By now you should know why you must create a blog for promoting your affiliate products. If you have any doubt about the importance of a blog in your affiliate marketing business, you can review my earlier post why you should create a blog. If you lack technical skills or money to host a blog in your own domain, you should create a blog for free in Blogger. Blogger is a Google hosted blog platform and it is very popular among affiliate marketers starting out on a shoestring or no budget at all.
Though there are a few other options to create a blog for free, Blogger provides some compelling reasons that triumph over other free blogging services. In Part 1 of my Blogger series, I will discuss the pros and cons of using the Blogger platform to create your first free blog.
Pros Of Using Blogger Platform
1. Owned by Google, a large company with lots of cash. So, you will have peace of mind that they won’t impose a fee in the near future.
2. It is simple to sign up and start blogging. It takes no more than 10 minutes to create your blog.
3. Unlimited Number of blogs. You can create unlimited number of blogs in Blogger platform without resorting to trickery and violating their terms of service. If you are working on more than one niches as an affiliate marketer (and you always should), you should create individual blog focused narrowly on individual niche topic. For example, if you are promoting rose gardening and dog training, you can create two blogs – one for gardening and the other for dog training.
4. No Advertisement. Unlike many Google websites and free Blog providers, Blogger does bot display any advertisement. However, you can use your own advertisement for monetizing your blog and keep 100% revenue to yourself. You don’t have to share any revenue with Google.
5. Easy To Use AdSense For Monetization. Google even goes one step further to give you a revenue generating mechanism in the form of AdSense. You can sign up for AdSense, and once approved, Google will start showing ads relevant to your blog topic. As an affiliate marketer, your goal should be to generate income promoting affiliate products, but it does not hurt to have a second avenue for creating income from your blog.
6. Use Your Own Domain. By default, blogger gives you a sub-domain in their domain. For example, if you sign up for a sub-domain called rose-gardening-tips, you blog URL will be rose-gardening-tips.blogger.com. If you own a domain (only costs $10/year) called myrosegardeningtips.com, you can attach your domain to your Blogger’s blog URL. And when people click on myrosegardeningtips.com, they will be taken to your blog on Blogger at rose-gardening-tips.blogger.com.
Why is it important to own your domain and attach it to your Blogger’s URL? Because it provides the following benefits:
- It allows you to brand your URL.
- In the future if you move to your own hosted domain, it will be easier for people to access your blog. You don’t have to do any redirect or other stuff.
- As more affiliate marketers are using Bloggers to quickly set up Blogs, short sud-domains are mostly unavailable. You can use a long sub-domain in your Blogger URL and then map your own pretty URL to the long Blogger’s URL.
Cons of Using Blogger Platform
1. Limited Number of Widgets and Plugin Though Blogger has plenty of third party widgets and plug-ins to enhance your blog, it still has less number of plug-ins compared to WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging platform. Moreover, WordPress has almost become a standard blogging platform for affiliate marketers. So, a lot of people are developing a large number of paid plug-ins. However, this should not be an obstacle for you in using Blogger. Blogger still provides a decent amount of plug-ins to take your blog to a great height.
2. Limited Number of Themes. For the same reason discussed above, Blogger offers limited number of free and paid themes compared to WordPress.
3. No Auto-Blogging. Auto blogging is a concept where you use a software script to pull contents from various sources like article directories, YouTubes, Flickr, etc. to populate your blog. Once set up, you blog publishes blog posts at regular interval without your intervention. Though it’s a very attractive model for blog publication in terms of saving time, it also has some serious implications for search engine optimization.
Though it is possible to develop auto-blogging scripts for Blogger platform, there are a large number of excellent auto-blogging Word-Press plug-ins already available in the market.
4. Limited Support. As WordPress is more widely used for blogging, you will find a large number of forums and discussion boards dedicated to WordPress issues people encounter in their day-to-day blogging endeavor. For Blogger platform, it is very limited.
Weighing different pros and cons of Blogger platform, I still think Blogger is the best platform for creating a free blog. I have a few blogs in Blogger but I use them mostly for back links to my websites.
In part 2, I will discuss the step-by-step process to create a blog for free in Blogger. In the mean time, if you’re adventurous, you can go to Blogger directly and sign up for your first Blog.
Image credit ange
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maybe get a blog started aswell.
