Best Blog Platforms and How to Use Them Successfully

Blog marketing is a wonderful way to connect with your audience, to provide valuable and useful information to prospects and customers, to sell your products and services, and to drive traffic to your website. However, before you begin to blog or even start to set one up, you have one very important decision to make. Which blogging platform will you use? Here are a few tips on how to use blog platforms successfully.

The Big Three and Beyond
A blog platform is essentially a product which a blog or website is based on. In many cases they’re the service you use to host and publish your blog. In the blogging world, there are three big players with a host of smaller platforms.
The big three are:
* Blogger, now owned by Google
* Typepad
* WordPress

There is also MoveableType.org, which is an open source publishing platform. Another is Joomla, which offers blogging capabilities but is considered more of a website platform than a blogging platform. There are many other website hosts which offer blogging functions; however, they’re not traditional platforms.
When you choose a blogging platform, you’re looking for a few key ingredients.
You’re looking for:

• Ease of use - If you have to jump through hoops and read a 1000 page manual to get a blog up and running, you’re not going to want to do it. Intuitive interfaces and easy to find information are essential.
  
• Functionality - It needs to be user friendly for your customers and prospects, and that means easy to navigate and easy to use.
  
• Features - You want your blog to be able to do what you want and need it to do, including sell products and services, host contests, take feedback and so on.
  
• Price – Always a consideration.
  
• Customization - You want to be able to make your blog look and feel exactly like you want it to without a ton of work, time and money.
  
• Reputation - You want a platform that’s going to be around for years and years to come so you don’t have to switch your blog to a different platform.

Before you choose a blogging platform you’ll want to spend some time determining what you want your blog to accomplish. If for example you want to optimize your blog for the first page of the search engines, you’re going to want a blog that is easy to optimize and maybe has search engine optimization plug-ins. This means making a list of your requirements before you even begin comparing blogging platforms.

Another important thing to consider is where your blog is going to be hosted. TypePad and Blogger are both hosted blogs, meaning your URL will be http://www.yournamehere.typepad.com/.
The same is true for Blogger. WordPress gives you the option. You can host your blog on WordPress or redirect it to another host so your URL is whatever you want it to be. Read everything about your blogging platform before you go through the work to customize it and set it up. Some hosted blogging platforms do not allow advertising, for example, and if that’s something you want to do, then you’ll need to consider those restrictions before you sign on.

The good news is that blogging is free and unless you hire a professional designer to customize it then your start-up expenses are nominal. (There’s a $10 fee to redirect a WordPress blog to another host.) Choosing your blogging platform just takes a little time and research.

Happy blogging!