Newbie Blogstep Four: Choosing a blogging platform

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Photo by: Andyp

Following on from yesterday’s post – watching some videos – today I’m going to touch on the different types of blogging platforms that are available to you as a newbie blogger. 

I know much has been covered on this subject and I’m not going to try and cover old ground, but I am going to give my views and opinions on what each of the 3 blogging platforms has to offer people who want to start blogging.

Different Types of Platform

Blogger.com – is a free blogging software blog platform that will provide you with space on yourname.blogspot.com and will be highly optimised for search engines (especially google as they own blogger) and is really easy to setup.

Wordpress.com – is similar to Blogger above that this software is free and you will get a sub-domain to host your blog on – yourname.wordpress.com, you can choose from a few different designs like blogger, and you can add various plugins.

If you’re looking for a comparison of blogger.com and wordpress.com, then this post may help you decide.

Self Hosted wordpress.org  –  This option is by far the most common that I see throughout the blogosphere.  It is what I use for all of my blogs, including this one, and what a lot of bloggers use throughout the world to run their blogs on.

I’ve not covered the above in great detail as I think Darren Rowse over at problogger did a really great job in his post of choosing a blog platform – you should go and read it.  It lists pros and cons of each type and touches on whether you are best to use a hosted blog (blogger.com or wordpress.com) or choose to use a self-hosted blog on your own domain and hosting (wordpress.org for example) and also reflects on a few issues of whether you are technically aware or not and which could be better for you.

What I chose and why?

The conscious thing I did when deciding what to do was setup all three, no I wasn’t greedy I just wanted to test the three above and see what happened.  I didn’t like blogger, nor did I fully think wordpress.com was manageable.  I wanted to differentiate myself and build an online presence at the same time. If I started monetising my blogs, and the accounts were shutdown/deleted (which has happened to a lot of people) then would I be able to forgive myself for not splashing out a few hundred dollars against losing potentially thousands? – I don’t think I could.  Now, there is another blogging platform that you could use which is moveable type, but I have heard bad stories about this and so I didn’t try it, if you choose to, or you use this service then I’d love to hear from you how it’s going for you. 

So, in the end I chose to use wordpress.org software and host it on my own account (virtual space on the internet).  I did have to buy a domain name and rent a hosting account from a hosting company, but I believed this would be better in the long run (I did in fact already have a hosting account for an e-commerce website I had so I was at a slight advantage).  It meant that the blog is actually mine, and I can sell it in the future for profit. I also got a cool email address like yourname@yourdomain.com (well I thought it was, lol). 

There was another reason I decided to self-host though, I wanted to build an online portfolio, a sort of online blog empire, and I knew that the ‘safest’ way to do this (without having my account closed) was to have my own domain and hosting for all my blogs. I could then potentially sell some of them as a package to possible buyers. 

What to do now?

If you haven’t already, then I would suggest taking a trip over to problogger and reading the post he wrote about the different platforms you can choose, mentioned above.  Then, take a trip over to wordpress.com and blogger.com to set up an account with both, you can see how each one works and what happens.  I’d suggest setting up a dummy account (one that you’re probably not going to use) and publish some posts – this can be anything – it’s just to test the software and for you to understand how each one works.

Next week I’m going to be looking at establishing your blog.  If you liked this post, then don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed for newbie bloggers.

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