Setup: Google did make this fairly easy. Create an account, select a name for your blog and pick out a template. It’s that easy.

Layout: Blogger offers pre-configured templates, which make it easy to setup without having to know any special programming. They offer several choices too, so you won’t be stuck with a boring blog.

If you want something different and you know a little about html or java scripting, you can easily customize your blog’s look and feel under the template tab from the dashboard, where you’ll find the window showing the html code that generated the template.

Publishing: You can create a new post, which opens a window for you to type in, or email your post to your blog by setting up a Mail-to-Blogger address under the settings tab. This is real convenient. You can also set this up to hold your post in draft until you review it for proper formatting before it’s published. This is great for the perfectionists out there that want everything picture perfect!

Blogger offers automatic conversion to ATOM.XLS which is a syndication format. This allows your blog posts to become formatted in a way that other webmasters could use your content on their sites, if you want. This is a great way to increase visibility to your blog.

Comments: They’ve got some good options around comments. You can have comments display or not depending on what you’d like appearing on your blog. They even have a comment moderation feature, so comments have to be reviewed by you before they appear on your site. That’s excellent for controlling your site content and keeping it “pure” for your audience.

Search: Similar to Microsoft Spaces Live, Blogger uses the interests from your profile to help you find others with the same interests. There are pros and cons to this. The pro is you can quickly find people who like the same thing you do. The con is, unless you list everything you can think of in your profile, it’s difficult to reach more folks.

That’s when it’s probably better to use Blogger’s search function, where you enter a word and it searches the blogs containing that word. It works well and it’s easy to get to others blogs with those words. The only down side is how time consuming it is to read through all the blogs that appear in the search!

Linking: Linking to other blogs and having them link back to your blog, is a great way to increase traffic to your blog. I suppose you could write down the address of the blog you like, then go to the template page and add some html to point to that blog’s address , but what a bother!! Unfortunately, I could not find an easier way to do this in Blogger. Other blog applications have a handy bookmark or “add to my favorites” button that makes linking a whole lot easier.

Monetary Gain: Did you know you could make money with your blog without selling anything? It’s called AdSense. It’s an advertising feature of Blogger, which enables you to earn some cash every time one of your visitors clicks on the advertisements on your blog. I personally haven’t tried this as it’s not appropriate for my site, but I’ve heard from many people in various forums who would recommend it for quick money with little effort.

Statistics and Tracking: By default Blogger doesn’t offer any stats, no visitor counters, nothing. If you want to know how many folks are visiting your blog each day, you’ll need to search the web and find some free html code and add it to your blog under the template tab. If you’re a novice, that’s not going to be easy.

Customization: As you gain more experience with blogging, you may decide you’d like to offer more to your readers than just your posts. If that’s the case, you’ll need to learn some html or java scripting to provide the extras.

For example to add favorite links, pictures of books that link to Amazon, or a visitors counter, I had to locate “html” from other sources and modify for my purposes. If you’re okay doing that, it’s pretty easy to update from the template’s tab. I don’t recommend that for the novice out there.

After using blogger for 3 months, doing everything possible to increase visitors, I made the decision that Blogger is not for me. If you’re interested in online journaling or providing updates to a select list of family and friends, Blogger may be just what you’re looking for. If you want to run a business or use Blogger to increase traffic to your site, I do not recommend it.

Copyright Elizabeth Marks, author of ThinkOnIt Devotions, has a heart for helping others grow in their relationship with Jesus Christ. Do you need encouragement? Visit http://www.ThinkOnitDevotions.com today for daily devotions, book reviews, favorite websites and more!