The 8 Best Best Blogging Platforms - Which is Right for You?

what's up everybody welcome back to the channel my name is david i hope you're having a great day so in this video i want to focus on the best blogging platforms that you can use as a beginner now i know on this channel i focus on a lot of different website tools everything from like wix and squarespace like professional website builders to wordpress blogger google sites etc because i know that one size doesn't fit all we all have different wants and needs and specific use cases so sometimes one platform may be better than another so in this video i would specifically want to narrow in and focus in on blogging what are the best blogging platforms what are the different use cases why should you use this platform over this platform etc so let's get to it number one is wordpress.com so the dot-com version of wordpress is a website builder because there's the dot org version so you see in a lot of tutorial videos like with buying for example oh start with bluehost and build your wordpress powered website and people get confused that oh we're talking about wordpress.com no this is a website builder it's really bad marketing how they have these two services named the same thing now what wordpress.com is is just full access to wordpress but you're on their own uh specific uh shared servers okay and so that's what you're kind of paying for so it's a combination of a web host a domain name register content management system all built into one thing it's a website builder so that's what website builders are now this is an okay starting point for people because you know you can get you can jump into wordpress you can use the gutenberg block editor you can kind of get a feel for wordpress but my main issue is that long term this is just too expensive so for example we take a look at their various pricing plans so we have personal premium business e-commerce now in my opinion as a content creator and as a professional blogger and i'm not saying that it sounds so arrogant but i'm just saying like as someone who does this stuff for a living the only viable option is the business plan because the business plan come down let's scroll down here so right here install plugins and extend the functionality of your site so you have to pay 25 a month for one website just to be able to install any theme that you want in any plug-in that you want whereas like right now you can just jump over to like bluehost or siteground or name here or whatever and pay a much lower fee have multiple websites and use wordpress and have full featured full access to it so that's why everyone's always says like go with a shared host but it's totally up to you like if you really just want something that's really simple easy to use not technical where you don't have to set anything up then using wordpress.com is pretty good because the premium plan is all right over here now you are kind of limited with the you know plugins and themes like everything's kind of built in the themes are all built in but this for me this is a deal breaker because the main uh plugin that i like is uh yoast seo which gives you a little bit more control over the on-page seo of your website and i also like using something like pretty links to make nice looking affiliate links and kind of cloak everything but also just for tracking on the back end you can't do any of that stuff with premium plan because you can't install plugins and so for me that's why it's kind of a deal breaker so this plan is good if you're just looking to have a casual blog that sort of thing and that you're you're cool with just like paying a little bit a little bit of a small fee it's just a personal website uh then i would maybe consider the premium plan but for most people who want to build an income generating web property you're gonna have to use the business plan and again for me that's just a little bit expensive at 25 a month but again totally up to you i'm just trying to help you make a purchase decision anyways that is it for number one wordpress.com number two is wordpress.org now i have another video on this channel you can check out if you want to know like what's the difference between org in the dot-com version of wordpress but anyways this whole page exists just you know as a sales page for wordpress so this is the open source software okay that you install on a shared host and so what's a shared host you have to go somewhere like bluehost which is an independent web host and you go here you click on get started then over here you choose a hosting package then you submit payments and then you have your own server and then you can install wordpress and so right down here this is why you'd want to do this because like with work with bluehost you can start at 5.45 a month yeah renews at 16.99 but you can lock this price in at a 36 month term that's fantastic for multiple years and top features unlimited websites like with wordpress.com it was literally for one website that price point whereas this you can pay you can be paying 545 multiple websites you know and this plan i like the most because this is enough to allow you to really grow and scale your website up to like over a thousand visitors a day and then if you want to move away from bluehost and go to a little bit more of a professional level web host that's geared for like wire tie traffic websites you can do that but bluehost is the number one recommended web host because they are like the best they are one of the best shared hosts for just beginners because they make everything very easy and simple and intuitive setting up wordpress is easy the ssl certificate is automatically done for you very simple and then once you have everything set up you're gonna be on the back end of your website this is wordpress it's functionally the same as wordpress.com okay so you get access to the gutenberg editor multiple websites and most importantly you can install whatever theme you want so you can install any type of theme any type of plugin you're not limited in any way and so anyways that's number two wordpress.org number three is blogger.com i love blogger obviously because i use it and i have a bunch of tutorial videos on blogger now is it the perfect blogging platform no absolutely not so a blogger website is not going to rank as well as a wordpress website so if you want to build an income generating web property you definitely want to go with like bluehost and install wordpress and go that route but if you want to set up some type of a casual personal blog that makes a little bit of money on the backend as just a creative outlet blogger is just wonderful and to get started is really easy you just come over here just click on this orange button that says create your blog then all you have to do is sign in with a gmail account and that is it and then once you're signed in all you have to do is buy a domain name from like namecheap then set it up on the end to set a custom domain name so i'm paying for my domain name but i'm not paying for web hosting like this website i'm not paying for web hosting at all now i have again a tutorial video on this channel about how to properly set up a blogger blog that you can check out but it's a full-on website like there's no limits it's not like wordpress.com we have to pay four dollars a year in order to set a custom domain name no you can just do it with blogger for free and you can engage in various monetization strategies so as you see over here we have ads that's being populated by google auto ads and so i'm making like not that much but like a dollar a day nothing much but hey okay i'll take it a dollar a day from a completely free website free in the sense i'm not paying for web hosting not the domain name and that's it you can engage in other monetization strategies so we come over here we have this blog post where i talk about uh a vlogging camera that i really like and so it runs ads within the post over there so it gets clicks over here we have affiliate links for the you know specific camera that i'm talking about etc okay and so that's why i kind of want to just uh mention this because it's a full website you can engage in affiliate marketing and you can run ads now it's not perfect so for example like there's no way to cloak affiliate links per se so what i mean by that is you can't i can't make it like edge of david.com product and then have it redirect to the product you have to use the raw affiliate link unless you want to use something like bitly in order to like cloak it you could guess you could do that but again this is just for personal use that's why i would recommend blogger and you can just do whatever you want so like over here i have a skillshare course because i do post courses on skillshare and skillshare is now a 300 a month income source for me that i'm continually trying to grow and this is just one helpful little way because it's like there's a blog or blog hey here's the skillshare course on how to make a blogger blog like it kind of ties in together and so it's really helpful and really fun little creative uh website that i've been able to build over here and i would recommend blogger to anyone anyone anyone who just wants to have a you know a casual blogging outlet and you're not trying to build this big massive website and it's just fantastic because you just have to pay for the domain name and you get free web hosting and someone else will use it let me go over here to johnnyfd it's a guy i've been following i really like uh his youtube channel has recently just blown up he's went from like 8 000 subs to 60. he's now in ukraine hanging out with baldwin bankrupt and harold balder uh really good he uses and he's using uh blogger and so again like free web boosting got paid for the domain name and here you go you know collect emails engage in affiliate marketing run ads full on website the again the only issue is that blogger blogs don't rank as well as a wordpress website okay that's literally the main drawback but otherwise it's a full website for ideal for casual use so anyways that's number three blogger.com number four is wix yeah wix that website builder they actually have vastly improved their blogging aspect of their website builder to rival wordpress to be honest with you i'm quite impressed because i checked out wix years ago and i wasn't that impressed it was really focused on design and layout and the look but from a technical standpoint the blog was pretty weak not anymore it's really good so here i'm logged into my account let's go over here and create a new post and then boom this is the blogging aspect so you can create a title paragraph we come over here to click add very intuitive and easy to add in galleries videos gifs images just drag and drop into place but also you also have granular control over your seo so you can oh it's x out of that you have your granular control over your seo so you can change the page title the url slug seo title all those essential little things that you need to do that you can do within wordpress you can do with wix and even like categories and tags they've included now social shares so like when people share your blog posts on like facebook or somewhere you can change how it looks specifically anyways one thing i really like too that doesn't get enough attention in my opinion is the ability to content lock your blog post and create some type of like subscription service and this is just integrated within wix so what this is like if we come over here to mr mark mason's website and so we scroll down right here what you're going to see is it says members only so this is content locked so you have to subscribe to his site in order to be able to read this blog post and with wix you can do that like right here you can set up your own little payment plan and content lock everything so you have private blog posts people have to subscribe to the website now the only issue that i have with the blogging aspect is that they don't have any type of like redirection functionality built in so you can't have like something like mywebsite.com product name and have it redirect via the affiliate link if that makes any sense you have to use like bitly or use the you know straight affiliate links so that's something that they really need to add they need to add in that ability to set up redirects and if they just did that it'd be perfect it'd be literally like a perfect blogging platform for a website builder and then let's just take a look so here's the website let's navigate over to the blog aspect and there you go okay so it's a blog nothing fancy and with the wix website builder you can just completely change the layout the look and feel of your website as you want so if we open up this blog post right here and we have our content and you have specific control over how everything is displayed so if you for example come up with top there it says the author name the date if you just want to get rid of this and hide everything you can hide everything at the click of a button so you have full control over the way your blog looks and each how each individual blog post looks and that's why i really like wix literally my only issue with wix is just the lack of ability to set up uh any type of like url redirects for link managing your affiliate links otherwise it's a fantastic blogging platform and something that you should be aware of if you're considering going with wix to create any type of like blogging website so anyways that's number four wix number five is squarespace.com so yeah squarespace you can totally block squarespace and wix are kind of the same with regards to their blogging aspect but they are actually widely different website builders so with wix i would describe it as like an unstructured editor where you can kind of move the on-page elements to wherever you want squarespace is a little bit more focused on templates and replacing elements within the templates and changing colors really kind of simple but really effective and nice for a beginner anyways let's take a look at caleb wojcik he's using wix his website looks awesome let's navigate over to his blog section and right here this is his squarespace blog this looks great so you have a title of the blog specific description of what the people can expect your different categories let's take a look at a blog post the url structure is really nice we have slash blog slash post title one column design looks great so it's a very minimalistic blogging experience but it's very effective so anyways that's number five squarespace number six is tumblr.com so tumblr i would describe as like an alternative to blogger.com the sense that it's a free blogging platform you can set up a website you can set a custom domain name and then it's easy just to publish content it's really not that hard and it comes with a lot of helpful tools that just make everything easy so from text photos quotes chat audio video etc uh like they said you can put anything you want here really easy it's really nice videos audio chat etc and so a good example of a tumblr blog is like this like all that is interesting this is a basic tumblr blog here's your menu here's the logo here are the pieces of content again nothing too fancy it's again like that's why it says like blogger if you just want a casual little creative outlet where you're not trying to like make money from it you just want to share something et cetera maybe build an audience have some type of like blogging platform we can set a custom domain name uh then you want to maybe consider checking out tumblr so anyways that's number six tumblr number seven is ghost.org so this is pretty amazing it was launched back in 2013 on kickstarter of all things and it was primarily designed to focus on creating a platform for journalists so let's jump over here to their about page creating the future of independent publishing non-profit organization building open source technology for journalism that's how this site got its start that's what ghost.org was founded on but over time they've really kind of pivoted away from that and they're more about just made for independent creators and writers as it says over here that's really what ghost.org is all about it's sort of like having you allowing you to build your own small publishing company with a primary focus on subscriptions so let's jump over here to their showcase and right over here we can check out like the browser and then this is a very successful website so web page design by ghost uh come down here we have their blog post and then we have a bunch of different options to subscribe to the website and that's it and all this is powered by ghost.org so let's jump over back to the resources so they have a bunch of helpful aspects like integrations with thousands of apps and services for their website product updates themes marketplace etc so let's just jump over here to the integration section and they have a bunch of popular integrations with numerous companies very easily and last let's take a look at their pricing like how much does this all cost so pretty affordable actually we come down here the starter plan is just nine dollars a month again keep in mind that this is for one website at a time so it's not like a shared host like bluehost where you can have multiple websites one website per plan but you can start a 14 day free trial to see if ghost is for you but anyways i really like this as a unique alternative blogging platform with more of a focus on the subscription revenue model for publishers but anyways that's number seven ghost.org and number eight is medium.com so i think a lot of you are familiar with this website because uh it kind of integrates well with twitter and yeah i've used medium in the past it's always been like a sub domain a medium just a place to share thoughts of like whatever i wanted but medium has definitely changed over time so first thing that they now have is a type of membership so you can upgrade to a membership for five dollars a month or fifty dollars a year and so it's sort of kind of working like a skillshare revenue model because over here you can sign up and become an actual content creator okay and you can earn money for your writing so let me just back out of this a little bit and so we come over here and we can set your ideas in motion boom you can start writing create free accounts and get going and then when you're ready you can go ahead and apply to the partner program and so you get paid based on how many people read your content and so if those people are paying members and you get you know you earn credit towards getting paid exactly like skillshare if anyone's on skillshare it's like as a creator and skillshare you make money by the premium minutes people watch same type of deal not necessarily minutes but like if a paying member over here is reading your content that's how you get paid and last you can set custom names so this is great because now you can actually use this sort of like as a blocking platform you have that back-end ability to earn money from your writing through the partner program and you can set a custom domain name so it doesn't have to be like mywebsite.medium.com it could be whatever you want to be so overall i think this is a very unique offering uh for you know anyone who wants to just blog you're a writer and you're not don't want to get into design i think medium is an interesting website to look at and it may be the right blogging platform for you so anyways that's number eight medium.com okay everyone that's it for this video on the best the blogging platforms and their specific use cases to help you decide which one should you go with over the other now i've been getting a few emails from people asking me like what is this thing like people see this at my desk sometimes focusing on it that this is the sony x3000 i personally like to travel vlog with this so i'm one of those guys walking around with a camera pointing at me just because i shoot with a canon 90d on all these videos and you know canon 90d or a mirrorless camera i don't know i just don't like having a big heavy setup i usually like to just go with something really small and light so that's why i like that sony x3000 anyways i'm starting to ramble so i hope you enjoyed the video on these best of blogging platforms my name is david webster creditpro.com thank you very much for watching and have a great day bye you

Channel: David Utke

Views: 10,639

Keywords: best blogging platforms, blogging platforms, blogging, wordpress, blogger, wix blogging, squarespace blogging, tumblr blog, medium blogging, ghost org blogging

Id: VRzqvZJlbfc

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2021