How to Videos for Wordpress Blogging

There’s a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging platforms. The average newbie now has “too many” options to choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I’m always asked the question “Is Wordpress better than Blogger?”. The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need.

You also need to understand that there are different versions of Wordpress, the earliest now termed as “Wordpress” at Wordpress.org, and the hosted version similar to Blogger now termed “Wordpress.com” which is of course available Wordpress.com. Only the latter comes with free hosting on a sub-domain account. We’ll discuss this in Part 2.

For Part 1 of this article, we look only at the self-hosted version of Wordpress. Here’s the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can extremely furstrating. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating.

With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform.

The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS. Unlike complicated predecessors like PHPPostNuke, B2, Mambo or even Joomla, Wordpress is user friendly. Plus, the availability of source codes in this open-source system coupled with a strong community makes it possible to use Wordpress as an article management system, classifieds system, direct-selling site and even a paid membership site.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go Wordpress, you don’t go back.

A Wordpress tutorial can teach how to use Wordpress in blogging, but by far the best way to learn is by means of a Wordpress video tutorial. Why video and why Wordpress? Let’s take the last question first.

Why Wordpress

Most people use either Blogger or Wordpress for their blog, and there appears to be an ongoing debate as to which is best. I prefer to design my own blogs using Drupal,but that’s not related to this topic. With repect to the Blogger and Wordpress debate, there is only one answer for serious bloggers.

Wordpress. That is in now way being derogatory towards Blogger – just fact: run from Google’s hosting site kown as Blogspot, Blogger is an easy blogging system to use, and being easy, it has very litle opportunity for customization; however Googe users can use Google’s toobar to add posts or online content to their blog at the clickof a button. However, Wordpress wins hands down when we consider serious boggers seeking more detailed customization.

Sure, you can ftp Blogger to your website and run it from there, but if you do the same with Wordpress you have an infinitely larger number of possibilities that Blogger cannot even begin to compete against.

Wordpress Video Tutorials

If you want to operate Wordpress form your website you have to do it right, and it takes some knowledge of how your web space works and also of your online databases. However, learning is well worth it, and there are Wordpress video tutorials online that can help you to do so easily. There is a lot involved, but all you have to do is copy what you see on the video and you will get the same result as the video does.

Not only that, but in order to make best use of it, you have to learn the benefits of using plugins, widgets and themes and how to use them to your advantage. These are what make your blog what it is: add Adsense bocks, a calendar or a blogroll – or all three. If you understand how to do it, you can alter the entire appearance and functionlaity of your blog.

Wordpress Templates and Themes

Wordpress templates are what give your blog its online appearance. Your theme can be chosen according to style or color. For example you can a space-oriented style, woodland, nature, medical, etc. The themes and templates contain graphics that can represent any topic that your blog is based upon. An environmental theme, for example, could be based upon melting icebergs, or pets on a theme displaying any animal you want to choose. There are thousands of Wordpress templates available online, both free and paid.

Wordpress Plugins and Widgets

Plugins are small applications or code that carry out certain actions. As an example, there are plugins that optimize your posts for Google, amd you also get one that sends a tweet to Twitter when you make a new post. It will shrink the tweet to a TinyURL link. You can download a plugin to your blog that will allow you to add a calendar in any format you desire.

A widget is a small icon that activates these plugins when clicked upon. If you use a good Worpress tutorial, all that will be explained, but if your are doubly fortunate to have a Wordpress video tutorial, then you will be able to see what is being done and follow it exactly with your own blog and make it work as it should.

There is now doubt in my view that Blogger is inferior to Wordpress as a blogging system, as long as you run Wordpress from your own website, and you will also need a Wordpress tutorial, preferably a Wordpress video tutorial, to ensure that it is installed correctly and that you understand how your blog can be modified and customized to what you want it to look like.

Good Luck!

Wordpress Blogging and HTML

So the question here is: “DO I really need to know HTML programming to be a successful blogger?”

The answer is definitely “NO”.But what I did learn just recently is that you can use article marketing to drive more traffic to your wordpress blog.

Wordpress Blogging and Article Marketing Are Related

There is some debate as to whether you should post on your blog first or submit the article first. Katie and I believe that you should definitely publish your blog post first so that the search engines know that the content originated on your blog.


When I submitted my first article to ezinearticles I found that I could make my article more readable using the simple HTML code that was right there on the article submission page. However, it took me a while to figure it out. The how to video below shows you what I learned through trial and error (or maybe it was trial and terror).

Let me show you what I learned so that you can save time and make your articles look good on the first draft.

How to Video – Basic HTML for Beginners

In the video below I take you through a few of things that I learned about HTML. This video isn’t in “Geek” or Greek. It just gives you a few basic tips on how to use HTML in plain, ordinary, easy to understand English (with an Aussie accent). It can be also be applied to your blog posts in your wordpress blog.

Wordpress Blogging and HTML

I really want to stress that you definitely DON’Tdon’t need to know ANY HTML programming to be a successful blogger. But if you have a little “geek” in you – you may find it fun!