The first question to be answered is who is a professional Blogger? I must confess that this is probably the most difficult question to answer. Firstly anyone blogging for money is a professional blogger or ought to be. But this may not be the only reason to classify a blogger. There are people who use their blogs to bolster their image – what’s called reputation building. There are other bloggers who might fall into professional category. Which platform is best suited for professional bloggers?
Blogger belongs to Google
What initially attracted me to Blogger was the Google stamp. Needless to say that Google would give preference to blogs which are hosted on Blogger and you might get some SEO juice from this association. Though this conclusion seems to be intuitive and somewhat obvious, there are some SEO experts who don’t agree with this. There seems to be some anomaly in this association since Google doesn’t actively promote Blogger. One of the factors which seem to go against Blogger is the fact that it does not support tags. Now tags are considered the holy grail of SEO. This leads me to an important question – are tags really important for SEO. If Google doesn’t support tags in Blogger, it’s possible that tags are actually irrelevant?
What I do find interesting is that AdSense is fully supported by Google. Maybe, just maybe, Google is partial to posts hosted on Blogger. This means you are likely to earn through AdSense if you are part of Blogger. Those who are dependent on AdSense for a living must therefore consider Blogger as a serious option.
WordPress means many things to many bloggers
Somehow, WordPress blogs seem to look more professional and cool compared to Blogger. This may be because WordPress is supported by thousands of developers. There are thousands of skins, themes, plug-ins and stuff that the world of WordPress is impressive. Moreover you can host WordPress blog on your own server with your very own domain name. This gives me the flexibility which I don’t find in Blogger. For a professional blogger the ability to insert advertisements from people other than Google is important. WordPress doesn’t interfere or let me say, it’s more conducive to such opportunities. If you want to be a professional blogger, you want this freedom.
Integration with social media
Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg, Flickr and other social media and bookmarks have become important tools to showcase your blog posts. With Blogger, I feel a little cramped when dealing with outside media. In case of WordPress I found some nice widgets which enhanced interaction with social media. Somehow, WordPress seems more complete and wholesome with tight integration with social media.
Conclusion
I would go with WordPress if I were a professional blogger. You can jump into WordPress directly and get down to blogging. Google is trying desperately to topple other blogging platforms and therefore I would be keeping an eye on developments out there. But for now it’s WordPress for me