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One question I get from resellers revolves around what the value proposition of blogging is to their customers and how they can compete against freebie blog offerings that have the majority of the market today. There is one Web Log tool provider that has the largest calculated market share and one of the biggest reasons why is that their tool is free to use where they only generate revenue from advertising they place on the blogs.

I’m actually a little impressed with how Blogger has finally caught up with some of the functionality we had released over a year ago after taking a look at their tool recently. Even though they aren’t really a dynamic tool like most Blog providers out there, for a dressed up HTML page creator it’s not bad. They make you go through a little wizard to set it up and they have a few pretty templates, plus they now have a basic RTE and comment capability so it really looks like a dynamic web presence even though it really isn’t.

They have a few of the same features as a dynamic content management system, a few of the same benefits, but there are a couple of huge reasons why I don’t think they will ever be the brand at the head of the revenue generating Blogging front which also results in our resellers having a huge competitive advantage.

1)      The first thing to mention comes from taking a look at the history of the battle between no-frills Free Hosting Providers and the fee-based Hosting services provided by our resellers. The bell hasn’t rung yet, but most free hosting providers are finding it very difficult to sustain their business models on advertising revenue alone. The reason why? Customers want better and more reliable Bandwidth, no third party advertising, their own customization such as their own domain, FTP and Database feature support, ecommerce applications, robust Web Building Tools, great customer service, and this can all be achieved for a fare fee of a few dollars a month. All of these same differences can be applied to Reseller branded Blogware versus freebie Blogger.

2)      The key behind Blog content management systems are that they are so easy to use that they effectively lower the barrier for non-technical individuals to enter the world of web publishing. This expands the market from SME’s with an IT staff and/or Web Developers who are the bulk of fee based Hosting customers today to almost anyone with the need to communicate on the Internet, which is pretty much everyone since the Internet is a communication medium. One fragile factor that has been the biggest barrier to mass adoption of traditional HTML based web publishing tools is the attention factor and complexity. There is so much diverse information online and all of it is so easy to access, surfers have developed a 3 second attention span that these publishing tools have to address if they want to convert surfers into publishers. Blogger is a HTML web based creation tool that takes a long time, sometimes even many minutes to generate and FTP HTML pages after designing them in the interface. This is the biggest barrier and something our tool addresses perfectly with its dynamic and immediate gratification of any changes being applied. A customer makes a change, clicks apply, immediately refreshes their blog, and voila! It appears for the world to see in real time no matter how drastic the modifications or updates. No other tool can boast this  without a hefty price tag especially a HTML based creation tool such as Blogger.

So therefore a couple of conclusions:

The value proposition? It is the easiest to use tool available in the market for managing and creating a web presence that provides immediate gratification to any investment in effort that the mass surfing market demands. I won’t even go into how a database driven system like the best of breed Blogware inherently generates traffic which is the biggest “Pain” for any HTML publisher today and provides the most important gratification from publishing online…. Traffic.

How do you compete against Blogger? It has none of the above