Blogger is a service created by Pyra Labs in 1999 and acquired by Google in 2003 that allows you to create and publish an online blog. To publish content, the user does not have to write any code or install any server or scripting programs.
Blogs hosted on Blogger are generally hosted on Google’s servers within the domain.
It was launched in September 1998, being one of the first online blog publishing tools, recognized for having helped popularize the use of forms. More specifically, instead of hand-writing HTML code and frequently uploading new posts, the user can post to their online blog, which is dynamically updated, by filling out a form on the Blogger website. This can be done by any up-to-date web browser and the results are reflected immediately.
In 2003, Pyra Labs was acquired by Google; hence, so was Blogger. Google got the resources Pyra required. Later, the “premium features”, which were paid for, were made available to the general public with Google’s help. In 2004, Google bought Picasa and its photo-sharing utility Hello, which allowed Blogger users to post images to their blogs.
On May 9, 2004, Blogger was relaunched, adding new CSS-based design templates, individual post archiving, commenting, and email publishing. Later, Google would launch a tool called BlogThis! in the Google search bar. This tool allows opening a new window with a posting form that allows the user to post without visiting the Blogger home page.
Function
- Post editor, which can be scheduled.
- Template designer, which allows you to customize the look of the blog without knowledge of HTML or CSS.
- Publishing in custom domains, changing the default publishing address in blogspot.com to any internet domain.
- Adding images and videos through the post editor.
- Public or restricted access to the blog.
- Yearly, monthly, weekly, or daily archiving of blog entries.
- Dynamic views, allow you to visualize the content of a blog through an interface that takes advantage of the benefits of jQuery, HTML5, and CSS3.
- Mobile devices templetates.
- Optional comments on blog posts and pages, with second-level responses.
- Noncontemporary pages with static-constant content.
- Mobile publishing through the short message service, multimedia messaging system, and official applications for devices with iOS or Android operating systems.
- Publication via e-mail.
- RSS syndication of blog posts, posts by tags, blog comments, comments by posts, static pages, and comments by pages.
- Lightbox, a native photo viewer for blog posts.
- Description metatags and robots crawling for the blog and each of the posts.
- Custom 404 error page.
- Custom 301 and 302 URL redirects.
- Custom robots.txt file.
- Integration with third-party applications, as well as a data API to develop your applications.
Use of blogs over the last decade
The digital era brings with it a wave of content in which its creators no longer have the task not only to inform but to seek alternatives and strategies that attract the user and generate trust. Today, consumers want to feel inspired and identified with a product, service, or brand.
When it comes to creating quality content, there are professionals in charge of doing the magic. Writing articles or having a blog may not be complicated, but generating sales from a site is no easy task.
These passionate writers are essential on the web and are known as bloggers. Undoubtedly, it is a term that you hear more and more; although, if you do not know what they do, do not worry, because we are excited to tell you all about their work.
We must clarify something: the term “blogger” also refers to Google’s free blogging platform, but this time we will talk about bloggers.
During the first years of the new millennium, Blogger’s popularity increased significantly and it is estimated that in 2002 there were already more than one million blogs within the platform. These numbers explain the interest of Google, which the following year acquired Blogger for an amount that was never publicly disclosed but may well have been the lifeline for Pyra Labs: at the time of the purchase, the company consisted of just six people.
What turned out to be a Pyra Labs success story was not without setbacks before Google’s arrival; reports at the time told the story of how and why the company ran out of money. As a result, Pyra Labs split Blogger into two versions, one free and ad-supported (called Blogspot) and Blogger Pro, the paid edition that allowed for more features.
Pros
- – Easy-to-use platform for beginners
- – Available in over 60 languages
- – Free subdomain and SSL certificate
- – Integrated with Google AdSense and Google Ads
Cons
- – Limited to blogs – can’t create other types of websites
- – Comment moderation tool is quite limited
Types of bloggers
There are different types of bloggers depending on the topics they master or the sector they work in. There are from fashion, travel, and lifestyle bloggers to those specialized in the technology industry, science, or economics, among many others.
You can also recognize them by their professional orientation:
Enthusiast blogger.
They don’t have a blog as a business: they use cyberspace as a means of expressing their ideas and opinions.
Perhaps they are a writer, poet, or activist with an interest in political and social issues. Whatever the topic he is most interested in, he wants to be known for what he thinks.
Full-time blogger
The full-time blogger eats, dreams, and breathes for his blog, as it is his main source of income and his priority is to generate engaging and current content.
This type of blogger is the one who looks for more opportunity generators, knows how to create better revenue, and is a great SEO expert.
Some of the types of blogs he can engage in are:
– Personal.
– Corporate.
– Of specific niches.
– Online store.
Bloggers are competitive by nature. They put all their effort and dedication to make their content the most popular and able to generate the largest number of followers.
Tools for Bloggers
1. A quality web hosting for your blog
For a professional blog, today, there is no alternative: the formula is WordPress.org with your hosting. And in this, good hosting is the basis of everything, that’s why I mention this point in the first place.
Free options like Blogger or WordPress.com (not to be confused with WordPress.org) and more recently options like Wix are too limited, when you want to overcome some of its limitations you have to pay and then you get into prices that exceed the price of WordPress.org with good hosting.
The hosting you choose has to support PHP and MySQL databases, it has to be fast, and secure, and has to have good technical support because some time or other you will need to use it and bad support, apart from not solving the problems, will make you lose a lot of hours.
2. The email marketing tool
If you ask any successful blogger what is the biggest mistake they have made, everyone will answer “not having taken care of my mailing list before”.
It’s not for nothing that the famous phrase “the money is in the list” has been coined. I don’t really like this phrase because of its greedy connotation, but it conveys very well how important a good mailing list is in a blog.
So, don’t make this mistake. If you haven’t worked thoroughly on your mailing list and subscriber acquisition, you’re already late.
3. An SEO tool
It amazes me how many people write “tun-tun” when they create their content. When you have a large number of followers, these posts can give you a good peak of traffic on the day of publication and the following days, but after that, they will receive practically no more visits.
By “tun-tun” I mean that they have not investigated a niche of searches to which this content could respond to adapt it, to “do SEO”, so that it is positioned in search engines and receives constant traffic through those searches.
4. Google Search Console (GSC)
First of all, it is important to register your blog in the GSC (it is free) so that Google can index you.
But, in addition, along the lines of the above, if you do SEO, you also need some feedback information, mainly for which keywords (which searches) your content is being positioned, in which positions, and which links you receive.
This will allow you to improve your SEO in a very effective way. For example, it happens many times that content is positioned near the first page of results for keywords with a good search volume for which you did not intend to position it. These types of “gifts” are very grateful and you can take advantage of them.
Imagine that you write a post about how to take care of a bonsai and it turns out that GSC reveals that you have positioned for the searches “how to take care of a ficus bonsai”, “how to take care of an olive bonsai” and a few other similar specific searches.
5. Statistics and analytics tools
Two phases:
- Initial start-up
- The growth phase
To give you an approximate figure: the initial start-up phase would be the phase until you consolidate an average number of daily visits of around 100 visits.
During this phase, my advice is to keep the focus simply on increasing the absolute number of visits to your blog. For this, a simple and free tool like Jetpack (specifically its statistics module) is enough.
6. Image editing tools
Any self-respecting content should have at least one or two images. It is very important that these images are of good quality because of their impact on the overall feeling of quality of the content and that they are optimized so that their files take up as little space as possible, which will result in shorter page load times.
To do this you will have to process the images, reduce them, crop them, merge different images into one, optimize their size, etc.
We work mainly with three of them, all of them free:
- Paint.net: a very powerful free tool, a little Photoshop, in short. It covers everything you will need to do as a blogger with images.
- Picresize: This tool allows you to reduce the dimensions of images. Although Paint.net does the same, we almost always use this one for this specific task because of the convenience of being online, for allowing us to work in batches, and because the quality of the results is a little better than with Paint.net.
- TinyPNG: ditto for optimizing the file size of images. Despite its name, it works not only with PNG images but also with JPG.
7. Cloud-based storage and office tools
At this moment, there is no information related to our websites that is not, and the change in efficiency when working in a team is simply brutal, without counting the improvement in security that comes with it.
The security improvement is because having things in the cloud with a local copy synchronized with several people on different computers is an excellent way to always have an up-to-date backup, with zero effort.
But, in addition, what I strongly recommend is that you do not use the cloud only as a shared storage space, but that you take your entire office automation to the cloud and for this, I especially recommend Office 365, the product that we also use.
Conclusion
We must clarify something: the term “blogger” also refers to Google’s free blogging platform, but this time we will talk about bloggers. These numbers explain the interest of Google, which the following year acquired Blogger for an amount that was never publicly disclosed but may well have been the lifeline for Pyra Labs: at the time of the purchase, the company consisted of just six people. What turned out to be a Pyra Labs success story was not without setbacks before Google’s arrival; reports at the time told the story of how and why the company ran out of money.
