How To Find The Best Blog Sites For Your Blog
Blogging can be lots of fun and that is why so many people do it as a hobby. However, the truth is that it is also hard work. It is always a long tough road to success and a sizeable adoring audience as well as regular traffic.
Your journey will start with you selecting from the best blog sites what suits you and your plans best. You will by all means need the right platform and a solid reliable blog site to blog from.
So how will you go about selecting the right blog site or platform to use for your blogging activities?
Avoid new blog sites with no track record
One of the things you need to do is to avoid new unknown blog sites because they are too high a risk. In the early blogging days, I was unfortunate enough to have set up shop in a brand new site for blogs. Even though I dutifully read through their terms and conditions to ensure that I did not break the rules that did not stop them from suddenly shutting me down after a dozen or so posts. They did not give any explanation nor advance warning. I sent them several emails and support tickets but never received a single response. All that hard work and the precious posts O had put so much effort into were all gone. Naturally I learnt a bitter lesson that I will not quickly forget.
You do not want to choose a site to host your blog that has no history or is not established so that it is here today and gone tomorrow. You are building a business here and you do not want to take the risk of going with a blog site that is not known and whose tomorrow is therefore totally unpredictable.
Let us now take a closer look at some of the available blog sites and the advantages that thy come with.
Google’s Blogger
One of the oldest and most established blogging platforms in the world, Blogger was actually launched in 1999 by Pyra Labs. In February 2003 it was bought from them by search engine giant Google. The major change that happened right away was that the service became completely free and this included valuable premium services that had been charged for by the previous owners.
But more importantly, the new owners of bloggers have continued to constantly and continuously develop it. For instance, in 2004, the search giant bought Picasa and immediately incorporated the photo-sharing tool called Hello into blogger, this made it possible for users to be able to post photographs on their blogs alongside their prose.
These days most folks access the World Wide Web from some kind of mobile device and so no blogger can afford to ignore this huge and growing market. In a recent development, Blogger has introduced mobile applications for users. It is now so easy to post and do all the important stuff on your blog from a mobile device. Here the blog site has focused on two main mobile operating systems. Namely Android and iOS.
Today Blogger, which is hosted at blogspot.com, is not only amongst the best blog sites but it is solid and reliable and used by a vast majority of the leading and most famous bloggers around the world.
Clearly, in shooing blogger you will be sure that your platform will undergo constant developments and improvements to enhance your blogging efforts.
Powerful WordPress
Powered by WordPress open source software and owned by Automattic, WordPress.com is a leading blog site. You can get free blog hosting but its’ financially supported through upgrades that users make to paid services. The site was launched in November 2005 and had 56 million blogs in its’ fold by October 2012. It is estimated that at the moment there are close to 60 million sites using WordPress.com including some famous names like Sony, Volkswagen, CNN, CBS, Reuters, and BBC.
Anybody can set up their blog site for free at wordpress.com. The only problem is that you will have limitations to what you can do. For instance, it will not be possible to modify your blogs. PHP code and neither can you install plug-ins. You will also be unable to upload themes that you can customize to give your blog a better look and appearance. To be able to do all this, you will need to upgrade by paying about $99 annually. Amongst the benefits enjoyed by paid clients is being able to use their own domain name with their WordPress site.
Still, this leading blog site is extremely popular and well-loved because of the various advantages it comes with. One of them is the fact that it has an extremely search-engine-friendly setup that has been widely copied as well as numerous other advantages including great plug-ins that are available for this platform.
If you have a budget for your blogging then this should be the blog site that is at the top of your list.
What about the other blog sites?
Despite the many attractive advantages, they offer Blogger and WordPress are not the only top blog sites. There are others.
Typepad.com’s blogging service is not free. You will need to pay for it inclusive of customer support and web hosting and prices vary depending on what you want. Premium services will cost you in the region of $29.95 per month while for something basic and on the low end you could pay as little as $8.95 monthly.
Another leading blog site is Tumblr. It is extremely easy to set up and you can be sure that in no time at all you will be signed up, set up, and already blogging. This is a very visually oriented blog site that works best for businesses that require plenty of photography and visuals. Real estate companies and also furniture businesses come to mind.
In considering the best blog sites mentioned in this article, your decision on who to go with will be based on what kind of budget you have for your blogging and what you want to do and achieve.
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