In this article, I would specifically want to narrow in and focus on blogging. Best Blogging Platforms To Make Money? What are the various use cases? Why should you use this platform over this platform?
As I experienced I wrote on some of the Best Blogging Platforms To Make Money, which were defined below.
- WordPress.Com
- WordPress.Org
- Blogger.Com
- Wix.Com
- Squarespace.Com
- Tumbler.Com
- Ghost.Org
- Medium.Com
Also Read: Ways To Earn Through Facebook Monetization
WordPress.COM
The dot-com version of WordPress is a website builder because there’s the dot org version. For example, start with Bluehost and build your WordPress-powered website and people get confused that 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 similar thing. Now what wordpress.com is just full access to WordPress but you’re on their own specific shared servers. 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.
For instance, 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 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”. 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 site ground or name here or whatever and pay a much lower fee to have multiple websites and use WordPress and have full-featured full access to it.
So that’s why everyone 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 you know plugins and themes like everything’s kind of built-in.
The themes are all built-in but for me, this is a deal-breaker because the main plugin that I like is uh Yoast SEO, which gives you a little bit more control over the On-Page SEO of your website.
I also like using something like Pretty Links to make nice-looking affiliate links and kind of cloak everything.
Also just for tracking on the back end, you can’t do any of that stuff with a Premium plan, because you can’t install plugins.
So this plan is good if you’re just looking to have a casual blog that sort of thing and that you’re cool with just like paying a little bit of a small fee it’s just a personal website.
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.
Again totally up to you I’m just trying to help you make a purchase decision.
WordPress.Org
Now anyways this whole page exists just you know as a sales page for WordPress. So this is the open-source software, that you install on a shared host. So what’s a shared host you have to go somewhere like Bluehost which is an independent web host.
You go here you click on get started then over here, you choose a hosting package, then you submit payments. Then you have your own server and then you can install WordPress. 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.
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 wordpress.com. It was literally for one website at that price point whereas you can pay.
You can be paying 545 multiple websites. You know 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.
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 simple and intuitive setup.
WordPress is easy the SSL certificate is automatically done for you very simple. 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.
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 to.
Blogger.Com
Best Blogging Platforms To Make Money Blogger.Com. I love Blogger obviously because I use it. I have a bunch of training articles 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 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. 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. We have to pay four dollars a year in order to set a custom domain name, no you can just do it with a blogger for free and you can engage in various Monetization Strategies.
Read: Blogging Tips To Know Before Start Blogging
Wix.Com
Wix website builder actually has vastly improved the 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.
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. It’s out of that you have granular control over your SEO.
So just simply 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 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 you have full control over the way your blog looks and how each individual blog post looks. That’s why I really like Wix literally my only issue with Wix is just the lack of ability to set up 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 blogging website.
Squarespace.com
Squarespace you can totally block Squarespace and Wix are kind of the same with regards to their blogging aspect. 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 to be a little bit more focused on templates and replacing elements. Within the templates and changing colours really kind of simple but really effective and nice for a beginner.
Tumblr.com
Tumblr I would describe it as 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. From the text, photos, quotes, chat, audio, video, etc. Like they said you can put anything you want here really easily.
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 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 then you want to maybe consider checking out Tumblr.
Ghost.Org
Ghost.org so this is pretty amazing it was launched back in 2013 on Kickstarter of all things. 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 organizations 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 the browser and then this is a very successful website. So web page design by the ghost, 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.
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. In the integration section, they have a bunch of popular integrations with numerous companies very easily.
Medium.Com
Medium.com so I think a lot of you are familiar with this website because it kind of integrates well with Twitter and yeah I’ve used medium in the past. It’s always been like a subdomain a medium just a place to share thoughts of like whatever I wanted. But the medium has definitely changed over time. So the 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. 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.
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.
If those people are paying members and 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, the same type of deal, not necessarily minutes. 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. 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. 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 the medium is an interesting website to look at and it may be the right blogging platform for you.