeling comfortable with it. However, WordPress is generally considered easy platform to use, and you should learn it quickly.
Lastly, there is a big industry behind WordPress these days. Many authority websites write about this blogging platform and many businesses that offer services relevant to WordPress design and development. That proves to us that this platform is on a huge demand right now. On the other hand, Blogger is not so popular as it used to be a few years ago.
Most marketers use it only to get backlinks and share content from their websites that have created on other platforms.
So, if you are serious about blogging and making money, you should definitely go for a self-hosted domain and WordPress.
Paul Lian is a researcher, writer, and founder of WayToChanges.com. With over eight years of experience in blogging, digital marketing, copywriting, and digital products, he has built multiple six-figure income streams. Through his blog, Paul shares his best expertise, strategies, and tools to help readers achieve financial freedom and success in their own digital ventures.