Tag Archives: blogging platforms

5 best blogging platforms I would recommend

Leave a reply
5 best blogging platforms

5 best blogging platforms

Blogging isn’t as easy as it was in 2010, or even in 2015. Primarily because everybody wants to use blogging to draw traffic and improve search engine rankings.

Since it is increasingly becoming difficult to gain visibility for one’s blog, people are constantly predicting the end or demise of blogging.

Still, depending on who is presenting the figure, roughly 6 million blog posts are published each day worldwide. This naturally makes it difficult for most of the blog posts to get visibility.

Hence, blogging isn’t ending – more people are blogging, and hence, it is difficult to succeed at blogging compared to the early days.

Does it mean there is no use publishing a blog? It depends.

Despite stiff competition, people are able to carve out a space for themselves through ingenuity, hard work, originality, and perseverance. You can still find many successful new blogs.

How you gauge the success of your blog also depends on what you want to derive out of it. Advertising revenue is always difficult. Most of the entrepreneurs start a business blog because they want to develop a platform from where they can communicate their thoughts and also draw quality search engine traffic.

I regularly publish my content writing and copywriting blog because it generates constant business for me. It also helps me maintain decent search engine rankings for my main website.

The blogging platform that you choose for your blog depends on what you want to achieve. Are you seeking visibility? Do you want to improve your search engine rankings? Do you have a preference when it comes to interface and features?

Based on these factors I’m listing here 5 blogging platforms that I would recommend you use for your purpose.

How to choose the best blogging platform for yourself?

Since there are many blogging platforms available you need to know precisely what you are looking for before you pick the right blogging platform for your need. Just because many people you know might be using a particular blogging platform it doesn’t mean it is the right fit for your requirement.

Here are a few things to consider

Content creation and management

You will most likely be writing and publishing blog posts. You may use a few images. You may also sometimes like to embed videos.

The success of every blogging venture depends on your ability to create and publish content on an ongoing basis and hence, you will be interacting with the content editor almost daily.

The content editor of the blogging platform must allow you drag-and-drop features if you are comfortable with them. You should also be able to enter plain vanilla text with all standard HTML markup. You should be easily able to embed images and videos.

The content editor must be light, visually appealing, and offer you only the features you need.

Search engine optimization features

A big part of your blogging effort involves improving your search engine rankings. Your blogging platform must have all the standard features to allow you to optimize your blog posts for easier and faster crawling, indexing, and ranking.

Aside from the standard features such as ability to enter custom titles, descriptions and tags, your blogging platform must allow you to use standard SEO extensions that will enable you to analyze your text in real-time and make changes for better SEO.

Layouts, themes, and designs

Every major blogging platform allows you to use themes and layouts, but individual platform has its own capabilities. Do you already have a website and your blog must look like your website? Then you should be able to tweak the blog theme as per your website layout.

Some blogging platforms allow you to write themes at the code level, some allow you drag-and-drop features to easily create the layout, and some offer you a mix. You can choose your blogging platform accordingly.

Plugins and extensions

Since no blogging platform comes with every possible feature you may need, you can increase the capabilities of your chosen blogging platform through plugins and extensions.

As mentioned above, there are some SEO plugins and extensions that can analyze your text in real-time to let you know whether you are appropriately optimizing, under-optimizing, or over-optimizing for your keywords.

Similarly, you can find plugins and extensions for contact forms that also handle spam comments. There are some plugins that allow you to run complete shopping cart and e-commerce features from within your blogging platform.

You can make a list of extensions, integration needs, and other features that you may need in your blogging platform before deciding the best blogging platform for your blogging needs.

5 blogging platforms I would recommend

WordPress.org

WordPress blogging platform

WordPress blogging platform

This is one of the oldest blogging platforms. Ever since it was launched in 2003 it has become one of the most widely used content management systems. As of 2022 almost 43% of all the websites on the Internet are managed on WordPress. It holds 65% market share for content management systems worldwide.

Most of the web hosts these days offer WordPress.org as a pre-installed hosting package so you don’t need to physically install it on your server. Even if you go for conventional hosting packages, WordPress.org can be installed in a single click.

Once the WordPress blogging platform is installed it is ready to work out of the box. You can straightaway start publishing blog posts although you would want to customize it in certain ways. It comes with standard themes and layouts that can help you publish blog posts immediately.

Why do I recommend WordPress.org as a blogging platform of my preference?

The best part is that all your content remains with you. The blog posts that you publish, the images that you use, they all belong to you.

All the blog posts are stored in a MySQL database. You can always take backup.

In case you want to move to another web host, you are not stuck. All you need to do is take the backup of your MySQL database and then restore the backup on the new web host.

It is also a very lean CMS. Unless you install lots of plugins and extensions it has a very straightforward source code. This is very important for your search engine rankings. The less source code you have, the easier it is for search engine crawlers to access your main content.

Aside from the fact that you can fully customize it as per your needs – make it look exactly the way your existing website looks – it is harder for your content to be found by your target audience. You are publishing everything under your domain. Unless your content begins to be crawled or unless you have a good social media presence, nobody knows about what you are publishing. You have to start everything from scratch.

Also, in some cases, you may require knowledge of PHP, JavaScript and HTML to tweak your layout just the way you want. For that, WordPress developers are easily available.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn blogging platform

LinkedIn blogging platform

LinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals, but it is also fast emerging as a viable blogging platform. The content that you publish through the blogging platform of LinkedIn is also called article publishing.

Why use LinkedIn as a preferred blogging platform?

It already has a ready-made audience. It enjoys better search engine presence compared to a new blog that you kickstart under your domain name. It is automatically search engine optimized. You can get visibility faster because good content is promoted among the Lincoln audience.

Since it is a third-party hosted blogging platform in terms of customization and extensibility, you can’t do much. The only benefit is that, provided your blog posts are good and informative, you get traction faster.

Also, LinkedIn prefers blog posts published within its platform when it promotes content compared to links existing somewhere else.

Medium

Medium blogging platform

Medium blogging platform

Medium is a full-fledged third-party blogging platform. The entire content exists on Medium. Then why am I recommending it?

Medium is a very large blogging community. It has its own audience, its own readership. It gives you live stats on how many people look at your stories and how many read them till the end. It has a unique algorithm to present appropriate content to particular readers.

In the beginning I have written that many people discount blogging as a trend that is waning, but Medium created a space for itself when bigger blogging platforms such as WordPress.com, Tumblr and Blogger.com already had thriving ecosystems. It shows that if you offer something unique, if you can stand out, you can still carve out a niche for yourself.

The Wix blogging platform

Wix

Wix

Wix is for designing and hosting websites but since most websites also prefer to have a blog, it has its own blogging platform. It has a free version but then on every blog post the Wix branding appears.

The primary strength of Wix is its WYSIWYG editor for creating layouts. You can literally drag-and-drop various components of the design that you want to create. It also has a drag-and-drop editor.

The free version allows you to create your blog as the wix.com subdomain but if you upgrade to a premium version you can host your blog under your own domain. There is nothing to install. You just need to connect your domain with the Wix web hosting server and all the features immediately become available to you.

It has blogging templates for every business need. Its biggest draw is minimalistic layouts and ease of use.

The only problem is that once a template is created, you cannot change it.

Squarespace

Squarespace blogging platform

Squarespace blogging platform

Just like the Wix blogging platform, Squarespace is a web hosting and web design platform that can also be used to host a blog.

Squarespace is known for its sleek designs with a touch of minimalism. It is preferred by artists and designers as it focuses more on presenting portfolios without obstructions. It has beautiful templates that you can easily tweak. It is said that individual templates are handcrafted by an in-house Squarespace team of designers.

The entire interface at Squarespace works on the philosophy of drag-and-drop and no-code. You don’t have to meddle with a back-end editor to get the layout that you desire. When you are building a page, it looks exactly as it is being designed.

Unlike WordPress.org it does not have thousands of plugins and extensions, but you can have a shopping cart integrated within your Squarespace blogging platform setup. You can also integrate email marketing. There is a members-only area for paid subscriptions. You can also host podcasts.

Conclusion

As someone who prefers better control over design, layout, and content, my most preferred blogging platform remains WordPress.org. Yes, I am biased because, although I’m not a professional WordPress designer, I have a fair idea of how to handle the basic theme-altering functions to get the desired layout for my websites and blogs.

After that it is Medium. Very robust. Easy to publish. Real-time stats. Greater chance of your content being found by the right audience.

It is always better to publish content on your own website

Leave a reply
Publish your content under your own website

Publish your content under your own website.

There are numerous content publishing platforms on the Internet including social media platforms as well as blogging platforms such as Medium and the “Article” section of LinkedIn.

Just a few minutes before writing this post, all Facebook properties were down. Facebook.com and Instagram were not accessible. There was the usual brouhaha on other platforms like Twitter.

A few months ago, YouTube was down. Content creators have spent years building their presence on these platforms and to an extent, there is nothing wrong in that. For example, if you want to upload videos, what could be better than YouTube? It is inexpensive. You don’t spend money on hosting and bandwidth. Sometimes visibility is instant. There is also a vibrant community. There is already a massive audience. With so many advantages, it doesn’t make sense to upload videos under your own domain.

But when it comes to publishing blogs, I always advise my clients to build their own platform – publish all the blogs under their own domain, or under their own website.

Use social media and third-party platforms to network and connect with other content creators. Just imagine what would happen if I published all my blog posts that I publish on my Credible Content blog, on Medium or on LinkedIn?

I would have good visibility. People accessing my blog posts on these platforms would be exposed to my profile. But I would be sending all the traffic to these websites. There would be no search engine traffic to my own website.

You can say that I’m heavily depending on Google and what if Google itself goes down or what if Google decides to remove my links due to one or another reason? It has happened with many websites. Overnight the links have disappeared from Google.

Yes, there is this possibility, but still, all the content that I’m publishing, I’m publishing it on my own website. Whenever I want, I can take backups. Even if Google removes my links, my content remains. On other websites, if they decide to remove my content, I have got nothing.

As a businessperson this may not be a big issue for you, and you can also argue that just as Facebook is down or Instagram is down, even your own website can go down, with all the data gone forever. Yes, such calamities can happen.

But I would assert again, you can instruct your web host to take regular backups. You can download regular backups. You can always restore your data if your website is hacked, or something happens that completely deletes your information from your web hosting company.

But if all your articles vanished from LinkedIn, there is a fat chance you’re going to be able to recover them.

Should you use the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing?

Leave a reply

content-marketing-with-MediumI have been using the Medium blog publishing platform for quite some time now. I have never published content marketing and content writing blog posts on Medium (maybe 1-2 experimental posts) but this is because when I started publishing on Medium, that was never my intention. I use Medium to publish my political, cultural and social commentaries.

My success rate at Medium has been much better than on my own websites, although, the topics that I take up when I write on Medium are usually politically and ideologically provocative and hence, more people respond or share them, compared to my content marketing and content writing blog posts on my own blog.

But of late, I have noticed more and more people recommending the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing. See, for example, this post on Problogger. The writer recommends routinely publishing your content on Medium to increase traffic on your own website or blog.

So, should you use the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing?

Being a vibrant platform already leaving behind many much-established blogging platforms like WordPress.com, you definitely get better exposure on Medium for your content. If one of your posts is featured on the main page or even under the main page of a major category, the implications can be great.

Just like any other platform, you can’t simply just start publishing your content on Medium and expect to get traffic from there. It’s not like OK, let me publish a few blog posts on Medium and I will get thousands of visitors to my blog or website. No, it does not happen that way.

Just like any other platform, you need to build a community around your presence. This is true for every platform, whether it is Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or Medium. This is why these social networking and social publishing websites have millions of users but still, just a few hundred or just a few thousand have a decent following. It takes time. It takes energy and persistence. It takes good content.

Why would people respond to your blog posts on Medium if they don’t find your content exciting enough? Why would they recommend it? Why would they share it?

Although Medium has a ready-made audience (so do Twitter, Facebook and Instagram), you need to draw attention of this audience to your presence by consistent writing and publishing and by continuously engaging people.

Remember that it is in Medium’s self-interest to promote well-written content. The makers of Medium want to build it into a serious publishing platform, not a spam farm. So badly-written, uninspiring and spammy content is automatically ignored.

It is very important for the Medium blog publishing platform to know how many people actually read the complete blog post. This is what one of the founders of Medium has to say about the importance of the quality of the blog posts that are published over there:

How we calculate the ranking is an algorithm that will change over time (kinda like Google’s PageRank but obviously much more simplistic at this point in time). It’s not a direct popularity ranking. It takes in a variety of factors, including whether or not a post seems to actually have been read (not just clicked on) and whether people click the “Recommend” button at the bottom of posts. The ratio of people who view it who read it and who read it and recommend it are important factors, not just the number. (This is an attempt to level of the playing field for those who don’t already have large followings and/or a penchant for writing click-bait headlines.)

Why use the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing?

I totally agree with the writer on Problogger that the Medium blog publishing platform should be/can be used as a great content marketing tool because one, the audience is already there (all you have to do is publish good content), and two, everything you need to make your content publishing social is already built into the Medium blog publishing platform. The content can be easily socially shared.

One great thing that I like on Medium is that if you want to share a big paragraph on Twitter, just highlight the portion that you would like to share and then click on the Twitter icon in the context menu that appears over the selected portion. The entire selected text is turned into an image and then along with the link and the title of the blog post, it can be posted on Twitter. This is just one example of convenient social sharing that is available on the Medium blog rubbishing platform.

Medium twitter highlighting

Building a community on Medium is quite easy: you can follow people and brands on Medium. You can leave comments. You can recommend posts to people who follow you. This reminds me, your content is automatically broadcast to your followers so building a following on Medium is as good as building a mailing list.

Here is why you should use the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing:

  • Medium has a ready-made audience.
  • Medium-users like to read long, text-based posts unlike Facebook and Twitter users.
  • The blog publishing platform has social sharing features inbuilt.
  • The content is categorized under various categories and featured under the correct categories.
  • Larger publications like Huffington Post and New York Times routinely publish dedicated content on Medium and they often approach independent content writers through Medium. Even the former President Barack Obama regularly uses Medium.
  • You can tag your blog posts to make it easier for people to find them.
  • Influencers can easily find your content. If they find and share your content you can generate massive amount of traffic.
  • You don’t need to depend on other social networking platforms because the Medium blog publishing platform is itself a social networking platform.
  • One of your posts can go viral even if you have published just a few posts. You don’t need to start everything from scratch.
  • Since most of your traffic comes from mobile devices these days, the Medium blog publishing platform is mobile-optimized.

Here are a few things you can do to use the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing:

  • It goes without saying, publish quality content that people would like to read.
  • Republish your existing content with links back to your original content.
  • Publish original content on Medium and in the footer of the post you can encourage people to subscribe to your updates or mailing list. This is how I do it:
    Amrits Updates - new
  • Hyperlink to your existing content from the new posts that you publish on Medium.
  • Respond to others’ content by writing rebuttals, add-ons, comments and references and then let those people know that you have posted.
  • Recommend content by other writers to your followers whenever you feel that your followers will benefit from the post.
  • Regularly leave comments on other posts on Medium.
  • Quality, relevance, quality, relevance, quality, relevance…

If presidents and famous publications are using Medium to reach out to its audience it means it has a great audience. Every platform can be used for marketing and so Medium can also be used for content marketing provided you stick to the fundamentals of content marketing:

  • Publish quality, relevant posts.
  • Use great headlines.
  • Encourage people to share your content.
  • Share other people’s content.
  • Post content regularly.