Blog Beast Empower Network – I’m Not Impressed

Disclaimer:  This is my personal OPINION about Blog Beast.  I do not use it, have never used it or any others Empower Network products, and will never use any of their products as long as their business practices remain the same.  I also recommend that you don’t use it either unless you like being endlessly badgered to “Go all in” and spend upwards of $5,000 on other products.

I DO wholeheartedly recommend Wealthy Affiliate, an online business community, dedicated to helping people start and grow businesses online.

How I Heard About Blog Beast

A few weeks ago I was on Facebook looking at photos of friends. One of my “friends” on Facebook had posted a status update on something called “Blog Beast”.

He routinely makes these types of posts promoting Empower Network, but usually they are in the form of “Hey, I’m making this much money. Look at this screenshot to prove it,” type of variety.

However, this one was different. This one was promoting Blog Beast something that I had never heard of before, so my curiosity got the best of me and I clicked over to find out what it was.

Well the post didn’t give me much information. However, in the comments he mentioned that it was “The blogging platform that will blog WordPress away!”

That gave me a little bit more information, but essentially it was an all hype no information type of post so I had to resort to google to find out what it really was all about.

It took a while to read through over-hyped, one-sided press releases and reviews to find out what it was really about, but I persisted and finally figured out what it is.

What I found out is that Blog Beast is the second iteration of Empower Network’s “Viral Blogging System”. Essentially what it is a software upgrade.

To summarize their press release(http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/10/prweb11247486.htm) blog beast allegedly:

• Took more than $3 million and a year to develop
• Offers a multitude of features not available among the current generation of blog software
• Allows you to maintain multiple blogs among multiple domains within one account and one system login
• Has a better design than the original Empower network and compared to what is offered through other blogging platforms
• They think the setup, maintenance and endless plug-ins of WordPress “can be confusing” and that they’ve made “blogging easy enough that anyone can do it.”
• “WordPress, Blogger, Tumbler…lack key features”
• Users can withhold premium content with a paywall which restricts access to the content and offers a call to action for viewers to upgrade their accounts to view premium content

To someone who knows nothing about internet marketing this might sound impressive, but if you know anything at all about internet marketing and you’re not trying to sell people on the Empower Network then you won’t be very impressed.

To show you why I’m not impressed I’ll go through these points one by one.

$3 million and a year to develop

I would like to applaud Empower Network for actually reinvesting some of their profits to make their blogging software easier for their users to use. With that being said just because you have spent $3 million and a year to develop something, that doesn’t automatically make it the best thing out there.

If you go to WordPress.org and visit their About page you will learn that WordPress has been around since 2003, has hundreds of developers, is the largest self-hosted blogging platform, is Open Source, and to top it all off a number of Fortune 500 companies use it to run their blogs.

I will take a platform(WordPress) that has been around for 10 years, has hundreds of developers(Empower only had 30 developers for Blog beast), and is used by some Fortune 500 companies over anything that Empower Network ever comes out with.

Multiple Features Not Currently Offered By Current Generation Blog Software

I’m not really sure what “multiple features” they are talking about since they don’t really specify. I’m just going to take this for the most part as what’s known as “puffery” or sales talk.

Perhaps they are talking about being able to “maintain multiple blogs among multiple domains within one account and one system login”? I don’t know about you, but I really don’t think that is that impressive and I definitely really don’t think it’s something that I would pay $25 a month for.

If I really thought logging in to multiple websites was a hassle, I would just install one of those browser plug-ins that acts as a password vault. It remembers all my passwords for all my blogs while I just have to remember one password.

Multiple Blogs With One System Password

See above.

Better Design Compared To Other Platforms

What exactly does “better design” mean? Does it mean that it aesthetically looks better than other blogging platforms? If that’s the case then I would have to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I’ve seen the Blog Beast template and there is a lot left to be desired.

Or does “better design” mean that it’s structured better to outrank other blogging platforms in the search engines? If this is what they mean then they have truly failed.

When I searched for “Blog Beast” or “Blog Beast Review” on google I didn’t find a single “Blog Beast Blog” in the first 3 pages. I didn’t bother looking past the first 3 pages because honestly who does that?

What I did find in the search engine results page were Youtube videos, Daily Motion videos, Vimeo videos, WordPress blogs, and WordPress.com blogs talking about Blog Beast. However, I did not find a single blog powered by Blog Beast.

That’s kind of ironic if you ask me.  Here Blog Beast is supposed to be the “blogging platform that will blog WordPress away” but the blogs powered by Blog Beast talking about Blog Beast are no where to be found in the search engines. Yet you find plenty of blogs powered by WordPress talking about Blog Beast in the search engine results.

If you ask me, this just shows that WordPress is the better platform. It’s easy to talk about how great something is but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter how easy it is to use if it’s not getting you traffic. So unless you enjoy being charged $25 a month to blog for blogging sake I would recommend you use Blogger.com, Wordress.com, or Wealthy Affiliate’s SiteRubix web hosting platform.

Setup, Maintenance, Plug-ins For WordPress Are Confusing

This is true. To someone brand new to internet marketing, WordPress can be overwhelming. However, this is true for everything that you encounter that you haven’t done before.

I would be willing to bet that “Blog Beast” is overwhelming for someone who hasn’t done any sort of blogging before, and that they still have to teach people how to use it.

The truth is there are lots of resources on the internet that teach you how to use, market, and make money from a WordPress blog. Heck, there are even tools that let you install a WordPress blog without doing any of the “hard” work.

WordPress plug-ins really aren’t that confusing. They allow you to add extra capability to to a WordPress blog that isn’t included in a clean WordPress install.

WordPress has a huge developer base and millions of blogs using it. People need and want different capabilities with their WordPress blog. As a result, they either write a plugin or hire a developer to create a plugin for them. More often times than not they will allow others to use the plugin free of charge since that is what the WordPress the community is about. WordPress was founded on the principle of Open Source, so a lot of the developers code plug-ins and allow them to be used free of charge to give back to the WordPress community.

Blog beast has no such capability. You are stuck with whatever functionality they give you. There is no way to add functionality to enhance your Blog Beast blog yourself. You will have to rely on Empower Network to roll out new capabilities.

Which brings me to my next rebuttal against their claim that:

“WordPress, Blogger, Tumbler…lack key features”

This is another statement made in the press release that isn’t justified by anything in the press release, unless you consider being able to record a video on your mobile phone and upload to your blog a “key feature”.

I hate to break it to you Empower, but the WordPress iPhone app allows you to record and upload video to your blog posts as well. Not so ground-breaking if you ask me.

If anything I would say that Blog Beast lacks key features.

Blog Beast doesn’t allow you to add Google Authorship markup to your blog. There are a lot of people that feel that Google Authorship can help you increase the ranking of your content.

Another feature that Blog Beast is lacking is Schema markup which is the next big thing in SEO. If you’re not doing it you are behind the power curve.

If you had WordPress all you would have to do is search and find a plugin and then you would be able to add these capabilities quickly and easily to your blog.

Users Can Withhold Premium Content With A Paywall

Heaven forbid someone actually learns how to market a website without “going all in” and spending upwards of $5000 on Empower Network products.

This last part of the press release shows you what Blog Beast is all about. It’s about getting people to sign up for a blogging platform for $25 a month only to perpetually try to upsell them and upgrade them to all other Empower Products that if you bought all of them would cost you, like I mentioned earlier, $5000.

You can actually restrict content on your WordPress blog as well by password restricting your posts and pages.

The Down and Dirty Truth About Blog Beast

People that are a part of Empower Network will promote Blog Beast as an amazing way to make money.  In reality, the people promoting and selling Blog Beast do not sell Blog Beast by blogging about Blog Beast on their Blog Beast blog.

As I mentioned earlier I could not find any Blog Beast blogs in the first three pages of the Google search results when I searched for “Blog Beast Review” and it’s not because people haven’t blogged about Blog Beast using Blog Beast.  If you search google using “blog beast review site:empowernetwork.com” you get plenty of Blog Beast blogs talking about Blog beast.

You may be wondering why I searched using “site:empowernetwork.com” and not a domain that has the words “blogbeast” in it.  The reason is because that Blog Beast is just an upgrade to the blogging system located on the empowernetwork.com domain.  Individual blogs used to be located at empowernetwork.com/insertblognamehere however with the new upgrade the empowernetwork blogs are located at insertblognamehere.empowernetwork.com

But I digress, back to my original point.  The people selling you blog Beast as a way to make money aren’t using Blog Beast to sell it to you.  They are using WORDPRESS websites to get ranked in the search engines.  They are using video sites such as Youtube, Vimeo, Daily Motion and others to get ranked in the search engines.  They are using posts on Facebook to promote Blog Beast.

The question you should ask yourself is:

“If the people promoting Blog Beast can’t use Blog Beast itself to get ranked in the search engines, what use do you have for it?  The simple answer is:  “No Use.”

The truth is that people don’t make money using Blog Beast, people make money selling Blog Beast to other people.