Best Blogging Platform for Marketing Yourself

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The best blogging platform for marketing yourself depends on its ability to customize for SEO and share with other distribution channels such as social media.

It also has a few other requirements:

• Is the platform strong enough financially to survive for the foreseeable future?
• Does it fit the technical skills of the author?
• Does it provide an SEO-friendly vanity URL?
• Is it easily ranked by search engines?
• Does it distribute posts to other bloggers on the same site?
• Can you follow new postings via email or mobile notifications?

Blogging from a marketing perspective takes two forms:

1. The ability of the blog to be effective in marketing itself.
2. The ability of the blog to market its parent site, i.e., the Travel Channel blog on Tumblr that really serves to market the Travel Channel brand and Web site.

Know Your Target Audience

The best blogging platform also is impacted by the audience it reaches. In other words, blogging platforms have many similar characteristics, but their audiences may vary quite a bit.

It is not enough anymore to target the global Web audience. A blog platform that exists on a host site such as Blogger and WordPress also targets the authors and visitors to other blogs on that platform.

Another important consideration is the audience of that platform. Blogger.com and WordPress.com both have more traditional content with a mix of images and narrative.

Tumblr and other recent additions to blogging platforms are more graphical and appear to have younger and more uninhibited authors.

If the brand and reputation of the business matters — and it matters to most of them — then it is crucial to have a blog on a site with visitors and other blogs that favor the same things.

5 of the Best Blogging Platforms

The following five options are free and exist on a shared platform. One of them, WordPress, also is available as a download that can be set up on a separate host.

WordPress

This is an easy one. WordPress is the premier blogging platform in terms of easy use,  easy installation and easy updating.

Go to WordPress.com and look at the home page. Note the display of blog topics, the display of new postings and the links to the authors of those postings.

Click on a topic and see even more postings and links to individual blogs.

WordPress.com promotes its bloggers as much if not more than any other blogging platform. From a marketing perspective, it’s clearly one of the best.

Out of all the blogging platforms, I have found that it is easiest to attract followers on WordPress.com.

Tumblr

Tumbler is one of the newest platforms and shooting up quickly in popularity. Unlike Blogger above, my test blog was indexed very fast by Google.

It is much more simple than WordPress and allows external linking without nofollow attributes.

The site promotes its authors on the home page and clearly emphasizes graphics over text.

Distributing to Facebook and Twitter was easy.

Yahoo! bought the site in 2014 and has been promoting some of the better blogs on other Yahoo! sites and in its search engine.

Tumblr is almost as good as WordPress.com in attracting followers.

Blogger

The largest blogging platform based on total users is also one of the oldest. Its age is showing.

Oddly enough, when I created test blogs on all five of these platforms, the Blogger one was the last to show up in Google’s Webmaster Central, despite the fact that Google owns Blogger. Go figure.

Unlike WordPress.com, Blogger does not promote its authors other than providing a follow button and a few other limited capabilities.

Weebly

Weebly emphasizes the simplicity of its site-building tools. “Our core advantage is our stunningly easy drag & drop website editor,” the site says.

It does not put ads on its member blogs, which WordPress and others have been known to do, and it allows customers to use their own domains, which is another advantage over other platforms.

Another major player in the easy blogging space is Wix. It has more in common with Weebly than the other platforms in part because the base package is not free. But at $5 a month, it’s pretty cheap.

Wix claims it has hundreds of templates and allows an unlimited number of pages as enticements for businesses with a lot of content to publish. But the base price includes ads that Wix will put on the site. Removing the ads will require an upgrade to $11 a month or higher.

Still, for a small business just getting started online, these packages are an easy and convenient way to put a toe in the water and learn.