Guest Post – Our host is Robert Espinosa, starting with the ones you may be familiar with to some you may not have heard of Robert lists the best platforms for bloggers. See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.
Blogging has turned out to be a powerful tool to share thoughts and ideas on the topics that you are passionate about. Moreover, keeping a blog is the best way to polish your writing skills, drive traffic to a website and maintain good relations with the customers. If you are not in the condition to buy your own hosting right away, you can opt for a free blogging platform.
If you have decided to setup a blog, but cannot make up your mind about which blogging site is right for you then check out these well-known and most stable free blogging platforms that offer their users with many advanced features. These blogging sites usually come with both free as well as premium plans.
WordPress (Alexa Rank: 22, Page Rank: 9)
Number one on my list, WordPress is the grandmaster of all the free blogging platforms to start your own blog site. It provides free as well as paid blogging facilities to thousands of bloggers worldwide. WordPress is popular among technical as well as non-technical bloggers due to its large number of useful features even in its free version such as anti-spam filters, traffic stats, hundreds of elegant themes and much more. Various blogs like CNN’s Political Ticker, Flicker, etc. also use this for their blogging needs. If you have planned to create a blog, WordPress is the best choice for you.
Blogger (Alexa Rank: 44, Page Rank: 9)
Blogger is a free, cool and versatile blogging platform that offers quite a lot of stunning features to its users. Mostly newbies opting for Blogger interface due to its ease set up process. Owned by Google, blogger allows you to go from blog-less to publishing the post in less than 15 minutes. In addition, it also provides many templates widgets, geo-tagging for location-based blogging and lots more options. Therefore, if you need a versatile platform that helps you to get great search engine optimization power then blogger is a good choice.
Tumblr (Alexa Rank: 32, Page Rank: 8)
Another extremely popular free blogging site is Tumblr that is a great combination of a full-fledged blog and a Twitter feed. This popular microblogging portal is great for people who want to post short and frequent content that are normally longer than Twitter feeds but not as long as a regular blog post. Packed with numerous smart and exciting features like audio blogging, free custom domains, blogging themes, this platform takes just one minute for free login. In this blogging platform, you can post a lot of images along with short text posts.
LiveJournal (Alexa Rank: 129, Page Rank: 8)
LiveJournal (short form LJ) is a user-friendly blogging platform owned by SUP Media that makes it feel somewhat like a social network. It allows you to create your own networks, participate in polls, and interact with other users alongside blogging. As with many other social networks, a wide variety of political intellectuals also use this service for commentary, especially in Russia, where it associates with an online newspaper Gazeta.ru.
Weebly (Alexa Rank: 313, Page Rank: 8)
If you are planning to start with a blog and then later opt for building website then Weebly will be a right choice for you. It offers a variety of features like video/audio maps, image galleries, drag and drop options, slideshows to name a few. With the ease of use along with chance of getting high traffic, Weebly is a great pick for any blogger.
Webs (Alexa Rank: 385, Page Rank: 7)
Webs.com is a web building interface and the blogging platform just like Weebly. It is an easy to use blogging platform, which allows you to build a free website and do blogging in no time. You can add forum, photo gallery, videos, and much more in this blogging platform. Its free package contains one website together with mobile version of your site with ads, limited to 40 MB data storage capacity.
TypePad (Alexa Rank: 430, Page Rank: 8)
Type Pad Micro is an extremely functional blogging platform that is used by most of the professional bloggers like Seth Godin, the author of various best-selling books. Type Pad is also a very solid choice for the newbie due to its ease of set up and reliability. It is a kind of hybrid of Movable type blogging platform in which you can export and import content from various other blogging sites. It is a best blogging site for the bloggers who don’t want to fiddle with design. However, it is simple and easy to use but in terms of themes and other features, Type Pad does not offer much to satisfy the most basic blogger.
Blog (Alexa Rank: 835, Page Rank: 6)
Blog.com is another popular WordPress-powered free blogging platform that was established in the year 2005. It offers a variety of amazing free premium themes and advanced plugins to its bloggers. However, there are some downsides of this highly sophisticated blogging software: A lot of ads in its free version, Its’ disk storage capacity just limits to 2 GB.
Bravenet (Alexa Rank: 5355, Page Rank: 7)
This blogging platform also offers many domain and email marketing solutions. Moreover, you can also install user-friendly free web blogging software that will assist you access to some powerful functions. Upon log in, users get 1.5GB monthly bandwidth and 50 MB disk storage free.
MovableType (Alexa Rank: 168318, Page Rank: 8)
Last but not least, Movabletype is a popular free blogging software owned by a recognized company Six Apart. This blog is widely used by experts and professional bloggers due to its several outstanding features. This blogging site has also an ability to host multiple blogs in a single account. It comes in mainly two versions- the .com for those who want free blog hosting service and .org for those who want to host their blogging platform using external services for better control. Its new version Movable Type 5.2.2 has been released in December. Written in Perl, Movabletype supports the Oracle database, and Microsoft SQL Server.
So guys, hope this list will helpful for you! Let us know in the comments below about the blogging platforms you are using right now or you.
By Guest Author – Robert Espinosa is a professional Internet Marketer, a technology geek and writer. He writes for various technology sites to share his ideas and knowledge with others. He is also an avid reader and therefore often recommends some good books in his blogs.
