Top 5 Reasons Why People Use Blogger

I’m sure that those who have been using the Internet for a while are familiar with or have come across the free blog platform – Blogger. To put it simply, Blogger is a blog-publishing platform, hosted by Google that allows you to create a blog and maintain it without any charges. All blogs registered under Blogger will be hosted by Google’s servers at the blogspot.com subdomain.

Besides Blogger, there are many free blog providers available such as WordPress.com, Xanga, Tumblr and etc, which all have their boons and banes. But one thing that they have in common is that they allow you to start a blog for free, and play around with the layout and customize it to make it personal, informational, or commercial as well as let you keep track of your followers.

Though Blogger is one of the most popular blog publishing tools around, it has its limitations. Firstly, it is a rarity for professional blogs to be hosted on Blogspot domains. Hence, to some people, some Blogspot blogs may be deemed unprofessional. Many spamblogs also originate from Blogger, as it is the most common and esay to use blogging platform. Compared to other hosting providers, there are less original themes and widgets provided by Blogger. You also can’t sell your domain in the future, as your site is hosted on a subdomain (blogspot.com).

Why many still use it? The top 5 reasons

Apart from all the limitations Blogger has, it is still loved and being used by many bloggers. Blogger is still able to anchor its status as a popular blog hosting platform as many still use it. Why is it so?

It is owned by Google

Google is the leading search engine on the Internet. Since Blogger is owned by Google, when people search for the keyword ‘blog’ or ‘free blog’, the first site to pop out in the search results is Blogger, hence many start their first blog through Blogger!

Easy to use

It is generally regarded that Blogger is the most user-friendly blogging platform. There are many who have returned to the embrace of this blogging tool after trying out other ones. Great for beginners and good enough for the average blogger, it is no wonder that Blogger blogs are still very popular. Its user-friendly interface, widgets and theme designer are also great for easy publishing and customization of your blog, hence, well welcomed by novice and experienced bloggers.

Use AdSense and other Advertising options

If you intend to monetize your blog, the easiest way is through Blogger. As Blogger’s owner – Google, also owns AdSense, Blogger is integrated so that you can monetize your blog by putting ads into your Blogger blog easily. For registrations with Google AdSense, higher priority is also given to blogs hosted on the subdomain blogspot.com, so, it is easy for you to earn some revenue while blogging.

Personalised Domain on Blogger

Some bloggers who are more ambitious usually will think of registering their custom domain, i.e. use a .com domain name. When it comes to blogging under your own domain, Blogger offers you a better deal compared to other blog hosting platforms. When you hook your domain to your Blogger blog, you will not be subjected to any charges, while WordPress.com charges you $12 for each domain you incorporate. If you happen to have many domains, this may cost you a lot of money. Hence, comparatively, Blogger seems to offer a better option!

More Traffic on Blogger

Last but not least, Blogger blog can be established and gain popularity faster compared to blogs hosted on other platforms. Why is this so? When you visit any Blogger blog, you will see a navigation bar at the top of the page, so, you will be able to visit random Blogger blogs easily. In the same way, random visitors will also come across your blog at any time! Hence, apart from your own friends and online acquaintances, you may also receive visits from people from the other parts of the world. If your content is unique, interesting or informative, they may even bookmark it, increasing your potential traffic.

A few final words

Though I myself have tried blogging on other platforms such as WordPress.com and Tumblr, I found that Blogger is still the most appealing, with its easy to use and user-friendly features. Despite the limitations, you can do a lot by playing around with the widgets and themes, to get your own personalized blog with your own unique twist. For individuals or companies with custom domains, you would not have to worry about extra charges when you hook them up with your blog. Hence, let’s all start blogging on Blogger.com!

What is Gravatar and Its Benefits

Gravatar is a grey icon that stands as Globally Recognized Avatar. It is already infectious and millions of people all around the world started using it for their websites. Especially, WordPress has come up with a special built-in support for your Gravatar and it serves well to pull the individual’s globally recognized avatar from the Gravatar servers. This will result into showing gravatar every time next to the comment. This commenter can obtain exclusive identity all over the World Wide Web successfully.

Here, it is quite imperative to mention little in detail about avatar before going further on Gravatar. Avatar used to serve as a graphical representation for the user earlier. People used personal picture or an icon as their avatar to associate well with their presence. Icons are definitely popular for the avatar usage on this virtual world. It can be witnessed to a greater extent with the gamer community too. Here, avatars used and served as identification help particular at places like forums and discussion boards. People use different nicks as their login IDs and some of those are very often hard to read and remember. Avatars will serve as a great help in recognizing and remembering people with their avatar rather through their tough nicks. This wide usage of avatar and its help resulted into its extensive transformation into Gravatar now.

Why should we use Gravatar may be your question now after learning more about avatar history and Gravatar’s entry into our virtual world. Branding is nowadays essential for a business or NGO or a professional or someone that is wanted to make a mark over the World Wide Web. Gravatar is definitely a great helping hand to build your brand on this virtual world. Every time, there is a presence of you in the form of comment or some activity at forums or discussion boards will get more attention and recognition through this Gravatar. There are instances people used to visit your site or blog through being attracted by your Gravatar too. Definitely, it is a rewarding act from you through creating a special Gravatar for you.

Now, are you geared up to ask me, where and how to get this Gravatar, then read further. There is Gravatar Website to sign up and to get a good gravatar for you. Here, always register with an email that is currently being used by you for commenting and forum or discussion board activity. People those are with WordPress based websites and blogs are more benefited for this purpose because gravatar integration is available from WordPress. Old websites and blogs can add this integration very easily too. WordPress built in support is arranged in a better for these needs and you will get very quick integration of Gravatar for you. It is never late now to have your special grey icon in the form of Gravatar and make more out of it successfully.

5 More Reasons to Love WordPress

Yep you read the post title right, “5 More Reasons to love WordPress” the keyword being more because who out there doesn’t love this wonderful platform. WordPress was originally released in 2003 as a blogging platform, at the time blogging wasn’t entirely popular but was starting to become a hobby as the internet was on the verge of its grown spurt. Today we are going to take a look at how far WordPress has come and why it is the best platform to not only run a blog on, but an entire website as well.

5. WordPress is Easy to Use!

Out of several CMS (Content Management Systems) I have dealt with I must say by far WordPress is the easiest to install, configure and get up and running, not to mention pick a theme for, it took me less than 30 minutes to get it up and running and have my first post online! WordPress is perfect for bloggers, but it can be themed to run the perfect website that can be literally setup in just a few minutes of your time!

4. Plenty of Plugins!

Plugins.. They are great, in fact without plugins there would be a lot of functionality not available for WordPress... Extra functionality I must mention! Plugins can transform the typical WordPress blog into a fully functional website loaded with features, with over 60 million downloads to date there are plenty of authors publishing plug-ins from contact forms to sharing buttons and much much more!

3. Themes

Not only are there a plethora of plug-ins to choose from but WordPress has a large directory of themes to choose from, you can find premium themes which are paid or you can find a lot of free themes which still look great, even from there you can customize colors, images and other settings. WordPress has the perfect themes for every webmaster/blogger.

2. Easy admin/backend panel

Are you a novice webmaster or new to creating a website? You don’t need to know a whole lot with WordPress, the goal with WordPress is to get the typical user up and blogging/writing in less than an hour, you don’t have to be an expert to have your own website and start sharing the valuable information you know! Simply login, create a new post and publish it when you’re done... It’s really just that easy!

1. Search Engine Friendly!

WordPress is by far the most SEO optimized platform/CMS available. Out of the box WordPress uses the ?p="post number" urls, this can be changed in the admin menu under settings in just a matter of seconds. There are also plugins you can download for SEO as well as a Google Sitemap plugin which will definitely improve your SEO... WordPress generally ranks higher than websites that aren’t running this wonderful platform.. and after all isn’t more traffic a good thing?

Overview:

You don’t just have to be starting a blog to use WordPress, many websites are using this great CMS even as far as completing recoding the backend  to completely customize there site. WordPress has always been free (opensource) software since its original release. I have tried other CMS such as Joomla, Drupal and Concrete5, they unfortunately just don’t compare to how smooth WordPress operates, not to mention the support behind WordPress is incredible you can find answers for just about any question you have in the forums, and if you have a question that hasn’t already been asked you can simply ask yourself and you will receive answers! Many popular tech sites like Mashable, Techcrunch use WordPress to mange their stuff.

A Glimpse of Luxury Watches

The reason is obvious in saying that a watch is an important piece in people’s everyday life. However, this thing had evolved to give us more than pointing the time. Today, famous names in the watch industry are giving people the chance to own a piece that exudes style more than just telling what the time of the day is.

Since the market of watches is rapidly increasing, big tech-giants companies embracing the concept of smartwatches. We have handpicked some of the luxury brands of watches which are depicted in below infographic with their most expensive watches till now.

Image: Give & Take UK

Why is WordPress Free and Its Facts and Secrets

It is always a well-known fact that WordPress is an open source that comes at zero cost for your website and blog needs. Here, open source is all about the kind of freedom you will get through it like you are free to modify, free to build upon, and free to redistribute too. Many people definitely get a doubt here as, why they are offering it free and why there is no price tag attached to this software. Here, few things one should know is being open source is not all about its free usage and it involves valuable contribution from the talent pool of the community too. It will allow and accept contribution from everyone in this world and uses their contribution for improvising the product successfully. Here, major inside activity will take place in the form of support to the core development team of this project in many ways through reporting bugs, through contributing patches and through suggesting additions. This is resulting into improved versions for the WordPress one after one.

The profitability factor for this open source software comes through offering additional products and service packages for the users. The free open source WordPress software comes with restricted features and people wanted to avail the useful features for enhancing their website performance will buy it through making payments. This will result into an upgrade for your free web site or blog with additional useful features. Mainly, the CSS modifications availed through upgrade with payment will create powerful working environment for your website or blog.

There is little more inside activity should be mentioned here. This WordPress is definitely a open source software that is available for all openly on the net. You might have heard of plugins for WordPress. These plugins are customized additions for your website to perform some special activities for your site or blog. Every year, many developers are coming up with many useful and helpful plugins for WordPress and selling them to the WordPress users. This business is currently grown to multi-million dollars every year throughout the world. People regularly buy many types of commercial plugins, themes, and many more. Take for example StudioPress, which is making every year multi-million dollars through selling WordPress themes.

There is one more thing requires special mentioning here. WordPress is definitely comes at free, but remember that it is not copyright free. It is allowed to use, but not allowed to contribute. This is a kind of open source software that allows free usage, free modification, and free redistribution of code. Here, the catch is that modification can be done to the software but not to entire code. As long as the software being used for your site or blog can be availed totally at free. People looking for simple website or blog can go with this open source, but remember that spending will be needed while you want to make your site further more dynamic and efficient with special themes and plugins.

3 Arguments for Disabling Blog Comments

Are blog comments something you look forward to moderating or do you feel they are holding you back from more important tasks? Blog commenting has long been considered a way to allow your readers to take a more active ‘role’ in the growth and development of your site! For the site administrator however this means they must also take the time to review and respond to each comment left! Is the time invested in reviewing your readers remarks and responses to what you’ve posted better put to use in some other area?

Here are 3 valid arguments as to why you may want to consider disallowing people from leaving comments on your blog!

Harmful Spam

Damn spam! We get that crap in our mail, email, telemarketing calls and yes, even blog commenting has been known to display evidence of spam, gasp! Now that Google has ‘proclaimed’ spammy commenting or delinquent links find therein, will cost bloggers, spam has become even more repulsive! Now suppose for a moment you didn’t even allow your readers to comment, good bad or otherwise, or a way to do so anyway, than of course the litter called spam wouldn’t be a concern to you would it? Additionally now that you don’t have to invest the effort to sniff out spam in each and every comment, there is nothing holding you back from getting an early start on your next blog post!

Time Consuming

One thing most bloggers have in common is they are always pressed for time! Developing content takes time just to find a topic you can focus on and than don’t get me started on the research! The point here is this, if your readers were asked to decide between being able to leave a comment or having fresh content to view, they likely will choose the latter! Unfortunately blog commenting has an ‘evil’ side and that is it’s high maintenance and time consuming, at least for the blogger!

Writing Defensively

Let’s face it, once you have people commenting on your blog, you tend to post updates that ‘please’ these very same visitors! While this may appear to be a good thing, it does keep you from being a bit more daring, creative or edgy when creating something new for your readers and sadly, this is what they want! Let’s face facts, standing out or taking a stance can definitely give you a edge as a blogger, but allowing your readers to influence what you think or create limits you as well as your success!

Although blog comments left by your readers can be helpful and encouraging to your writing efforts, the time they take to ‘monitor’ may be holding you back! As discussed above there are some very compelling reasons for you to consider not allowing blog commenting on your site! When you consider your readers are in search of fresh content relevant to their interests, perhaps your time is better spent developing more of what they want! For this reason and the others reviewed above it would seem allowing people to leave remarks holds the potential to introduce more bad than good to your platform! Just a thought!

Exam Lifehacks: 18 Unexpected Tips for a Higher Score

A great score. It’ll take more than traditional studying to achieve. You’ll need guts, perseverance, and … bacon?

Yes, bacon. Or sugar. Or clairvoyance or a kitchen timer or a cute panda video.

These 18 unexpected tips can boost your test prep whether you have a month, a day, or 15 minutes left until your test. They’ll make it easier remain calm, focused, confident, and organized. Plus, they’ll help ensure that your mind and body are in top shape for the challenge that lies ahead.

Image: Magoosh