OverBlog is an easy-to-use blog builder that offers everything you need to start a personal blog. You won’t get lots of customization or complicated features, but it’s a solid tool if you’re new to blogging or just want to focus on writing.
OverBlog also boasts a revenue-sharing model, so you can earn money when visitors click on ads displayed on your blog. The site supports English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian.
Features and Ease of Use
It’s easy to create your blog, pick a theme, and get started writing and adding media to your posts. You can build your site and write posts in your browser or on OverBlog’s official mobile app.
The post editor begins with well-defined sections for a title and text. It’s easy to add more sections, including:
- images
- HTML
- links
- quotes
- video
- audio
- maps
- files (paid members only)
OverBlog also supports lots of other standard blog functions. For example, you can schedule when to publish posts, add tags, or enable automatic sharing to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Selecting and editing your site’s theme is easy, but the customization options are rather basic. As I said, if your focus is more on actually blogging rather than creating a specific look, it might not be a problem.
On the free plan, you can pick from 20 themes (32 on a paid plan). You’ll change basic things like headers, fonts, colors, etc. by clicking Options and selecting from dropdown menus. As far as site elements go, you mainly just choose what you want to appear on the page and in what order – you don’t have a lot of control over positioning.
The lack of a drag-and-drop editor and the themes themselves are perhaps OverBlog’s biggest weaknesses. While all of the themes are mobile-friendly, many look dated.
Your blog will have ads on it by default, but you can turn them off if you upgrade to a paid plan. You can also monetize your blog with OverBlog’s Earnings program. This means that if a visitor on your site clicks on an ad, you get a share of that revenue. It’s an enticing feature, but it’s only available to paid users.
Other blogging essentials include a stats page, which shows your visitor count and pageviews. OverBlog also supports Google Analytics if you need something more in-depth.
Pricing and Support
OverBlog has a free plan in addition to three paid ones. On the free plan, your blog will display ads and be hosted on a subdomain at yourblog.over-blog.com.
The next step up is the Comfort plan. This lets you remove ads and password-protect your blog, from $5.96/month.
Full features become available on the Individual plan, which only costs about $1/month more than Comfort, so it’s sort of a no-brainer. This unlocks:
- custom domains (ex. yourblog.com) and email
- premium themes
- multiple blog authors
- shared revenue from OverBlog’s Earnings program
But then the price jumps up to over $20/month for the Business plan, which mainly just lets you run your own ads.
OverBlog offers support via email for all paid plans. No chat options appear to exist at this time. Free users only have access to a knowledge base.
