Blogging is a top work-from-home job and is a great way to engage with an audience and gain a following by talking about the things you love most.

There are a lot of different ways to create a blog, however, and the fist thing you need to do is get started on an online platform. Here are a list of the 5 best platforms to help kick start your blog.

Cred: @anete_lusina

WordPress.org is the world’s most popular blogging software and has the biggest community of online publishers.

WordPress has been around for a long time now, starting all the way back in 2003 during the dawn of the internet.

Today, WordPress powers more than 43% of all websites online. WordPress is an amazing, free platform to use if you are a beginner to blogging.

Pros:

  • Gives you control over every aspect of your website by allowing you to customize and personalize everything you need.
  • Gives you a platform with opportunities to grow your website by adding additional features such as forums, an online store, paid memberships, and ad revenue.
  • While WordPress does have additional features that you have to pay for, you are provided with thousands of free themes, allowing you to create a beautiful, costume, and personalized website for your fitting.
  • You also get access to more than 59,000 free WordPress plugins for the WordPress app apps with features like contact forms, galleries, and more.
  • WordPress is one of the most search engine friendly, allowing you to create URLs and different tags for your posts that are all optimizable.
  • Google Analytics powered websites are easily enabled allowing you to see the stats for your website helping you grow your blog traffic and subscribers.
  • WordPress has options to easily embed videos, social media feeds, Google Adsense, graphs, charts, and more.

Web.com

Web.com is a free platform where you can create a domain for your blog or, if you already have one, continue using that already existing domain.

If you like to continue using this platform, there is a very affordable starting fee of $1.95 per month where you are able to unlock all of their easy-to-use features.

Pros:

  • Web.com has a user-friendly drag and drop website builder where you can customize your blog in any way you would like.
  • There are also dozens of fully customizable templates you can access for your blog.
  • Web.com allows you to easily set up everything you need to create a blog you want and takes care of all the technical details of hosting your website.
  • If anything is to go wrong there are 24/7 customer support services available via phone, live chat, and email and Web.com will fix your issues as soon as possible.
  • Web.com gives you a platform where there is plenty of space to store files, share documents, and upload website media.
  • They also have thousands of royalty-free images that you can use to make your blog pop.

Wix

Cred: @domenicoloia

Created in 2006, Wix is one of the top most popular free website builder platforms that give you the freedom to create, design, manage and develop your web presence exactly the way you want at a very high quality.

Blogging is one of the best self-employed businesses, and it shows that Wix currently has over 110 million users across the globe.

Pros:

  • Wicks has over 500 customizable templates that you can choose from completely for free.
  • They also have a mobile app that you can download, where anything you add or personalize on your phone is synced to your online account.
  • Wicks offers customized SEOs for search engines that are specifically designed for you by answering a few questions about your website, location, and keywords.
  • They include a drag and drop technology that lets you edit your site however you’d like and every design element is completely customizable allowing you to resize, recolor, rotate, and align elements to make your blog look just right.
  • Allows you to build your e-commerce business online we can get connected to multiple channels that you can advertise on, add links, and accepts secure online payments to increase your revenue.

Blogger

Blogger is a free blogging service by Google, which means that all you need is a Google account to start a free blog on this platform.

First launched in 1999 by Pyra Labs, Blogger is one of the earliest blogging platforms in existence.

It was bought by Google in 2003, making it very simple to set up a blog and have access to all Google has to offer. Today there are millions of active users on this platform.

Pros:

  • Blogger allows you to create a beautiful blog that fits your style by providing you with hundreds of easy-to-use templates that are all optimizable and customizable.
  • You are given a free domain by creating a website on blogger, but you can also create a customized domain if you’d like.
  • A lot of ad revenue is supported by Blogger. Because this platform is owned by Google, Google AdSense automatically displays relevant targeted ads on your blog so that you can earn more income by posting about your passions.
  • Similar to YouTube, Blogger has a built-in analytics algorithm so you can keep track of your audience engagement.
  • Blogger allows you to safely store thousands of posts, photos, videos and so much more via your Google account completely for free

Squarespace

Created in 2003, Squarespace is a website building service that allows you to create beautiful websites and gives you connections with many other users on the site allowing you to expand your blog. Squarespace currently powers millions of websites online.

  • Squarespace offers industry-leading website templates, designer fonts, and color palettes that are all customizable to best fit your personal style and professional needs.
  • Offers an easy-to-use drag-and-drop system where you can personalize every aspect of your website to make it fit exactly for you.
  • You are also able to explore a wide variety of tools that you want to add to your website, whether it’s setting up an online store, booking services, or adding your favorite third-party extensions allowing you to essentially sell anything on your website.
  • When you create a website with Squarespace, you get free unlimited hosting, industry-grade security, and dependable resources to help you succeed. You can count on personalized support around the clock by email, live chat, or by joining a live webinar.