Blogging: Choosing The Right Platform
Article Overview: We discuss what a blogging platform is, the many options available, the pros and cons of the industry leaders.
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Free Download - Blogging: Selecting Your Webhost By Jamaal Abdul-Ali
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Blogging: Choosing The Right Platform
When we speak of blogging platforms we are referring to the device you
use to design everything from the look, feel, color schemes, font sizes
and graphics. This is where you get creative and personally brand
yourself and set yourself apart from the rest of the Blogosphere . Branding
is a very important part of your online success.
To get a accurate picture of the major players in this arena let's take
a look at the blog platforms of choice among the top 100 blogs as
listed by Technorati, (a blog search engine). Surprisingly, there were
only 12 platforms making up the 100, which speaks volumes to
the awesome effectiveness of those chosen. For this article, we will
focus on the best of the best which brings us to only four that
garnered double digits usage ou tof the 100 spots. They are as follows,
Word Press with 27, TypePad with 16, Blogsmith with 14 and
Moveable Type with 12. As you can see, these four superstars took 69 of
the top 100 spots. Word Press is the clear leader among the leaders.
Very impressive.
When choosing your platform you'll also need to decide on hosted
versus non-hosted features. Hosted simply means the blog is housed on
that platforms server, whereas, non-hosted means your blog would be
housed on your own sever which is usually a third party vendor you pay
a small monthly fee to host, the latter choice gives you more control
and ownership, so, if you're blogging for profit there's only one way
to go.
Of course, there are pros and cons to both of these methods and they
differ slightly depending on the platform you choose . But generally
speaking the pros of the hosted platforms are, for starters, they are
extremely easy to set a up and interface with. Almost all come with
very efficient how to tutorials and, again, generally speaking, "are free".
A few of the cons to be noted are they don't appear to be as
professional, there is not as much room for personalization, branding,
search engine optimization suffers and you could very well lose all
your content because it's not on your own server.
The pros of using a non-hosted platform are many, but in my humble
opinion, the main one is that unlike the hosted version you own and control the content you produce
and in general have more control of your entire blogging experience,
and believe me, control is good. Personalization and branding
capabilities are only limited by your imagination and non-hosted
versions can be fully optimized for the search engines.
This may sound a little bias, but, in my humble opinion, unless you are
a seasoned techie you'll be hard pressed to find any cons, for the
average user there is no need for concern.
So, as far as platforms go, Word Press seems to be the clear cut
overall leader and for several reasons but mainly because of it's all
around excellence, as in ease of use, making changes, upgrading and the
ever growing extensive variety of plug-ins to make your blog more efficient, the seemingly endless selection of themes in which to personalize your blog.
Word Press also gives you an option of the hosted or non-hosted
versions. Word Press. com is the hosted version and Word Press. org is
the non-hosted version.
This is the third in the series of five on the marketing magic of
blogging.
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Article Tags:
blogging,
blogging platforms,
industry leaders,
pros and cons,
wordpress
Referred by: http://jaykubassek.com
Related Forum Posts
Social IMPACT!! Marketing - How it will change your Business
- SEO,SEM and more recently SMO have been the catch phrase for those wishing to optimize their sites for the search engines and all will see you gain some level of success, but I am about to introduce you to a new catch phrase SIM or Social Impact Marketing, a system that has been developed at Kooiii tested on Kooiii and proven to be more effective than any of the other 3 systems in use.
When we started Kooiii 6 or so weeks ago we were building a site that had nothing as far as SEO,SEM or SMO properties it was lost way back in the depths of most search engines and had an Alexa rating of 3.8 million, it was lucky to get 12 visitors a week and that was mostly my business partner and myself with the odd visitor that somehow found their way to the site by mistake.
Our original idea was to build Kooiii as a Search Platform that was capable of spidering some of the most popular social networks, however we realized early on that those coming to Kooiii would also want some form of social interaction with our site if it was going to go anywhere so we implemented a simple to use Micro-Blogging system as the front end of the system we were putting together.
Not having money to promote our new baby we had to resort to using all the free avenues we could find in order to attract people to the site, of course this meant utilizing as many of the social networks we belonged to as possible, Not being spammers and not wishing to appear as such we decided that we would simply keep active on the social networks while sharing and posting to our profiles from kooiii, it was at this point we realized we were onto something suddenly within a week we saw our Alexa drop dramatically and our membership start to grow not only on Kooiii but also on the social sites we belonged to, people seemed to be drawn to us like we were magnets and Kooiii went from 4 members (all admins) to over 1500 members quickly.
By teaching those that joined Kooiii to also share member posts on the social networks, not only those we were posting but other members posts as well we saw the birth of a completely new way to promote something, see everyone saw the same effects we were seeing not only was Kooiii skyrocketing up Alexa but the members sites and popularity were also soaring and so Social Impact Marketing came into the world of the Internet.
So lets re-cap SIM it's a system where members of Kooiii cross promote each others offers using a socially connected Micro-Blogging system creating tremendous buzz about the offers throughout the wider social scene in other words causing Social Impact using Marketing techniques resulting in massive targeted traffic generation to a specific site or page for basically no monitory outlay.
Blogging for Entrepreneurs
- If you run a small company, you may find that the world
of blogging for Entrepreneurs is a world that you
want to be a part of. Blogging is a great way to get the
word out to consumers about your product or service,
and it can even be useful for inspiring employee loyalty
and helping you keep your workers at peak morale. If
you are looking for a way to take your business to the
next level, consider what starting a blog might be able
to do for you.
Blogging for entrepreneurs has a lot in common with
all other types of blogging, but it has its own unique
pitfalls and strengths. The key to having a successful
blog as a business owner is keeping your goals clear
and concrete at every step of your blogging adventure. It
can be all to easy to get sidetracked, especially if you
are just learning about the exciting possibilities of
blogging technology, but if you want your blog to
succeed you need to stay focused. Write up a plan for
how often you will update, how you will promote your
blog and retain readers, whether you will feature
photographs or video, and other aspects of your blog,
and then stick to it with the same kind of determination
that you used when you built your company.
Re: Best Internet Marketing Strategy
- Hi David,
I agree about the Blogosphere. You have a smaller group that Blog, but do so on the premise that they think they should, but have never really considered the purpose of their Blog. Then I think there are a few SEO or Internet Marketing types that see Blogging as just another link building strategy. But the largest group of Bloggers, tend to be people who enjoy writing and discussing their topics of interest.
Blogging is good for link building, but the true Blogger is a breed apart from the rest. They want to dialog, to debate, to have feedback and they are very willing to link to other worthwhile conversations that are relevant to their topic. I agree with you. These group of Bloggers obviously are passionate about their writing and together, they create huge conversation trails interactive and travel from Blog to Blog. But the evidence is clear with this group that loves what they write about. With comments enabled on a Blog and having a Blog tuned to a specific purpose you already have the evidence of original Social Media.
Use of Blogging For Promotion
- Blogging might not be the easiest promotion and advertising method however it certainly is one of the cheapest methods. All you need is a hosting package and a domain. Actually you could do it through Blogger and it would be free of charge.
Site promotion and Blogging
- Blogging might not be the easiest promotion and advertising method however it certainly is one of the cheapest methods. All you need is a hosting package and a domain. Actually you could do it through Blogger and it would be free of charge
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