There are a lot of sites you can look into while thinking about starting your own blog, but which one is the best? No matter if you are a total dummy as for blogging, or you have already been interested in blogging before – you should research all options and find out what could work for you best.
There are at least several sites, allowing you to set up a blog. In our article today, we’ll briefly go through selected ones and show you possibilities of setting up your own blog. Let’s start!
What is blogging?
Long story short: blogging is publishing content in various forms in order to express yourself, drive traffic, get attention or even monetize. Within blogging, you can publish a lot of various types of content including plain text, photo galleries, infographics, checklists, e-books and so on. Blogging is also about making the community around content and interacting with audiences.
Why should you blog?
There are at least a few reasons why blogging can be fun and more than just a hobby.
- It can be a great time-killer if you need one.
- It can deliver you some extra money or even become your main source of income if you play the game of monetization well.
- It can make you influential and kick off your career in a different industry.
- You can gain a lot of followers aroung your content.
- You can even start some business around your blog (e.g. t-shirts).
What is the best site to start blogging?
Let’s go through a few popular choices among bloggers. You should find the platform that is relatively easy to set up and may not require any further and advanced skills as for coding. You should not invest a lot of your time and efforts if you are not sure if coding is actually for you. However, if you want to connect your blog with monetization options, you may want to look through platforms offering such an opportunity.
WordPress.org
WordPress.org is one of the most popular options for blogging software. You cannot make a mistake and confuse it with WordPress.com as it is a totally different story. WordPress.org is an open source blogging platform where you can build your simple website for blogging in a heartbeat and for free. To start doing so, you have to sign up with WordPress hosting provider. A big advantage of WordPress.org is that you can build a blog in minutes and have all control over how it looks like. You can control every single element of your website and enhance it with features like online store, paid membership or forums, and many more. It opens up a lot of possibilities for monetization.
You have a lot of themes to use for WordPress and you can customize them as you want with thousands of plugins. However, you need to manage your layout, security and backups on your own.
Wix
Another solution is Wix that can help you build your first website. It is often used by SMB and solopreneurs. Wix offers an intuitive and user-friendly drag & drop editor and it can be enhanced by a blog feature as well as many third-party apps. The set up takes only a moment.
However, it has a few drawbacks, too. With a free account, you only get a subdomain, once you choose a template – you can’t change it, and design options are limited.
WordPress.com
WordPress can offer a blog hosting service in a very basic way for free, however, you ought to purchase some additional features to make your blog look fully professional. WordPress.com is one of the leaders of blog hosting platforms. It requires no set-up and is relatively simple to manage even for dummies in the world of blogging. However, you have very limited options to add some custome themes and what matters for monetization, you can’t run adverts yourself.
Blogger
This free blogging service provided by Google allows you to create a blog quite short & sweet. You only need a Google account to kick it off, and it is free to use. However, you can’t count on any blogging tools, features or plugins, as well as new templates and layout options. Also, you can’t really monetize it.
LinkedIn Publishing
If you are not too sure if blogging is actually for you, you may want to try LinkedIn Publishing. It is a free publishing platform within the LinkedIn social media platform. You can’t really customize it (just add some interactive content to your posts and decorate it with a cover photo), but you can give it a go if you are not sure that you can publish regularly.
Medium
Medium is quite similar to LinkedIn Publishing, and it is rather a blogging and community platform with some social options, more limited than those present at LI. You can’t use your own domain or customize a template, however you have some interesting options for editing publications themselves. If you are not bothered about having your own domain, monetization or layout options, Medium is one of the easiest ways to go. However, if you want to focus on writing only, then it could be the best solution.
Which one should you pick?
The choice does not have to be as tough as you initially think it would be. If you want to devote yourself to writing only, you have no skills nor willingness to monetize your writing, solutions offered by LinkedIn Publishing or Medium may be the best. If you care about flexibility, use WordPress.org, but if you want to get into monetizing, definitely go with WordPress.com.
