What Makes a Blogging Platform Right for Your Business?

There are lots of factors that determine the success of business blogging. One of those factors takes place even before building a blog for your business.

Choosing the platform where to host your blog is important as it serves as the foundation where your blog rests.

Therefore, it is crucial that you get selecting a blogging platform right the first time. If you feel that you have chosen wrong, you will need to undergo a painstaking process of transferring all your content from your old blogging platform to a new one.

This goes by also saying that there is no single perfect platform for everyone; rather, there is only a blogging platform that works best for you.

In this post, we will discuss the follow criteria to determine the best blogging platform that suits your business.

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User-Friendliness

Not all businesses have the funds to get someone to build the blog for them nor the skills and patience to set up a self-hosted blog for his or her companies. They prefer a quick and easy DIY platform where they can build a blog on the go without the fancy features known from another platform.

This is the reason why website builders exist. Not only can businesses build a beautiful website for their products and services to attract their audience and convert them into customers, but they can also create a content-rich blog that their target market would want to read. The key to the success of website builders is their drag and drop feature that allows website and blog owners to include elements on a site page easily without any design skills or experience.

One of the best and most popular website is Weebly. Perfect for small business and E-commerce sites, the platform takes away the guesswork from site building by allowing you to drag easily and drop website elements and bring your ideas to life. Here is a great review and tutorial about Weebly for your pleasure.

Powerful

One of the many quirks that people do not like about website builders is the limited nature of the platform. Given that it is built for beginners due to this drag and drop feature, the platform provides little to no room for customization. As a result, there is a tendency for users of website builders to have to the same look and feel on their business blogs.

To truly stand out, you would want a platform that will afford you a customized appearance for your blog to help it stand out from its competition. A platform like a self-hosted WordPress blog ought to do the trick.

There is an excellent reason why almost half of the sites online use WordPress to run their blog, which is also the reason why I believe that this is arguably the best platform to use for your blog. Aside from customization, WordPress lets you supercharge your blog with thousands of plugins to choose from to help you achieve your business goals. Whether it is building your email list, selling your products and services, or engaging with your readers, WordPress has the plugin that you need.

To help you create a website using WordPress, this resource site will give you the details on how to make a beautiful looking blog in a couple of minutes.

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Responsive and Mobile-Friendly

With the rise of mobile use to search the web, there is now need to build websites that are optimized for mobile viewing. Your blogging platform should have the ability to resize the page automatically depending on the screen resolution of the user browsing your blog, whether it is a desktop or a mobile device. With a responsive design for your business blog, you can ensure that your site loads fast on any device and prevent visitors from leaving your site due to slow loading speed.

Therefore, building a blog using Joomla is an excellent way to leverage the ability to provide a mobile-friendly design to deliver your blog content. Arguably one of the most professional platforms in the market, there is a lot to love about Joomla other than its mobile-readiness, which is clearly stated in this resource post.

Third-Party Integration

As a business blogger, you will want all the help you can get. This means getting different service providers to integrate with your choice of platform. Similar to WordPress plugins, Drupal's modules allow you to get the most out of your blog and bring it to the next level with added features. If you want to boost your social media activity, CRM, SEO, and security feature, Drupal has something for everyone. Check out other benefits of choosing Drupal as your blogging platform in this post.

Simplicity

Let's face it - most of the blogging platforms out there are focused on providing the full-scale experience of designing, developing, and boost their blogs that it is easy to forget what a blog is all about, which is sharing ideas with readers through your content. If you simply want to focus on harnessing the power of the written word, then you may want to forego the platform mentioned above and go straight to a no-frills platform like Ghost.

Ghost brings back the "blogging" in blogging platform. It lets you build your blog around your content, which is the focus of the platform. You can customize the look and feel as you see fit, although you may need help from a developer to achieve the appearance you want. Nonetheless, this should not scare you if your primary focus is to blog and let your words do the talking.

In case you need more convincing to try out Ghost, here is a post to help get you to try out this platform.

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Conclusion

Given that you have been presented with not only different criteria to consider when choosing a blogging platform as well as the actual platforms themselves, but it is also time for your to test-run them yourself and see which one you are most comfortable using. The criteria should help you determine your priorities as a blogger using their platforms. From there, you can decide the perfect blogging platform for you.

Source: What Makes a Blogging Platform Right for Your Business?