visnum

Recently, I moved a couple of my blogs from wordpress to blogspot. The main reason for this was my hosting service. It has been nearly one month that I started using blogspot often as a blog service. Now is the time to make some comparison as well as suggestions on how to choose a host for your blog.

Well, let’s look at what you want to do with your blog. If you trust your creativity and believe that people will enjoy reading whatever you write, there are two options in my mind. You should whether choose wordpress.com or blogger.com. Here is why: both services are very easy to maintain. If you want to monetize your blog, blogspot is the way to go because it is very easy to implement adsense on your blogger blog whereas this is not difficult but impossible on wordpress.com. Wordpress.com doesn’t allow publishing ads on your blog.

If you say that you are not creative up to par, you will need tools and facilities that will make it easier for people to visit your blog and read more and then come again. And this is usability. Usability in navigation, usability in content creation etc. In this case, I recommend you a self hosted wordpress blog. For a self hosted wordpress blog, I can suggest you liquidweb.

Blogger is better than a self hosted wordpress blog based on some criteria. If you are good in coding, then I would suggest you to use Blogger because they are also very scriptable. However, with the introduction of new Blogger layout system, you have to be en experienced coder because you need to know how to “escape” some of the characters between two blocks of Blogger layout tags. This is difficult for a beginner and very prone to syntax errors. Wordpress is not the same. On any self hosted wordpress, you have thousands of different documentation in your hand and even if you are a beginner you can mess with code as much as you want without harming your blog too much.

And this is needed for any blogger because there is always the need for customization. You may want to display ads only on certain posts in certain categories on your blog or you may want some archive pages to look different than ordinary pages in your design. Then a self hosted wordpress is the way to go.

It’s obvious that good content always brings visitors in. More important than good content is good and vertical content which means putting emphasize on a single topic.

If you look at blogs in the Technorati top 100, you will find out that almost all of them are vertical in the sense of topic they are publishing posts about.

What are the reasons that vertical content is profitable than mixed good content? Well, primary reason is search engine optimization and the leads that search engines create.

When you look at websites or other resources that claim to provide high profit keywords, they often look like meaningless. They are usually not meaningful. If there is one keyword, of course there is nothing to talk about meaning. One word is meaningful, naturally. I am talking about phrases. There are phrases that sounds silly for the first look. However, they are not phrases for everyday life. They are simply search terms that users put in the search box.

At this moment, remember on some searches we made on the net brings results like one or two words are in a sentence and the third word we are looking for is in another sentence or another paragraph or sometimes even on another post or article at the same page.

Now this is where the vertical content plays a role. Since sincerely writing on a topic and nıt trying to stuffing keywords in your writings would result poor search engine results, search engines try to collect data not only in terms of a single post or article or a block on your web page. Instead, they try to understand your topic on a variety of measures.

So, when you feel very competent on a subject, then what you have to do is to write different aspects on that subject in a single web site.

You can choose the catch-all way and put a variety of subjects in one blog or website, but then search engines either put you in a wrong category in terms of a topic or they would not get your subject at all. This is also why blogs concentrated on a certain subject always have better search results. This is because of the structure of a blog. On any front or archive page in a blog, there are 10 posts on average. If they are almost on same subject then it is very easy for a search engine robot to identify and connotate your blog with that subject.

This is of course also very important when it comes to related text advertising. On any given day, if you have at least tens of posts in your blog on a certain subject and you suddenly post something entirely different or something very short, ads sontinue to display in the context of your subject in general.

As a conclusion, if you blog for fun then you don’t need to stick with a certain topic. If you are blogging for the purpose of making money out of text advertising then you should pay attention to create vertical content. You’ll be more profitable that way.

Obviously, I use Google Adsense to monetize several of my blogs. I am not a person who committed himself to make money out of blogging. I just evaluate, appreciate and use it. It is useful. It can pay the cost of my web hosting services.

However, as a geek and a former marketing / advertising worker, I do some research on the web advertising market. I do that research virtually irregularly. You cannot have enough idea just by looking at what I say on the issue. I am going to share my opinion anyway.

When it comes to online marketing, advertiser’s part is fairly easy in comparison to the publisher’s. The online advertiser have reach to many tools and these tools can measure the return on investment (ROI) fairly well. On the other hand, there are many uncertainties on the side of the publisher.

Whatever the publisher does in order to get an idea about what keywords (thus, what topics) to deal with, there is always a great percentage of chance involved.

The publisher can get the hang of keyword value mathematically but what about the order and the timing when and how the ads are going to be published. If you do every work on your part and don’t relay on a third party advertising publisher like Google Adsense or Yahoo Advertising Network, then results would be more predictable. In that case, your business will not be feasible because you will need great marketing budget and effort to promote your ad spaces. Therefore, this is not a solution to a more predictable outcome.

Suppose that you did research in order select a topic for your new website from which you expect advertising revenue. Then imagine that you finally decide on a supposed to be profitable topic. Then you work on your articles or posts and you publish them. You do everything to provide a good placement in search engines and you start displaying related ads on your website.

This is the publisher’s part.

Now, the fact is, any advertiser on your topic has a budget and his budget declines with every click. Since you are not the sole content provider on that topic, there is a great chance that his budget reaches to zero before any advertising are clicked on your website.

The problem is clear. There are no gambling at the side of the advertiser but there is a great effect of chance on the side of the publisher.

All of this information can be gathered in the future, maybe. Moreover, you can mathematically have the information as possibilities or probabilities but never as exact predictions of the real result.

So, this is why traffic and targeted traffic is so important. You have two competition. One of them is the advertisers budget that day or that hour. The other is the possibility of websites publishing something on the same topic. The only way you can have your way out of this situation is working on traffic. Therefore there are still a lot of catch-all websites. If publishing vertically on a certain topic would be the only wise move to solve these problems then we would not see that much website with topics on anything that comes to your mind at the same time at the same page.