This is a post I wrote on Reddit some time back.
I am astonished at how many people are using Blogger, Wix, et al.
I guess most people are not actually serious about achieving anything with their blogs and see it as their diary or something. And that’s fine.
But I see posts with questions from people who are actually aiming at monetizing their blogs at some point, be it via affiliate links or ads, and are STILL using Blogger!
I can only come to one conclusion: they’ve probably heard about blogging as some get rich quick scheme, read a few gurus (looking at you Neil Patel), and are now massively wasting their time.
If you’re one of them I actually feel for you.
Take my dad for example. He makes good leather shoes. Nothing to write home about in terms of looks, but you’ll be amazed how serious he is about complicated leather tanning and chemicals and stuff. But no one knows this. I told him he should write about it and let people know, all the while driving a few sales. And his immediate thought was: so should I go and set up Blogger?
No, you shouldn’t. Sure, it’s easy to start using, but that’s their only advantage. If you’re serious about this, you are massively shooting yourself in the leg.
With third party, you get a blog that’s:
- Not yours. Period. It’s either Google (for Blogger) or Wix etc. They own the blog and they reserve the right to take it down. If you ever choose to take your blog somewhere else, it’s a gigantic PITA to do so, or outright impossible.
- Not monetizable. Amazon will ban you. Other affiliate networks don’t accept Blogspot blogs. Any ad network that’s not AdSense, which pays peanuts, simply technically cannot be used on your third-party blog.
- Not optimizable for SEO. With WordPress, you have the choice of fast vs. cheap hosting. You can make your site blazing fast and minimal, or beautiful and awesome. But most importantly, you can use SEO plugins or even get into the technical SEO yourself – canonicals, breadcrumbs, schema markup, etc.
- Not prepared for advanced marketing stuff. With WordPress, you can do anything: exit intent pop-ups, above-the-fold offers, Hello bars, Facebook pixel retargeting, lead magnet-based email tagging… you name it. With Blogger you’re SOL.
Setting up a WordPress blog is actually super-easy, and even a non-coder like myself is able to do it quite quickly. It takes me 15 minutes to get the site running with a fresh install of my favorite theme.
Good luck!
What about Squarespace?
Squarespace is good enough for a start. A couple of points to stress though:
- It’s a closed ecosystem. You have a limited choice of themes and extensions as opposed to hundreds of thousands on WordPress and you’re reliant on its devs as opposed to a huge community on WP.
- Its marketing tools and SEO optimization features are still VERY limited. You can’t do most of the things I do on my WP sites.
- It’s very bloated, at least in my limited testing. It’s slow and not compliant with Google’s new core web vitals requirement.
- It gets expensive as you upgrade as opposed to my $5/mo VPS with WordPress self-hosted.
None of this applies to my rant about people wasting their time with SS though. It’s just IMO an inferior choice but still usable and people earn money with it.
