Brandon Leibowitz — March 10, 2018 — March 10, 2018
Do you want to start a blog for fun and generate some unbranded traffic? Or do you need a site where you can share information and flex your muscles as a thought leader to drive readers to your e-commerce site?
Individuals, businesses, and everyone in between and beyond have different needs for a blogging platform, and the specific reasons why you may want a blog should affect your platform choice. Ask yourself the following three questions to help you choose the right cloud-based blogging platform for your needs.
Do You Want to Start Blogging Today?
Beginners who want a blog for professional or personal use, but don’t have many needs outside of putting virtual pen to virtual paper, can benefit from a straightforward platform that requires no coding to get started. Although you may find some restrictions in terms of processing power, storage space, and appearance of the site, you’ll find plenty of platform options when your priority simply is to publish what’s on your mind.
Choices such as Blogger, Tumblr, and Medium require minimum blogging platform setup and no coding skills. Although premade templates limit your ability to change how your blog looks, you can easily sign up for an account and start posting today. These options also have social tools, which make your blogs easy to share across any other social media accounts you have.
What Changes Will You Make to Your Blog in the Future?
Perhaps you want to start a blog casually for now, but you are interested in adding more functionality in the future. Or maybe you’re a business owner who will add a website to your blog or need an account that staff writers and social media managers will eventually use. If so, you’ll need something beyond what many free platforms provide.
WordPress.org and Squarespace are good choices for small businesses or beginning bloggers who would like to take advantage of more site features in the future. Both are easy to integrate with an e-commerce store. With WordPress, you’ll need to handle backups and data security on your own. If you blog with one of these platforms and start accepting payments or storing customer info in cloud services like AWS, consider working with a cloud access security broker to ensure that you’re customer data is kept secure in the cloud.
How Much Storage Space Will You Need?
Pay attention to how much storage comes with your blog, especially before going through the trouble of creating an account on a free site. WordPress.com, for example, offers basic services for free with the option to add more storage. This option can be good for a contractor who needs storage for many high-quality photos. Freelance photographers who want to blog and share their work may also benefit most from Tumblr because of its social tools and excellent support for visual content.
Every blogger has distinct needs. Think carefully about how much work you want to invest in to start blogging, how much control you want over how your blog pages look, and whether you’ll need support for items related to running a business. Answer the questions above and keep these recommendations in mind as you continue your search for the right blogging platform.
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