Now that you’ve successfully chosen a topic for your blog, the next thing we’ll be addressing in the smart blogging tutorial is how to choose the right blogging platform for your blog.
Before we delve into this topic, i want you to understand certain definitions…
So a blogging platform is a content management system where you’ll be writing your blog posts.
It’s a facility that enables you to write and publish your posts. More like what we have on fb and other social media platforms.
So there are different kinds of blogging platforms. We have from the popular ones like WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Squarespace to the moderately popular ones like Typepad, medium etc.
These platforms are also divided into the free and the self hosted blogging platforms.
The self hosted platforms is so called because instead of the blogging company hosting the blog for you, you’ll be in charge of hosting it.
With the free blogging platforms, anyone can set up a blog and get started immediately.
And this is about the best place to start especially if you’re a newbie or you just want to play around with blogging.
On the other hand, if you’re thinking of making money with your blog or getting on creating a brand and blogging for the long term then the self hosted platform will be the best for you…
Because it gives you certain privileges you won’t get with the free platforms.
And what are these privileges?
The number one privilege you have when you use a self hosted blog is the chance to have your unique URL.
So instead of www.myblog.wordpress.com for instance, you will have www.myblog.com which is shorter, more memorable and great for branding purposes.
Another major benefit you’ll have is that you will have the freedom to do certain things with your blog.
For instance you can monetize your blog however you want it. Unlike most free blogging platforms that doesn’t allow any kind of monetization.
With a hosted platform like WordPress for instance, you can even add extensions that will enable you to set up stuff like live streaming on your blog, audio and video updates, a store front or a handle for sales of your latest eBook among many other things.
If you’re thinking of starting a self hosted blog, then one of the finest platforms to start is WordPress.
This is because WordPress is the most popular blogging platform. It powers over 25 percent of all websites on the internet.
One of the reasons WordPress is so popular is because of it’s ease of use. WordPress gives you the chance to publish your blog posts with so much ease.
And again, it’s totally free… All you need to use WordPress is a hosting package and a domain name. That’s all.
When you have this two in place, you can easily install WordPress on your website then go about setting it up and writing your first blog post.
In our next post we’ll talk about how to brand your blog even before writing your first blog post.
The smart blogging tutorial was brought to you in conjunction with the Smart Blogging College.
I hope you learned a lot….
See you in the next episode.
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