13 Best Blog Platforms To Start Your Blog & How To Choose

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Are you new to the blogging world and overwhelmed by the vast array of available platforms? Choosing the right platform can be challenging for a beginner, especially with the many options and features available. Whether you're looking to explore your creative side, share your expertise, or tap into the lucrative income potential of blogging, finding the best blog platform is crucial. We'll compare the best blog platforms in-depth and recommend which one to use in 2024.

To assist you in navigating this decision-making process, we'll introduce Feather's Notion to blog tool. This resource will help you achieve your objectives by offering a user-friendly platform streamlines your blogging experience. With Notion to blog, you can effectively compare blogging for beginners platforms and receive recommendations on the best choice in 2024, setting you up for blogging success.

How To Choose A Blogging Platform

Key Features to Look for When Choosing a Blogging Platform

Templates/Themes

The backbone of any successful blog is its design. Access to various templates and themes is essential for creating a visually appealing blog that aligns with your niche.

Custom Domain Name

Building your brand is crucial to growing your blog. Look for platforms that allow you to connect your own domain name to establish a unique web presence.

SEO Friendly

Getting your blog noticed by search engines is essential for driving traffic. Choosing a platform with SEO-friendly features and tools will help you rank higher in search engine results.

Monetization Opportunities

Many bloggers aim to turn their passion into a source of income. Selecting a platform that provides various monetization opportunities, such as affiliate marketing and ad placements, will help you generate revenue from your blog.

Performance Insights

Understanding how your content is performing is key to improving your blog. Analytics tools can provide valuable insights into your audience's behavior, helping you create more engaging and relevant content.

Scalability

As your blog grows, you'll need a platform for increased traffic and content. Opt for a platform that offers scalability to ensure seamless growth.

Support

Even the most experienced bloggers need assistance now and then. Choosing a platform with reliable customer support will help you resolve any issues quickly and efficiently.

Ease of Use When Choosing a Blogging Platform

User-Friendly Interface

Starting a blog can be overwhelming, especially for beginners. Look for a platform with an intuitive user interface that simplifies blogging and requires minimal technical expertise.

Customization Options

Customizing your blog's design and layout can make it unique. The best platforms offer a range of customization options, allowing you to personalize your blog to match your brand and style.

Feature Versatility

The more features a platform offers, the more versatile your blog will be. Look for platforms with many features like social media integration, email marketing tools, and e-commerce capabilities.

Integrations When Choosing a Blogging Platform

Third-Party Integrations

Connecting your blog to external tools and services can enhance its functionality and streamline workflow. Choose a platform that offers integrations with popular tools like Google Analytics, MailChimp, and social media platforms.

Plugin Support

Plugins are a great way to add extra functionality to your blog without coding. Look for platforms that support a wide range of plugins to extend your blog's capabilities and enhance the user experience.

API Access

For advanced users, having access to the platform's API can open up a world of possibilities. Opt for a platform that provides API access to enable custom integrations and enhance your blog's performance.

What Is The Best Blogging Platform For You?

When starting a blog, picking a platform that fits your specific needs is important. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned blogger, selecting the right platform can help make your blogging journey more manageable. Here are some factors to consider when determining the best blogging platform.

Ease of Use

Choosing a platform that's easy to set up and use is essential, especially if you're new to blogging. If you don't have coding experience, look for a platform that doesn't require you to code, as developing a blog is already a complex task that doesn't need added complications.

Identifying Your Blog's Purpose

It's crucial to think about the type of blog you want to create. Draw inspiration from blogs you admire, jot down layouts and features you like, and note blog tools you may need as your blog expands. Ask yourself questions like whether you plan to monetize your blog with a newsletter if you're aiming for a multimedia experience or if you're starting a blog to improve your SEO.

Future Goals

Consider what you hope to achieve with your blog. Are you looking to boost your small business’s website SEO, build your reputation, or become a thought leader in your industry? Assess the skills you need to learn to build your blog and how many of those skills can be supported by the blogging platform you choose.

From Notion to Published Content with Feather

Feather is an SEO-friendly blog that allows you to publish blog content through Notion and doesn't require coding or design skills. Feather enables companies to write on Notion and automatically publish to their Feather blog.

Try Feather's notion to blog software for free today create a new account and go from notion to blog in minutes!

Best Blog Host

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Best Blog Host

13 Best Blog Platforms To Start Your Blog

1. Feather: The SEO-Friendly Blogging Platform for Notion Users

Feather is an SEO-friendly blog that allows you to publish blog content through Notion, and it requires no coding or design skills. Feather allows companies to write blog content on Notion and automatically publish it to their Feather blog. Feather allows you to setup a Subfolder blog (domain.com/blog instead of blog.domain.com, because subfolder is better for SEO).

Feather enables companies to get the HubSpot experience through Notion by allowing them to manage all of their CRM and website blog management through Notion. We also offer options to change design with custom CSS, collect Emails, and much more. Write on Notion, and automatically get that published to SEO-friendly blog – Collaborate with the entire team easily during the publishing process.

Try Feather’s notion to blog software for free today — create a new account and go from notion to blog in minutes!

2. SquareSpace: Ideal for Seamless Website Building

Loved by small business owners, SquareSpace is a great platform for blogging beginners. It’s ideal for building a seamless, stunning website with minimal time, effort, and technical knowledge needed. Choose from a range of templates to suit your style and needs and get a free custom domain and decent security and privacy measures. SquareSpace websites are mobile-optimized, so you can meet your audience wherever they are and on the go.

SquareSpace has limited flexibility and functionality for bloggers, especially if you want to build a business from your blog. It’s perfect for helping you get started, but if you want to expand the reach of your blog in the future, you’ll need to opt for a different blogging platform to take it to the next level.

3. WordPress: The Ultimate Blogging Platform for Customization

Creating and managing a blog on WordPress could mean more maintenance than other platforms. Still, it will offer the extensibility and content management features publishers and other businesses need to create a complex blog. WordPress was originally created as a blogging platform with a 4.4/5 rating on G2 with over 8,000 reviews. Though it has evolved into a multi-purpose content management system, it still has many features and themes for blogging.

Extensive Customization Options

WordPress lets you purchase a custom domain and download one of 3,500+ themes specifically designed for blogs — it also lets you add social media buttons, forms, affiliate links, and other features with plugins. The customization options are virtually limitless with the 60,000+ free plugins available.

Maintenance Considerations

With WordPress, you must ensure your theme and plugins are compatible and up-to-date. Otherwise, they can disrupt the user experience or break your site. Other maintenance tasks like finding and fixing broken links, updating the core software, and optimizing your database will also be your responsibility. This can be difficult for site owners who don't have the time or technical expertise to maintain their sites regularly.

4. Jekyll: The Customizable Open-Source Blogging Platform

Unlike many other platforms on this list, Jekyll isn’t a content management system (CMS) but an open-source static site generator built on Ruby programming. If you’re an expert coder, the sky’s the limit when it comes to customizing your Jekyll blog. The platform benefits from an active developer community that offers support, guidance, and resources. The availability of extensive support documentation is a standout feature, providing invaluable assistance for overcoming challenges during the blog-building and optimization process.

Pre-Generated Speed

Jekyll sites are faster than other types of websites because Jekyll pre-generates static HTML files for each page, eliminating the need for on-the-fly database queries and complex processing. This results in quicker load times and improved user experience.

Enhanced User Experience and SEO

Because Jekyll operates without the need for on-the-fly database queries and complex processing, the sites it generates have a rapid loading time that outpaces those built on other blogging platforms. This rapid loading time elevates user engagement and contributes to better search engine rankings, ultimately bolstering the visibility and impact of your developer-centric content.

Built-in Audience and Distraction-Free Writing

Medium is one of the best blogging platforms for writers who want to connect with a large, built-in audience. The platform’s clean and minimalist interface allows writers to focus solely on creating high-quality content without distractions.

Reaching Targeted Readers and Collaboration Opportunities

Medium’s recommendation engine helps writers reach relevant readers based on their interests and reading habits. Medium also offers the ability to join or create publications, fostering niche communities and enabling writers to collaborate and cross-promote their work.

Balancing Customization with Exposure

While Medium may not offer the same level of customization as other platforms, its emphasis on quality writing and engagement makes it an attractive choice for writers seeking exposure and readership.

5. Contently

Contently is a content marketing/blogging platform built for enterprises. It is ideal for enterprises that lack many internal content capabilities. It offers a comprehensive content marketing solution, connecting businesses with talented writers and providing tools for managing the entire content creation process. Contently’s platform streamlines collaboration, ensuring high-quality content delivery.

Contently provides access to a vast network of vetted freelance writers across various industries, making finding the right talent for any project easier. Its user-friendly interface and robust features make it perfect for creating engaging content at scale.

6. Ghost.org

Ghost is a free and open-source blogging platform focusing on speed, safety, and ease of use. It has a clean, simple design, a built-in editor, and advanced options for personalization.

Ghost is perfect for bloggers who want to write in a distraction-free environment and have full control over their blog. But setting up and maintaining Ghost requires technical knowledge, and a third-party hosting provider must be used.

7. Blogger

Blogger is definitely toward the more simple end of the blogging platform spectrum. It’s probably most similar to Medium, except that:

You make money via Google AdSense.

You don’t get access to an “internal audience” like on Medium, so you’ll need to bring in traffic via search engines, social platforms, and other channels.

You can customize your site’s appearance with free templates.

As default, when you create a Blogger account, your domain name will have blogspot.com at the end. You can buy your domain if you want your site to look more legit. And because the platform is owned by Google, it’s compatible with Google Analytics (and some other third-party software).

On the flip side, Google owns any content published on the platform. So, there’s always a chance it could destroy your revenue stream overnight by deleting all your posts.

8. Pixpa

Pixpa is a great option for bloggers in creative fields who want to showcase their work and share their ideas through attractive and professionally designed blogs. The platform offers a user-friendly interface and a wide range of templates, allowing bloggers to customize their blogs to match their own style and branding.

Effortless Blog Creation and Customization

Pixpa's integrated blogging feature provides bloggers a convenient and user-friendly platform to create, manage, and optimize their blogs. With Pixpa’s wide range of 150+ professionally designed templates, bloggers can easily customize their blog layouts, colors, fonts, and more to create a unique and engaging online presence.

All-in-One Blogging Platform

Pixpa offers essential features for content organization, customization, SEO optimization, and social sharing, making it a comprehensive solution for bloggers. Its e-commerce integration and 100+ built-in apps enable bloggers to power up their blogs, websites, and online stores—all in one place.

While Pixpa offers easy-to-use, out-of-the-box blogging capabilities, it may not provide the advanced customizations and features in dedicated blogging platforms such as Feather or WordPress.

9. Hubpages

HubPages is another blog platform that’s similar to Medium. You create an account using your email address and instantly get a mini-blog on which to publish content.

HubPages’ biggest differentiator definitely lies in its revenue-sharing model. Writers get to keep 60% of the ad revenues generated from adverts on their mini-blog, with all earnings paid via PayPal once they hit the minimum threshold of $50. You can also top up your income through affiliate marketing — so unlike Medium and Blogger, you’re not reliant on a single revenue stream.

10. Tumblr

The popular microblogging network Tumblr is owned by Automattic and hosts over 529 million blogs. Tumblr differs from other blogging sites because it works like a social networking site where users can post multimedia and other content.

Users can subscribe to other blogs, reblog, like posts, and leave comments on other blogs. Like social networking sites, Tumblr users can add tags to their posts to help their followers find posts about important topics. Users can even set up their posts to go out later.

11. CMS Hub

Created by the clever people at HubSpot, CMS Hub is a cloud-based content management platform built with marketing in mind. When it comes to the best blogging platforms, Hubspot’s CMS Hub has a lot to offer in terms of SEO features and data tracking.

Marketing-Focused Optimization

The CMS Hub is all about optimizing your blog for more marketing success – and it includes helpful tools like a fully integrated CRM and recommendations to improve your SEO. With their adaptive testing tool, you can also test up to 5 versions of one page to see which performs best, allowing you to optimize.

User-Friendly Content Creation

This blogging platform includes a drag-and-drop editor, so you don’t need to worry about having coding experience or a developer on hand to help you. All templates are responsive so your audience can see your content across any device (another plus for your SEO).

12. LinkedIn

While LinkedIn is obviously best known as a B2B-focused social network, it also has a blogging platform for thought leaders to publish and share content.

The advantages of LinkedIn are obvious. It gives you access to a huge audience, with 810 million people in more than 200 countries using LinkedIn. It’s also easy to amplify your content by sharing it on LinkedIn.There are a few practical drawbacks to blogging on LinkedIn. For starters, you can’t create a domain. And there’s no way to “directly” monetize your content.

Limited Monetization Options

You can’t run your own ads in your blog posts, and you don’t get paid per view like on Medium. Really, your only option is to charge businesses or individuals to create LinkedIn content on their behalf or promote their products.

13. Drupal

As an open-source Content Management System (CMS) with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, Drupal stands out as the optimal blogging platform for enterprises. That's a lot of jargon, so let's break it down to help you better understand why businesses like Nokia, NASA, and Charles Schwab use Drupal. Open-source is code you can freely use, modify, and distribute. In the context of Drupal, its open-source CMS empowers enterprises to develop blogs that fit their purposes without the constraints that proprietary software imposes.

WYSIWYG means that the content you edit within Drupal's editor mirrors its final layout upon publication. Essentially, Drupal's editor provides a means to visualize and edit content exactly as readers will see it. When you combine those two features, you get a flexible toolset that an enterprise's technical team can develop freely and its content team can easily use, even if they aren’t tech-savvy.

Best CMS Systems

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Webflow Alternatives

Weebly Alternatives

Blogger Alternatives

Wix vs Web.com

Squarespace Alternatives

Wordpress Alternatives

Alternatives To Wix

Medium Alternatives

3 Best Free Blogging Platforms

1. Wix - The Quick and Easy Blogging Platform

Wix is a platform for bloggers who want an easy way to launch a blog. With Wix, you can quickly build a blog or any other type of website using simple drag-and-drop tools. This popular platform offers an intuitive interface, a wide range of templates, 500MB of online storage, and 1GB of bandwidth for free. While the free account is limited, you can upgrade to unlock additional features like removing ads and a Wix domain name and accessing an online store and Google Analytics.

2. Weebly - The Easy-to-Use Blogging Platform

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the idea of building a blog, Weebly is a fantastic option. Weebly is known for its user-friendly interface, making it easier to use than Wix. Like Wix, Weebly utilizes a drag-and-drop system for easy website creation but offers fewer customization options.

This simplicity results in a less cluttered and more user-friendly interface, making it perfect for those seeking a free blogging platform. The free plan includes a Weebly ad on your site, a branded domain name, customizable layouts, free themes, and social sharing features. Upgrading to a paid plan will remove ads, provide a custom domain, and offer more customization options.

3. Substack - The Dual-Purpose Blogging Platform

Substack provides a unique solution for artists and designers looking to promote themselves through email newsletters. While Substack primarily focuses on newsletters, it also offers a web page to showcase all past newsletters in one location, effectively serving as a free blogging platform.

While Substack's blog features are minimal due to its focus on emails, you will receive a basic content management system with text formatting tools and the ability to embed images, videos, and other web content. Substack is free if your posts or emails are free to read. Substack will only take a percentage of the proceeds when you begin charging for subscriptions.

3 Tips To Start Blogging Now

1. Finding Your Niche

When starting a blog, finding a niche that resonates with your interests, expertise, and profitability is crucial. Your niche should be a specific focus for your blog and will shape all your content. Keywords and competitor analysis will help you understand the blogging landscape in your chosen niche.

2. Building a Community

Building a community around your blog is key to success in today's digital age. You need to understand your target audience's needs, wants, and demographics to attract and keep readers engaged. Writing content for your ideal reader will create a loyal following. In the future, you can create dedicated community spaces for your audience.

3. Thinking About Monetization

Monetization strategies are essential to consider when starting a blog. Popular strategies include ads, affiliate links, digital products, and memberships/subscriptions. When choosing a blogging platform, ensure it supports your chosen monetization strategies. For example, if you want to promote digital products, choose a platform that allows for easy integration.

Go From Notion to Blog With Ease Today with Feather

Feather is the best blog platform for SEO optimization for several reasons. First and foremost, Feather is an SEO-friendly blog platform that allows you to publish blog content through Notion. This means that companies can write blog content on Notion and automatically publish it on their Feather blog without the need for any coding or design skills. This seamless integration between Notion and Feather saves time and makes it easy for companies to manage their blog content.

Strengthening SEO with a Clean Blog Structure

Another reason Feather is the best blog platform for SEO optimization is that it allows you to set up a Subfolder blog. This means that your blog will be located at domain.com/blog, rather than blog.domain.com. This is important because having your blog on a subfolder is better for SEO, as it consolidates your website's content onto a single domain. This helps to improve your website's overall SEO performance and makes it easier for search engines to index your content.

HubSpot Integration Within Notion

Feather enables you to get the HubSpot experience through Notion by allowing you to manage your CRM and website blog management through Notion. This makes it easy to integrate your blog content with your overall marketing strategy and ensures that your blog content is aligned with your business goals.

Branding and Audience Engagement

Feather also offers a range of customization options, such as the ability to change the design of your blog with custom CSS. This allows you to create a blog that reflects your brand and is aesthetically pleasing to your target audience. Feather also allows you to collect emails from your blog visitors, which is an important part of building your email list and growing your audience.

All-in-One SEO Powerhouse

Feather is the best blog platform for SEO optimization because it allows you to write on Notion and automatically publish your content to an SEO-friendly blog, set up a Subfolder blog for better SEO performance, integrate your blog content with your overall marketing strategy, customize the design of your blog, and collect emails from your blog visitors. If you want to take your blog to the next level and improve your website's SEO performance, you should try Feather's notion to blog software for free today!