How To Choose The Best Blogging Platform For Your New Blog

We’re getting closer!  Once you have decided you want to learn How To Start Your Own Blog, and read How To Find A Profitable Niche For Your New Blog, and How To Purchase A Domain Name then you’ll need to decide which blogging platform you’ll use.  A blogging platform is how you will interact with your blog, you will use it to choose your theme, colors, design (all things we’ll discuss later) and you’ll use it to write!

How To Choose The Best Blogging Platform For Your New Blog

There are many blogging platforms to choose from when you are just starting a blog:

• WordPress.com
• WordPress.org
• Blogger
• Tumblr
• Medium
• Squarespace
• Wix
• Joomla
• Ghost
• Weebly

We’ll focus on the top 5 Blogging Platforms

WordPress is the most popular among bloggers, it’s compatible with other bloggers if you share content or work together in any way.  But, there are 2 different WordPress ways you can go.

WordPress.com is free, however, you cannot run ads on it, so, if you’re interested in a profitable blog, you definitely want to be able to run ads.  It’s also not as versatile as WordPress.org and you don’t have many options for expanding your site.  Also, you don’t actually own the site and they can shut it down and you’ll lose everything even if you accidentally violate their terms of service.  I have seen it happen and it’s very sad to put years worth of work into your site and then wake up one morning and your blog, your work, your readers, and you profitable blog is gone.  My advice is to go with WordPress.org.

My own sites are on WordPress.org, which is not free,you’ll pay for the Domain name which we did in the last step of this post, you’ll pay for monthly hosting (some are as low as under $3 a month) which we’ll talk about in the next step of this series.  With this blogging platform, though, unlike WordPress.com, you own it, so you have control over what you can and do post, you can expand it as time goes on and you grow it.  You have control over every aspect of your blog.  You can grow it and add more ways to make money such as a store, and so forth.  It’s great with search engines and there are thousands of themes and free plugins you’ll have access to when you decide to use the WordPress.org blogging platform.

Blogger is free and  it’s super simple to get going quick.  Here again you don’t own it and I have seen people pay money to move away from it later and I have also seen people lose everything like we discussed before.  Google owns this platform, so it’s reliable unless and until they decide to abandon it as they have done with many projects in the past.   You are limited to basic blogging tools, fewer designs and templates are available, it’s not often that they give any updates or new features.

Tumblr is free , super simple, and is more of an image based blog.  It’s what is called a microblogging platform where you interact more with other Tumblr blogs by sharing and following and all of that but, just within their platform.  Kind of like Facebook or Instagram or any other social media outlet.  It doesn’t have the capability of expanding or changing in the way the other platforms we have discussed do.

Again, my advice would be to go with the WordPress.org blogging platform.  You will be much happier in the end, you will have complete control, be able to make money to pay for your hosting and domain, you won’t have to move it later and endure all of the headaches that come with that.

Be sure to read all of the posts in this How To Start Your Own Blog series.  Don’t miss any of them or you could be setting yourself up for failure.  Each one is as important as the next.  Remember, you’re skipping all of the mistakes I have made over the years.