How to Pick the Best Blogging Platform to Start Your Own Blog

Are you ready to start your blog ?

But you're stuck at what blogging platform to use ?

We'll keep watching in this video , I'll walk you through how to pick the best blogging platform for your blog .

And we'll cover nine different blogging platforms .

So you can get a better idea of which one is best for you .

When you're looking to pick a blogging platform to start .

These are some of the things that you want to be thinking about when choosing the blogging platform .

The biggest thing is you want to make sure that it's easy to use for you and that it's beginner friendly .

You don't want to have to know a lot of technical things to get started .

I also want to make sure that it's feature rich or that their features are available for what you want your blog to do .

And then do you have room to grow both in terms of the features that you need and the functionality .

But also you may not be thinking about earning money yet .

But if you want to make it earn money in the future , is there ability for you to add things like advertisements on your site , affiliate marketing and things like that .

So , having all those things in mind , let's start looking at the different platforms that you can use for your website .

First one we'll talk about is Wordpress dot org .

This is the open source software that means it's free for you to use and it's also free for you to contribute .

Now , wordpress dot org is different than wordpress dot com and you've probably heard many people say just get a Wordpress site up and we'll talk about wordpress dot com .

In a minute .

Many of the pros for wordpress dot org are that you have maximum control over your site .

No one will be able to shut down your site because you're not following whatever their rules are .

The next thing are the most robust features out there .

Anything that you think you want to do with your blog to take it to the next level , whether it be adding features like a forum membership site , ecommerce , if you wanted to , that's all available to you by using the wordpress dot org platform .

There are thousands of thousands of plugins .

These are the things that help you make your site do what you want it to do by adding the extra functionality .

There are also thousands of themes both free and paid to make your blog look exactly how you want it to look .

Now , coming with that maximum control over your site .

Some of the cons are that you are tasked with maintaining your blog yourself .

And that means you must update your site and keep all the plugins and themes updated .

And you will also be tasked with making backups of your site .

Now , if you do it right , a lot of times the hosting provider that you work with can help you with some of these items .

So the price for using wordpress , as I said before , the actual software itself is free , but you have to have a , a server to host this on and the server or the hosting company that you get the server from , they will actually charge a fee and depending on which hosting company you go with that can range in price and but the average range is about 12 99 a month .

But as a WP beginner visitor , you can get it for as low as 2 75 a month through blue host .

And we'll have a link down in the description below for you to get that discount with that .

You'll also get the free SSL certificate for your site that secures your site for visitors .

And you would also get a free domain registration .

Normally , domain registrations if you don't go with , that is usually about $14 a year to renew your www dot my site dot com .

That's your domain name .

The next one we'll look at is Wix and some of the pros of Wix is that it's a fully hosted platform , meaning you just go and sign up .

They have many triplets to choose from to get up and running quickly .

They have built in functionality for you to get started .

But some of the columns are , it shows wis branding , there's a free version of it , but it shows Wix branding unless you pay for a higher tier .

Another thing is they'll show ads on the site but you don't get those ad revenue , they will get the ad revenue for that .

And also moving can be difficult .

It's actually one of the more difficult sites to move .

If later on , you've decided you want to host your blog somewhere else .

It's very difficult to move it off of Wix .

The price range is free for the free tier .

You get basically your site with the Wix branding and the URL .

If you want to pay for it , then the range is between nine and $26 a month .

And earlier , I talked about wordpress dot org and now we're going to discuss wordpress dot com .

So wordpress dot com is using the same software as wordpress dot org , but they're hosting it and they're housing it on their own servers and you're simply paying them to do it all .

So some of the pros for this or there's no set required .

You simply log in , start paying and you're ready to go .

It's also really easy to use and manage .

Now , the cons for this is you do have limited functionality for your blog .

It also means that you can't run ads on your blog and you don't own your blogs .

If you do something on your site or write about something that they don't agree with , they can shut your blog down and whatever traffic or whatever visitors you've built up , you've lost that .

The price structure for this is , it's free for the bottom tier where it could be your site dot wordpress dot com .

You can get custom domain names and the range for the paid tier is between four and $8 a month .

The next blogging platform , let's talk about blogger .

So blogger is owned by Google Blogger was acquired by Google in 2013 and is offered up to people to use as a blogging platform .

And some of the pros are that it's free , it's completely free to log in and use as you want .

It's pretty easy to use and it's a Google product .

So it's secure and reliable , you know that the security of it is pretty high up there .

Some of the cons to it are you have limited features , it's not their main source of income , nor is it their main focus ?

And so you have limited features also , they can also suspend your account anytime if you write about something that they don't agree with .

So again , you don't own your information or your blog , other things that they can just simply shut down the whole service .

So if one day they decide they don't want to deal with blogger anymore , then , then that's a real possibility .

As I said , blogger is free to use the next blogging platform that you can look at is Tumblr .

Tumblr is a microblogging service .

It's really geared towards like sharing images and videos and cat pictures and things like that .

But a lot of people really enjoy using Tumblr for this .

And obviously , some of the pros are that it is free and easy to use and get set up .

It is integrated with social media .

So it's a lot easier to share things through there .

It's a real easy platform to blog , videos or images , audio as well .

Some of the cons for it are limited features , difficult to migrate the blog .

If you ever want to move away to a different platform that's very difficult to do .

The cost for a Tumblr is that it's free and it's usually your site at Tumblr dot com or if you want to add a custom domain , then there will be a cost for that .

The next platform we'll talk about is medium , medium launched in 2012 and it is geared more towards strictly writing and blogging and very little networking capabilities with it .

And some of the pros are that it's free and easy to use with medium .

You can reach an existing community online since medium shares your articles with people who have similar interests to what you're writing about it allows you to focus solely on writing and that's simply because there's no themes involved in it at all .

Now , some of the cons are on the flip side of those pros and the fact that there are limited features , you're not really going to set up , you can't set up an e-commerce site , you can't set up your own forum and things like that .

Next , it's mediums audience and not yours .

So yes , they can send you some traffic .

But if you ever wanted to do anything with those , that audience , it's not really your traffic , they're not coming to your site to read about your stuff .

Also , you can't run ads and you can't set up e-commerce site , things like that .

So if you're wanting to make money , then this being your sole place of blogging is , is not going to be great for that .

It is free to use .

Although they are doing kind of a paywall for readers where people have to pay to continue to read and there will be some interesting changes over the next couple of years to see how this changes over the over the months to come .

So the next one , let's talk about Squarespace .

Squarespace is a great blogging platform .

It's using great easy to use dragon drop features .

Most of the people that they're looking for are more like small businesses to create an online presence .

So that's their main focus of their people .

Some of the pros for Squarespace art that it's very easy for beginners .

It's great track up and drop feature , beautifully professionally designed templates for you to use .

And a lot of people really like that , you can also add an e-commerce setup if you want columns are that it is a proprietary platform .

And so the features are pretty limited and it's just based on what they're pushing out .

So if you wanted something different , then you might not get the feature that you want for your site .

There are also limited integrations since it's a proprietary platform , there's not too many third party developers who can create something to integrate with your website and the personal plan , it's pretty limited .

You only get 20 pages for your personal plan .

You do get your blog and then you only get two contributors .

The price structure for this is it can range from 12 99 a month to $18 a month depending on if you pay upfront or not .

And then if you wanted to add an e commerce , then it bumps it up to 26 to $40 a month as well and you have to purchase your domain name separately .

The next one is Ghost .

It's a minimalist blogging platform and they've really paired down on all the features that they offer so that people just focus on writing .

And that's actually one of the biggest rows for that is you're only focusing on your writing and your blogging .

It's also very clean and clutter free and it's fast because it's built on javascript .

So it's fast .

If you go with their hosting version , then there's no set up that you have to worry .

Well , some of the things to consider is it , it's not easy to customize with apps because of the limited features .

There's limited integrations as well as limited themes .

If you're trying to do the self installation , it's complicated and not very easy to do .

The price structure for this is it's 7 99 a month and you also pay 14 99 a year for a domain name .

If you let them post it for you , then it's $19 a month for one blog and you get a limit of 25,000 page views .

And finally , we'll talk about Weebly .

Weebly is another blogging platform that hosts everything for you and they have a great clean dragon drop feature for you to get up and running .

Some of the pros are , it's fully hosted , the dragon drop design for you .

You're able to test features on a free plan to see if that works for you .

And if you want to go up to a different tier , some of the cons for Weebly are that they have limited features like with square space , they have limited third party integrations and migrating the site is quite difficult if you ever decide to move to a different platform .

Now , if you ever are on weebly and you want to migrate to wordpress .

We have created a weebly to wordpress migration tool and I'll link to that in the description below for you .

The price for Webley is it's free tier if it's your site dot weeley dot com .

Other than that , it's as much as $8 a month if you're billed annually with limited features , and then it can go up to $49 a month if you want to unlock all of the features that they have and you have to buy the domain separately .

Now , obviously , for us , we always think that Wordpress dot org is the best one to do .

And we think the combination of Wordpress dot org and blue host is your best option .

When just getting started .

If you're wanting to take your blog seriously and you're wanting to eventually grow this into a money making venture , then wordpress dot org is the best place to start .

And the beauty of wordpress dot org installation is you can start as simply as you need to and then as you grow , as your needs grow , it can grow with you .

And if you're ready to make that choice , then go ahead and click on the next video in this playlist where I'll walk you through , step by step on how to get wordpress installed for your blog .

Did you learn today's video if so subscribe to our youtube channel and we'll send more helpful tips to help you manage your wordpress website .

And thanks for watching .