Whenever you decide to start writing a blog, your first and most important choice is a platform you will use to host it. No, they are not the same. The platform of your choice should have all the necessary functions and opportunities to let you launch your blog and then use it successfully.
Before we start, you might want to hear one thing. Yes, blogging can bring profits. A lot of profits. Many experienced writers, for instance, combine creating free abuse essays and papers on other topics with personal blogging to gain more income. However, to turn your blogging initiative into a successful and prosperous business, you need to choose a suitable platform and then be ready to put a lot of effort and time into developing your page or site.
Good Blog Platform: What It Should Offer
The choice of platforms allowing to create a completely functional blog is huge. That’s obvious. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a subject for the article you are reading.
In most cases, those blogging instruments are so-called CMS (Content Management System) solutions. That means they are program platforms created to help you publish your content on the web. So, if you are looking for a quality blogging platform, here are the key functions a suitable CMS should offer:
Built-in text editing possibilities. Blogs are mainly about text content. So, it’s obvious that a good blogging platform should offer multiple formatting and editing options.
Comments. The function enabling commenting opportunities is one of the best instruments to develop your blog, regardless of what content and niche you focus on. A suitable blogging platform should let you turn on the comment section and manage it easily. A good blogging platform is simple to master and use.
Adjustability & flexibility. In 2021, many CMS’s and likely solutions allow you to change the functions and styles of your website with plugins and extensions. Even the simplest personal blog can benefit from that flexibility a lot because you can easily add new functions to it whenever you want.
Scalability. The most suitable blogging platform is one able to process a lot of content without performance reduction. Users and readers don’t like slow and unoptimized websites nowadays, so a lagging blog will never gain a stable community even if its content and optimization are perfect.
If you are picking your blog platform at the moment, it is highly recommended to keep that list of features above in your mind. Fortunately, the choice of comfortable and functional blogging platforms in 2021 is huge. Let’s check some of them.
1. Blogger
Blogger is a blog platform developed and supported by Google. It is about pure simplicity. It will take you minutes to create and adjust your new blog. The service offers hosting and domain name for your website at no cost, too.
Still, the customization settings for the blog design and functionality are limited here. You can use only some themes and a simple editor. Though, you can make your design more unique if you know CSS and HTML. However, Google does not allow you to expand your blog’s possibilities with plugins and extensions.
2. Tumblr
Tumblr is another extremely popular platform to begin writing your blog. It has tens of millions of online diaries, and its user base is steadily growing. Readers can subscribe to see new posts by their preferred authors instantly with notifications. They also can repost them to their own blogs or third-party services like Facebook, for example.
However, if you plan your blog to contain mostly long-read articles, Tumblr would doubtfully be your first and best choice. This platform suits microblogging much better. Local users like posts with minimum text content and more multimedia, such as animations, videos, music, pictures, and photos.
For those who want to concentrate on long articles, Tumblr can become a nice channel to attract and keep the new audience’s attention. This platform is more than suitable to reach your potential reader and user effectively. However, it will require you to develop a special promotional approach to hit the preferences of the local audience. Keep that in mind when deciding to start a Tumblr account.
3. Medium
Medium is being positioned as a hybrid of a tech and publishing platform. Still, it is another blog hosting that many different people use. There, you can find blogs by celebrities and ordinary people standing next to each other. Medium is free to use. However, it can be more challenging to write anything there.
The company is especially attentive about its policies, and it wants your posts to correlate with them completely. Additionally, Medium is always attentive about paid posts, product placement, and hidden advertising. The company does not tolerate any of those things.
However, Medium has two serious advantages you might want to use. First, the community there is active. They’ll read you for sure. Additionally, the search engines of Google and other companies like Medium posts. If you know how to write a quality article and optimize it well, you’ll surely get a lot of user traffic going through your blog.
4. WordPress
WordPress is probably the most popular CMS. It is the basis for more than 35 percent of all websites available on the world wide web so far. That means it is worth attention, at least. However, the popularity does not make WordPress the undisputedly best platform for personal blogs.
What makes WordPress stand out from the crowd are its scalability and simplicity. You can set up a website there with a few clicks. Then, free and paid themes and plugins are at your service to implement almost any function.
Additionally, the WordPress community is huge. So, if you have any problems using the platform, the quantity, and quality of learning materials available will allow you to solve them quickly and effectively.
5. Ghost
With WordPress, one can craft not only blogs but full-scale websites. The Ghost creator, however, aimed to offer an exclusive blogging platform as an alternative. Actually, its initiator was a former WordPress team member who wanted to offer a much better blogging solution.
Ghost’s audience would say the idea was more than good. And, of course, that concept’s implementation was more than successful. Ghost is a lot simpler and more user-friendly compared to WordPress because it has fewer settings and menus to click through and learn.
The platform’s killer feature for blogging is the built-in possibility to come up with paid subscriptions. However, a single plugin taking you less than two minutes to install would give you the same functionality on WordPress.
A Ghost-hosted website is free to download and install on your own hosting platform. Or, to make things even simpler, you can use the company’s paid subscription to get rid of all hosting problems. It’s your call.
All in all, Ghost is a very interesting blogging platform. Someone would say it’s mainly for geeks. However, such big companies and organizations as NASA, Apple, Tinder, Duolingo, and others have their blogs at Ghost. So, it is a perfect place for any blogger, no matter whether you decide to post free essays about the air force or share your experience of a 2-month trip in Europe.
6. Weebly
Here, they offer users not only the possibility to create blogs. Websites of other types like simple and small online shops will feel them well with Weebly, too. However, the platform suits blogging purposes perfectly.
The local infrastructure of the integrated system offers the website constructor to design your resource up to down. Additionally, you can register the personal domain inside the network or connect the existing name to the company’s hosting with no problem.
The free subscription offers every user to get 500 megabytes of cloud storage space and an individual subdomain. Still, you should keep your budgets counted. Most probably, you’ll need to switch to the paid subscription plan soon after your blog gets its first big user traffic and stable audience.
Afterword
Becoming a blogger begins with the choice of your topic and platform. A functional, scalable, and simple platform will let you develop your blog easily. Keep the key factors mentioned above in mind, and you won’t be disappointed with the chosen personal blog platform. Additionally, don’t forget that you’ll almost surely need to start paying for web hosting after your blog becomes popular.
Good luck, and don’t be afraid to start and support a personal blog! Your ideas and thoughts are worth showing to others.
