If you want to be successful in blogging, you are going to have to know the best blogging platforms or blog sites to build your blog on.
One of the biggest challenges a beginner blogger or aspiring blogger faces is not knowing whether to use self hosted blogging platform, or choose one of the free blog sites available to build his blog, .
This is quite understandable, as no one would like to build his blog on the wrong foundation. Building on the wrong platform only leads to waste of time, loss of resources, zero returns for your efforts and ultimately frustrations.
Choosing the best out of the blogging platforms to use is not as complicated as you may think., once you understand the purpose your blog has to accomplish.
Your blog has to first of all appeal to the right audience (your readers, customers and influencers. Blogging is a community and there is no stand alone path to success. You have to do your best to bring your blog to an acceptable standard in the community).
Second, your blog must be good enough for search engine. If not, you’ll not be able to rank high in search engine. The consequence of this is little or no traffic to your site.
But, which of blog sites best meets your needs? Should you go with the free blog sites or the self hosted blogging platforms? Which of these platforms is best for SEO (search engine optimization).?
These are some of the question, you’re going to find answer to in this post. It will cover:
What is a blog?
What is a blogging platform
What to look out for in a blogging platform.
What are the categories of blogging platforms – or blog sites?
Types of Free blogging platforms
Free blogging platforms – Its pros and cons
What is a self-hosted blog
Self-hosted – its pros and cons.
Which of these blogging site is right for you?
What is a blog?
This may sound too elementary to some of you that already know the answer to the question, but for the purpose of those that do not know, “A blog is an online personal journal or diary that is frequently updated.”
It’s a medium to express your passions, opinions and thoughts to the world. Another word for it is “weblog.”
A blog requires frequent updates of information, just like we do when we keep our personal diaries.
The major difference between a blog and our personal diary is that a blog is online and is intended for general public consumption, while the regular diary is offline and solely for private consumption.
When blogging started, it was not intended for anyone to become a professional or for making money online, however, this has changed overtime. Presently, it has evolved to many thing including generating income.
While the blogging scene has developed over time, the competition to stand out as a professional blogger has also intensified.
In order to gain advantage against the competition, my advice is to do a serious research before starting, especially in the area of knowing which of the blogging platforms or blog sites is best for your blog.
What is a blogging platform?
A blogging platform is a software or service where you build, publish and manage your blog.
What to look out for in a blogging platform.
Knowing what to look out for in a blogging platform is the first step in choosing the best blogging platform that meets your needs.
Do you want a blog only? Or a website combined with a blog?
You’ll want a blogging platform that is easy to set up and does not require any programming skills.
It is important to choose a platform that not only caters to your business’ needs but is also aligned with your objectives and goals
Or are you looking to increase your social outreach?
As your blog grows and you have huge traffic, you may want a platform that will not require changing or a platform that is possible to change if you need to.
Choose the best blogging platform to make money (if you desire to) now and in the future.
A huge mistake many bloggers make is that they don’t create their sites with marketing in mind. There are key features in blogging platforms that make it easier for marketers to get good results for their efforts.
In addition, you’ll also want to choose a blogging platform that allows you to have complete control of your blog, and potentially free from the distractions of a billion adverts and countless competing status updates
What are the categories of blogging platforms?
There are two categories of blogging platforms. These are the free blogging platformsor free blog sites, andthe self-hosted blog platforms.
What is a free blogging platform?
A free blogging platform is a platform that allows you to sign up for a free account to build and manages your blog. Although it’s free, you’ll not have a custom domain name. Rather, what you’ll have is a URL that has the name of the platform appended to it.
For example, if you use Wordpress.com free blogging platform, instead of the universally accepted domain “www.yourname.com,” your domain name will be “www.yourname.wordpress.com”
The free blogging platforms host your files on the platforms’ server. It does not require a third party hosting.
So, it saves you the hassles of having to download software, pay for hosting, or managing a web server.
Types of free blogging platforms
The upsurge of blogs on the internet, and the quest to have a blog that stands among these numbers, has brought with it a desire to have the right platform to build, publish and manage our blogs. There are quite a number of free blogging platforms available online, that you can choose from to meet your blogging needs.
Here is my list of the top thirteen (13) free blogging sites.
Using wordpress.com and Blogger as examples, let’s see the pros and cons of a free blogging platform
#1. WordPress.com
Pros
It’s 100% free to set up.
Easy for beginners to start with because it just requires you to sign up with a username and immediately start blogging.
WordPress.com offers premium upgrade to either personal, premium or business plan.
Cons
You will not have a custom domain, by default it will include wordpress.com.
Have limited storage space of 3GB.
Monetization of sites are restricted, therefore not a viable option for business.
Access to only free theme.
Also limited in terms of customization.
Upgrade features
The upgrade features available are custom domain name, no indiscriminate adverts placements, storage space from 6GB to unlimited depending on your plan, unlimited numbers of premium themes, monetization of sites allowed, only premium and business plan but not personal plan, plugins.
Also available are video press support, live courses, lot of SEO tools and the ability to remove wordpress.com branding.
#2. Blogger
Blogger is a mobile friendly free blogging platform from Google with easy-to-use interface. It integrates well with google apps and services. Thus, making it the delight of those that love google’s ecosystem.
Pros
It’s free.
It’s fast to set up – roughly 3 minutes.
Excellent selection of template.
Ability to monitor comment and visitor’s statistic through it’s dashboard.
No restriction on google Adsense ( of course, it’s owned by google).
It integrates well with google ecosystem.
Easy to use.
Cons
It ran by google so google have control over your site.
Advance customization can only be done by modifying xml files.
No custom domain. Your domain will be in this format: yoursite.blogspot.com.
No custom SEO tools available.
Google can cancel your account anytime or even stop providing the blogger service all together.
What is self hosted?
The phrase self-hosted means you’ll host it yourself.
You do this by renting a server space for your blog in a hosting company and then downloading some blogging software to install on your own. With self-hosted you can customize all the themes, code and plugins to your liking. Examples are, wordpress.org and Ghost.
WordPress.org
It’s the world’s most popular self hosted blogging platform. Word press.org can be used to build different types of sites ranging from blogs, ecommerce, directory, membership site, advert sites and magazine sites.To host your blog on this platform you have to sign up with wordpress official hosting service provider.
This is the blogging platform that big websites like CNN, eBay, Techcrunch, Marshables, Forbes, the New York Times, 500 Fortune Companies, and Sony, to mention but a few are using.
Pros
It’s highly flexible.
Thousands of free and premium theme.
Search engines love WordPress.
You can choose to modify the code at the backend of your blog to your liking because it’s an open source platform that gives you the option to edit css.
It requires basic technical skill.
It gives room you room to grow.
It has a very large, interactive and supportive community.
WordPress is a secured blogging platform, and if there is any threat you will be notified promptly by email.
Cons
You are responsible for performing all updates, management and backup on your blog.
Ghost
Is an open source publishing platform. Open-source means the source code is available to anyone with the right skill to modify.
Ghost has two hosting options, either host in ghost blogging platform or self host, but they both cost money.
Ghost pro, which is Ghost hosted blog plans starts at $19 a month for a single blog, for which you’ll get the best support available – since they wrote it!
On the other hand, the cheapest Ghost hosting package for blog on a third party hosting company are typically at least $5 a month.
Digital Ocean is the hosting company currently use for ghost blog. Their limit on the $5 a month plan is 1TB of data transfer. So, if you wanted to, you could have as many Ghost blogs running as you wanted until you hit that 1TB limit.
Pros
It’s fast even under heavy loads because it’s based on a modern Web technology called Node.js,
Mobile friendly.
It has built in SEO.
The ghost software itself is free.
Free and premium theme are available.
Cons
Ghost hosting is not free.
Slow to add new features.
You need a preconfigured ghost host because it’s not compatible with every hosting service.
It’s limited to a few hundred themes.
It’s not met for people that want to create complicated websites.
Which of these blogging platforms is the best for your blog?
Perhaps, the question should be which of the blogging sites will be best for your blogging needs?
This question should be given serious consideration before starting a blog.
Afterall, it’s often said that “no one builds a house without first counting the cost.”
Your reason for starting a blog will definitely determine the cost you’re willing to pay for it.
Failure to get your intentions right is one major cause of failure and frustration in blogging.
If you want a simple site where you can express yourself, or you just want to explore the blogging world with no intention of making money from it, then the free blogging platforms will just be best for you.
But, be aware that these free blogging platforms has it’s cost. They come with all forms of restrictions, so you have no control over your blog.
The prominent restrictions are, you’ll not have a custom domain name, and monetisation of your blog is not permitted.
Worst still, while you’re restricted from monetising your blog, the free platforms owners display unsolicited adverts on your blog indiscriminately.
How I wish free was free indeed!
Wordpress self hosted, being the most versatile of the the blogging platforms available, is the best to start your blog with. It requires basic technical skills to set it up, it has a solid community support to help you, and it gives you total control of your blog or website.
This independence comes with a price, though. WordPress.org software is free, but you’ll need to buy a domain and hosting for your blog. the price of domain for a year is about $14 and hosting is usually about $7.99 per month.
However, the online compass readers can get it at a highly discounted price that’s inclusive of a FREE domain from Bluehost.
What may be discouraging you from using a self hosted platform is that it seems complicated with all the download, installation, plugins we’ve been talking about. It’s really not as difficult as it looks. I’ve put up a step by step guide to help you set up your blog on wordpress.
Nonetheless, there are blogs built on free blogging platforms doing fairly well.
But not without it’s consequences.
It may not matter to you today using a free blogging platform , but years down the line and with so much effort put into writing great content, you’ll see the need to use a self hosted.
At that time you’ll need more advanced features for your blog, which will leave you with no other option, but to migrate to self-hosted or pay for an upgrade in free blogging platforms (although it will still not give you the advanced features that WordPress has to offer.
Furthermore, migrating a blog to a new blogging platform has its complications. Your blog permalink will change, and consequently, some of your site visitors may not be able to locate your blog.
However, if you don’t have the funds to pay for a self-hosted platform, by all means, go with the free blogging platforms! There is nothing that beats the hand on experience you acquire in the process.
THE ONLINE COMPASS RESOURCES TO HELP YOU START YOUR BLOG
How to start a successful WordPress blog
Wondering how to start a blog? I explained the necessary steps to get off to a good blogging start, no technical experience required. I’ll teach you how to set up a self-hosted WordPress blog on Bluehost in this tutorial. You’ll be getting a clear explanation of how to:
I was looking for an article like this! I’m soooo glad I came across your website!
Thanks, Lori! I’m glad you found it helpful.