Blogging platforms allow authors and bloggers to create, organize and publish articles, reviews and information via websites, emails and media feed. These platforms also enable readers to participate and engage with brands, making them an effective marketing tool.
Blogging platforms also let you use images, videos, and text to publish written or visual content on various topics. In addition, blogging platforms allow readers to search for content using keywords, which will increase your brand's reach. Learn more about blogging platforms here.
Benefits of Using a Blogging Platform
Besides boosting your credibility and getting noticed, here are a few more ways a blogging platform can help your brand.
Deliver Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is an important marketing element, and blogging can help you build it by displaying a personal side of your business to your visitors. Blogging also lets you create a solid brand image, express your vision, deliver a sense of corporate standards and cost-effectively engage prospective customers.
Get Discovered
Blogging platforms can optimize your blogs for search engines easier as they have fields to include metadata that tells search engines the purpose of the blogs. This optimization promotes your visibility. Publishing original and high-quality content on your blogs consistently can help your blogs rank higher on search engines, get you discovered and acquire business traffic.
Convert Traffic Into Leads
With the traffic you get on your websites through blogging, you can generate new leads. When people like your blogs, they can become subscribers who, in turn, can become potential customers. You can use your subscribers' list to convert leads to customers using email marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) tools.
Drive Long-Term Results
With a robust blog in place, you can increase traffic to your business. When search engines rank your posts higher, you can continue getting traffic and acquiring new leads. Over time, you will have developed credibility from your readers and grown your business without additional resource investment.
What to Look for in the Best Blogging Platforms
Before committing to a blogging platform, ensure that the platform has the following features.
WYSIWYG Editor
What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) is a word-processing program that lets you write and edit text precisely. Unlike traditional editors that require you to use HTML codes and restrict you from previewing the final output, WYSIWYG enables you to manage text and add multimedia without using HTML. Ensure the blogging platform you will use has a WYSIWYG editor and also supports HTML code.
Admin and User Management
Handling a business blog can be challenging. You may want the people from your team to occasionally post a new blog. To enable multiple contributors, you will require role management and granular role definition. Choose a platform that lets you create and assign different user roles and access rights.
Performance Tracking
Performance tracking is an essential part of blogging. To gauge the effectiveness of a blog post, you will need to view its analytics. Analytics lets you understand audience reach, popular topics, shares, and engagement and enables you to make informed decisions. The best blogging platforms should report the performance of your blog posts and possible strategies to strengthen their performance.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engines are the driving force behind expanding your reach as a brand. So, if expanding your brand's reach is your priority, your blogging platform should optimize the blog posts for search engines. It should have all the necessary tools to help you optimize your SEO and get your content to a larger audience. The best blogging platforms should also suggest appropriate keywords for your posts.
Best Blogging Platforms
Here are some of the best blogging platforms you’ll want to check out:
LinkedIn is a social network for professionals and probably the best blogging platform to increase your brand reach. If you aim to be a thought leader in a specific industry, you can engage with a professional audience from the industry via LinkedIn.
Pros: LinkedIn's greatest strength is its audience. Because your audience will be professionals in your industry, you will be reaching out to your primary audience. LinkedIn also features a ready-made professional blogging platform that has a solid SEO performance. It offers an intuitive text editor that helps you polish your content better than any other social media platform. LinkedIn can be an effective platform to acquire business-to-business (B2B) prospects.
Cons: LinkedIn is already a preestablished platform, so you are restricted to its algorithms. LinkedIn owns all the traffic to your blogs. Moreover, LinkedIn doesn't let you monetize your blogs using Google Adsense.
Best for: Users who want to reach out to industry professionals and acquire B2B prospects.
Price: LinkedIn is free to use and offers a great list of features. However, premium accounts unlock features like LinkedIn learning. It offers 4 plans: $29.99 per month for Premium Career; $59.99 for Premium Business; $79.99 per month Premium Sales Navigator; and $119.95 per month for the Premium Recruiter.
Wix is a do-it-yourself cloud-based website builder for small businesses. It is also one of the easiest blogging platforms to get started quickly. It provides web hosting and domain names with an accessible drag-and-drop interface.
Pros: With Wix's wide choice of templates and 3rd-party apps, you can build your blog quickly. The fresh, excellent designs and prebuilt layouts offer you precision for the look of your blog, while the templates provide flexibility to customize the text and other elements. You can start creating blog posts without knowing a shred of coding. It also offers a WYSIWYG editor for editing your blog posts.
Cons: Despite enabling you to design a pixel-perfect blog site, it locks the blog for you once you pick a template, restricting you from changing your blog. It will also place its ads on your blog in the basic version and doesn't share the revenue with you.
Best for: Bloggers who want something easy and dependable to create their blogging websites should choose Wix.
Price: Wix offers 4 tiers of pricing. Its basic website builder is free, giving you a subdomain. You can add a domain to it for $4.50 per month. Its Combo plan starts at $8.50 per month, which is best for personal blogging, while the unlimited plan costs $12.50 per month and can be best for entrepreneurs and freelancers. It also offers a VIP plan for $24.50 per month.
WordPress is the leading blogging platform, so naturally, it is one of the best blogging platforms. It offers 2 domain extensions for you blogging sites — WordPress.org and WordPress.com. While WordPress.com is a more basic blog hosting service, WordPress.org is more advanced and gives you complete control over your blog.
Pros: WordPress.org offers numerous customization and extension features with plugins and themes. It is self-hosted, but if you want to host it with your hosting provider, you can install it using a single-click installer. Its wide range of themes and plugins (both free and paid) helps your blogs with SEO, forms, backup and security. Unlike Wix, it also lets you change your blog site's template if you want.
Cons: For a beginner, WordPress blogs have a bit of a learning curve. To obtain granular customization, you will need to know hypertext preprocessor (PHP) programming. You will also be responsible for managing the domain name, security and backups.
Best for: Bloggers who want minute customization, control and flexibility on their blogs should consider WordPress.
Price: WordPress.org is free.
Like LinkedIn, Medium also comes with an audience — a community of writers and content creators. It is a platform that places readers and writers above others.
Pros: Medium offers a streamlined experience to share blog posts on its site. Getting started with writing on Medium is easy. Its best features are a built-in audience, support for 3rd-party video embedding and quality-based ranking for blog posts. Medium also lets you publish on a custom domain or subdomain. You also can sign up as a Medium partner to earn based on the article's engagement.
Cons: Medium offers limited features in terms of design and doesn't allow you to customize the look of your posts. Also, you must own a domain name to use a custom blog address. Similarly, like LinkedIn, Medium owns all your traffic and doesn't let you run your ads on it.
Best for: Bloggers who want to advance as writers should consider Medium.
Price: Medium is a free platform — for both bloggers and readers alike. However, to unlock premium content, you will need a Medium membership, which costs $5 a month or $50 a year.
Like Wix, Squarespace is a website-building platform that allows you to create visually appealing blog sites using its simple tools. It is an all-in-one site builder that can serve as a blogging platform for novice bloggers, portfolio sites, and online stores.
Pros: Squarespace offers quite a few elegant themes for your blogging site. It optimizes blog sites for tablets and phones and provides granular customization without coding. Squarespace also offers blogging features like multiauthor functionality, commenting, scheduling, and accelerated mobile pages (AMP) support. It also lets you host your podcast on Squarespace.
Cons: Squarespace publishes any edits you make to the website immediately, which can cause inconsistency issues when the updates you need to make are significant. Its blog can load slowly on smartphones.
Best for: Bloggers, photographers, and content creators who want to create visually appealing blog posts should consider Squarespace.
Price: Squarespace offers 4 tiers of pricing: Personal, Business, Basic Commerce and Advanced Commerce for $16, $26, $35 and $54 per month, respectively.
Start Blogging and Increase Your Brand Reach
Which blogging platform is best is relative to your needs. Analyzing your purpose should be the first step in starting a blog.
If you want to write for a specific audience, platforms like Medium and LinkedIn can be the best. If you're going to blog to bring traffic to your website, platforms like Wix and Squarespace can serve you better. If customization is your most significant concern, a platform like WordPress can be better. So, analyze your needs and start blogging now.