Blogger vs WordPress with Guest Danielle Knight

Grow with Angie and April: A Podcast for Teacherpreneurs

Blogger or Wordpress? That is the question! We promised that a Blogging series was on the way, and here it is! Blogging is something most of us know we should be doing, but struggle to stay on top of. There are so many questions such as "what platform should I use?" and "how often do I need to blog?". We are going to address these questions throughout our series, but join us in our Facebook group www.growwithusmastermind.com to start the conversation now. It’s also a great place to get support and advice when you are struggling to build your Teacher Pay Teachers businesses. Ok, get ready everyone. Today we are addressing the popular debate: Blogger vs WordPress. We were a little nervous to record this episode of our podcast because we've witnessed this debate get a little heated between Blogger fans and WordPress fans. But, the bottom line is there is no one-size fits all solution. We were excited to have Danielle Knight from Study All Knight join us for this conversation. Danielle has used both platforms over the years. She was originally coming on as our Blogger expert, but actually just completed a relaunch on WordPress. She has a lot of knowledge on both and shared why she recently decided it was time to jump back over to WordPress. The pressure to switch to WordPress If you have had a website for any length of time and aren't using WordPress you have probably felt the pressure to switch at one time or another. It seems that everyone is being pushed over to that platform, but there usually isn't a lot of explanation given as to why you should switch. The truth is, we don't think everyone needs to be on WordPress. For some of you, Blogger is going to better. For others, WordPress is going to be what you need to accomplish your blogging goals. It truly depends on what you want from your blog. What we are using on our own blogs Angie and I both use WordPress on our own blogs as well as on the Grow With Us website. We made this decision because there are a few things that we want to accomplish on our blogs that are easier to do using WordPress. While we might be able to do some of these things on Blogger it would require hiring a designer to do the work for us or having to find a workaround. But, we'll dive more into that later. Angie actually found Blogger to be a little confusing to use but knows that there are plenty of people that have had the exact opposite experience. About Blogger Blogger is actually owned by Google. That means it comes up easily in Google searches which is always a good thing when you are trying to grow your TpT business. I really like how Danielle explained it. She said, "Blogger is owned by Google. It is a 'what you see is what you get' HTML editor for you to format a blog that focuses on content." And, she's exactly right. If all you want to do on your blog is publish content (blog posts) then Blogger is great to use. It will allow you to accomplish exactly what you are trying to do. If you are looking for a basic blog then this platform is easy to set up and maintain. Things you should know about Blogger: You don't "own" your site - When you have a site on Blogger you don't "own" your site. You can find a lot of information out there about why this is an issue, but I don't think this is a good enough reason to switch. When I was using Blogger this never created a problem for me. There are limits to what you can do - Blogger pretty much limits you to writing blog posts. If you want to change