Success In Blogging? It’s All About Finding The Right Platform!
Whether you’re a budding writer, looking for an outlet to share your everyday musings with the world, or a seasoned amateur looking to take the next big step and monetize their blogs in the hopes of one day making a living off of it, you may not be aware of the extent to which the right platform can either make or break your blog.
In an age where more and more people are engaging with their media through their smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, the potential audience out there for your blog is wider than ever and indeed mobile optimization may play a huge part in helping your blog find its audience. Nonetheless, as more and more people are engaging with content on the train to work, waiting in line at the bank or (sorry) in the bathroom, now is the time to throw your hat into the ring and engage with this ever-growing audience.
Why does the platform matter?
If you’re just starting out and using your blog as a whetstone on which to sharpen your writing skills, you may not think that your platform is all that important, but while any blogging is better than no blogging, choosing the right platform for you will help to pave the way for future success.
All blogging platforms will allow you to post content and have some degree of control over its appearance, there is a huge fluctuation in functionality outside of that. Some blogging platforms are free, some may require an investment on your part, so if you’re hoping to blog for business purposes it might be worth following these personal loan tips and investing in a good platform should you choose to monetize later down the line. Just as people blog about a wide range of things for a variety of reasons, so too do some blogging platforms emphasis some features over others.
Choosing the right platform for you
Tumblr- Tumblr is a great ‘starter platform’, as its greatest asset is its built-in community which can help to quickly and easily establish a readership for your blog. While it can accommodate long-form content, It’s culture and setup make it more suited to microblogging than detailed blogs, and its lack of plugins makes it notoriously difficult to monetize.
Blogger- A good all-rounder, Blogger is intuitive and easy to navigate and as it’s owned by Google you have access to great plugins like Google Analytics (for keeping an eye on your traffic) and AdSense (for advertising) but while integration of Google apps is easy, HTML knowledge is required to do virtually anything else.
WordPress- There are two versions of WordPress aimed at slightly different user needs. WordPress.com is free but has much more limited functionality, and so it is mainly used by amateur bloggers writing for their own enjoyment. WordPress also owns the blog, meaning that you will have a .wordpress.com suffix after your blog’s name which limits your capacity to generate advertising revenue. WordPress.org, however, is marketed to professionals and is far more flexible but requires you to either self-host or pay for a managed WordPress blog from a third party provider. WordPress has an unparalleled selection of plugins allowing you to generate revenue from an online store on your blog.