Emily Robbins has a great blog with tons of resources to help you get started and improve your blogging experience, recently she revises her post about Blogger Blogs and how google indiscriminately removes thems. I’ve shared my experience with Blogger at he end of this post.

As is often the case whenever there is a free tool available, it gets abused by spammers. Such has been the case with Google’s free Blogger service, and lately they’ve been very active in trying to delete blogs that they view as spam (aka splogs).

Normally I’d say that’s a good thing, but apparently they’ve been a little overzealous in their cleansing of the system and many individuals are reporting that their legitimate, hand crafted Blogger blogs that they spent much time on have been deleted without warning or explanation.

So…..is Blogger a good platform to start your blogging experience with?

It’s easy…its free and you have absolutely no control over whether it will be here tomorrow. Call me a control freak, but I’ve stopped purchasing any software, scripts or other online material that can be controlled by anyone other than me.

I don’t remember how long ago I started blogging using a blogger account. I didn’t have any money. Blogger seemed to be the latest and greatest. Wordpress was complicated at the time and few knew or taught about setting up Wordpress blogs. So….Blogger was the best option for me.

Based on the above I started a Blogger Blog that had to do with Internet Marketing. At first I didn’t post much. Then I begin to share some of the ideas and concepts that were working for me. I also used it to review various affiliate products and the pages had some adsense ads.

After a while I started getting some traffic. Anyone who does something online can reflect on your feelings when a little success starts to creep into your efforts. I had a few sales, some adsense clicks and I begin to see the potential behind blogging!

Now….I want you to realize this. All my posts were by hand, I didn’t use any automated software or script to try and automate the blogging process. I used the blog to inform my list of some the latest and greatest :)  products as they appeared on the internet marketing scene. I really hated and refused to mail them every other day with…”Get in on this deal….limited time offer” yada yada yada.

One day I tried to log into my blogger account.

My Blogger Blog was gone!

There was no profanity, nudity…..no violation of their terms. Yet after constantly trying to contact blogger support, they said I didn’t comply to their terms. I couldn’t get any specifics, I tried for weeks and was completely ignored.

It came at a time when things were really tough in my life. I was very ill, I was desperately trying to develop an online income. My wife was diagnosed with MS. I needed the money…..I needed something to work and the Blogger blog was starting to show some  promise.

When my blog was deleted….I was devasted. Although I knew blogging was the way of the future, I just couldn’t force myself the start again. I guess its been around 2 years since it was deleted….I’m not sure about the exact time.

I would NEVER recommend anyone use a blogger account if you care about your content and would like have control over how long it starts on the world wide web.

Use Wordpress. Emily’s blog has some good stuff to help you get started…..but be warned!!! Stay away from Blogger