Blog Platforms: Choosing One That's Right

 Got your niche? Great! the subsequent thing then is to believe in actually fixing your new site and getting started together with your content. to try to do this, you'll get to choose a ‘blogging platform’ which effectively dictates how your site’s code is going to be structured and what you’ll see when you’re logging in and adding content.

Now, of course, you don’t really need a ‘blogging platform’ intrinsically. you'll set about building your own website from scratch which can involve creating pages in HTML and CSS, possibly employing a builder like ‘Dreamweaver’ but if you are doing this it'll take tons longer and be much harder to make something that appears and performs a sort of a professional website.

Instead, then, you would like to use a blogging platform/CMS. CMS stands for ‘Content Management System’ and is actually a tool that simplifies the method of designing and building your website, also as adding and editing content as required. 

Use a CMS and you won’t get to know a line of code to create the location, add new posts, and edit your existing content. This in fact saves tons of your time, it streamlines the method and ensures that your site is a minimum of functional. 

Choosing Your CMS

So how does one choose a CMS? 

The very first thing to try to do is to acknowledge the difference between hosted and self-hosted options.

A hosted option may be a blog platform that you simply use almost sort of a social network. In other words, you create your account and ‘sign in’ to a different website, and from there, you’ll then be ready to add new posts for other users to ascertain. In other words, the platform then your website is already hosted somewhere online, meaning you don’t get to buy a hosting account to urge started.

Good samples of hosted blogging platforms include BlogSpot(www.blogspot.com), LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com), WordPressHosted (www.wordpress.com), WordPress Self-Hosted(www.wordpress.org) and Tumblr (www.tumblr.com). Each of them has strengths and weaknesses, though all of them do essentially an equivalent thing. Tumblr here is basically the odd one out because it straddles the road between a blogging platform and social media platform – and because it mainly focuses on images that you simply upload as against written content.

The great thing about this is often that it’s a totally free process and requires absolutely no set-up. you merely visit the blogging platform, be that BlogSpot or WordPress, sign in, then start posting! you'll make changes to your blog in terms of the way it's but you’ll be quite limited in terms of what you'll do. Likewise, you’ll even be limited in terms of your URL – meaning that you simply won’t be ready to call your website ‘BodybuildingNewsArticles.com’ – instead, your blog will need to be ‘wordpress.bodybuildingnewsarticles.com’ or ‘blogspot.bodybuildingnewsarticles.com’. This in fact looks far less professional and it also means your URL goes to be far less catchy and brandable. People will likely not remember your URL and sort it back to the address bar – they’ll need to search on Google. which said, even searching on Google are going to be harder seeing as it’s not as easy to urge hosted websites to ‘rank’.

For these reasons, you’re far better off with a self-hosted CMS. this suggests you’ll get to buy the hosting space too also as a website name. In all, this may likely set you back $100-$500 for the year but if you monetize well you ought to be ready to make that make even in year one. If you propose becoming a knowledgeable blogger, this is often really a compulsory expense. When it involves hosted blogging platform options, you've got a couple of popular options. 

These include:

• WordPress (yes, WordPress is both)

• Joomla

• Drupal

WordPress is out there as both a hosted and a self-hosted CMS option. If you choose the hosted option, you'll simply get to visit WordPress.com and begin an account.

If you would like to travel for a self-hosted choice, you’ll instead want 15 to download the install files from WordPress.com, then upload them to your server. You then navigate to at least one of the files in your browser and therefore the set-up process begins.

Which self-hosted platform do you have to use? the solution is WordPress by an extended shot. the rationale for this is often partly that WordPress is just the most popular blogging platform. In turn, this suggests it also has the widest support. meaning that you’ll be ready to find many developers to figure with who are well-versed within the platform and it means you’ll be ready to easily find additional plugins and themes to put in to require your site to a subsequent level. We’ll check out what themes and plugins are during a moment except, for now, all you would like to understand is that they significantly increase the capabilities of your website and are often completely free to use.

The fact that WordPress began life as a blogging platform also gives it another big advantage. that's that it's highly user friendly and compared with Joomla or Drupal, the instrument panel is far more accessible and straightforward to use.

But most of all, you ought to use WordPress because everyone else does… which may sound sort of a somewhat lame reason but believe it: most of the foremost successful bloggers on the internet use WordPress. Countless people before you've got shown that a WordPress website is often incredibly successful… so why then would you employ anything that's far more of an unknown quantity? Why would you're taking your chances with a more complicated platform? we all know that WordPress is often optimized for search engines, we all know it is often alright optimized… if you’re serious about making money then it’s the logical choice. and therefore the websites created with it look great.

Choosing a Name and URL

As you’re going with a self-hosted option for your blog, you’ll now get to choose a URL. this is often the address that folks will type in their search bar so as to seek out your website and intrinsically it'll probably also act because of the title of your website and therefore the brand you’re going with. Choosing your name is another vital step here and there are two big factors to think about when making this decision:

• SEO

• Branding

SEO is program optimization – in other words, tweaking your website to make sure that it'll likely rank highly on Google and to point out up in searches. Your URL affects your SEO because some URLs are far more ‘searchable’ than others and this may offer you a foothold over the competition. In other words, if you wanted to rank highly for our earlier example – bodybuilding news articles – then having an address like bodybuildingnewsarticles.com or bodybuilding-news-articles.com would be an excellent advantage. This won’t guarantee you’ll rank highly mind and people who have done more work on their SEO could still beat you in other ways – it’s just an honest head-start and advantage. In terms of branding, you would like to settle on a URL that's equivalent to, or almost like, the name of your website. So a business called ‘Spination’ would do alright to urge ‘Spination.com’. Again, this isn’t a requirement but it'll make several things easier – to not mention promoting your site and making it more memorable.

If you don’t have a site name yet, then this is often an honest time to believe it. Aim for something that’s unique and interesting, catchy, and at an equivalent time descriptive. during a perfect scenario, your URL will tell people what your site is about without just being an uneventful description. So actually, ‘bodybuildingnewsarticles.com’ may be a dull URL that’s not great for branding. far better would be something like BroNews, BBNews, or MuscleTalk. this is often easier for creating logos, for creating an impact, and more but it still will offer you some SEO benefit and won’t be too obtuse.

 As for your ‘TLD’ or ‘Top Level Domain’ (the ‘com’ or ‘co.' '.uk’ part), it’s still always preferable to aim for the ‘.com’ if you'll. An exception to the present is that if you’re running an area blog during which case a regional TLD is best. In most cases though, ‘.com’ is that the easiest to recollect, and thus the only to market.