How do you choose the correct blogging platform for your needs?
There are hundreds of blogging platforms out there on the Internet, and choosing one single platform to blog on is often a tough choice. What are the things you should consider when choosing a blogging platform then?
As a blog marketing trainer, one of the most frequent questions I get from my friends and the learners in my workshop is: Which blogging platform is the best? I think this question would be near and dear to many Internet marketers too, especially those who have realize the immense potential in using blogs to drive traffic to their sales websites.
My answer, as you would expect – is “There is no one single platform that is the best! It really depends on what you want.”
However, there are a couple of things you need to consider when choosing a blogging platform, and these considerations will still stay, even of the current blogging platforms today are phased out in the next few years, as technology progresses.
So what are the factors to consider?
1. Full control of template
To first and most important aspect to consider when choosing a blogging platform is the ability to tweak your template. While most popular blog platforms do allow you to switch templates, not all solutions allow you to go behind these templates and edit the HTML code for the templates.
Why is this important?
The primary way (and very powerful way) of traffic generation for blogs is through search engine optimization, or SEO, in short, and one key aspect of SEO is about tweaking the code that goes behind the website? While your site can be aesthetically attractive, the search engine spiders only see the words and the HTML code! So in order to “give the spiders what you want to give them”, you need to have full access to the HTML code behind the template!
2. Hosting on own domain
The second aspect to consider when choosing a blogging platform is that it must allow you to use your own domain. Why? With experience in marketing blogs, I feel that the time spent between marketing your blog and posting content on your blog should be more or less equal. A blog with excellent content that is not marketed well will not go far, and neither will be a well marketed blog with junky contents.
So, since you are going to spend time to market a web address or URL, it would make sense to market an address that you fully own, isn’t it? Besides, it is more professional to use your own domain name in your name cards and marketing campaign, then to use a subdomain or subfolder provided by a popular blogging platform.
3. Advanced Features
The third most important thing to consider when choosing a blogging platform is the advanced features of the blog. There are many blogging platforms out there which are simply “instant publishing platforms”. While these blogs serve the purpose of a personal diary or journal where you publish you daily ramblings, this is insufficient for you if you want to use your blog to reach out to others.
Blogs are about creating conversations, and the only way you can create a conversation is to have people to visit your blog and post comments… and the way people are going to come is that you need to reach out to them!
There is therefore a need for advanced features in blogs like the ability to send trackbacks, automatic pinging of popular blog search engines, management of blog feeds and scheduled posting. With these features available, connecting your blog to the blogosphere would be a much easier job!
For more great tips on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s Blog Marketing Singapore Blog
