How to Choose a Good Blogging Platform

Many digital marketers are inevitably into blogging for business nowadays. In fact, you cannot be in content marketing if you are not blogging. Bloggers have discovered that blogging is one great way to connect with customers and to attract potential customers even though many bloggers tend to blog for many and varied reasons all connected one way or another with content marketing. If you write a blog, it can help your business to create a following and to establish your brand. Blogging is one veritable marketing tool you can effectively use to increase traffic to your website.

Even if you are a good blogger and you do not have a credible platform to build your blog on, it will not be effective. Not to worry though! Online, there’s a very wide range of blogging platforms you can always choose from.



To help you make a good choice, you must put the following into consideration.

Beginner-Friendliness

If you are a blogging newbie, you cannot aim to compete with the pros in their blogging platforms. All you need is a blogging solution that is easy to set up, manage, and doesn’t need complicated coding skills to run. Easy i suppose? A good platform for you must have 24/7 support for your efforts in case you have issues as you blog along.

Cost Consideration 

Cost consideration is inevitable in any business proposition. The blogging platform you need must be budget friendly and gives real value for money. Even if the platform is free, it is worth nothing if it doesn’t meet your blogging needs.

Monetization Options

Blogging has become a money making business for many bloggers in this age and time. Before you start a blog on any platform, it is good to consider if the platform will allow you to monetize your blog and earn money from it.

Maintenance and Versatility

Every blogger needs a blogging platform that will in no way impede the workflow of the blog. It must have tools and features that are simple to use and helpful with hands-on blogging solutions. You can best avoid blogging platforms that are unduly restrictive and not too user-friendly.

Features Flexibility and Extendability

As your blogging experience increases and your business expands, it is inevitable that the needs and requirements in your blogging site will change as well. The platform you need is the one that will allow you make these necessary changes easily as the need arises. Even if you choose to modify or overhaul your blog design, add features, or make other drastic changes, a good blogging platform must allow you make these changes with ease.

Recommendation

No matter what your skills, goals and requirements for blogging are, your blog can be classified into one or more of the following categories:

Personal blogs
Business blogs
Online businesses
Small hobby blogs

For these reasons, your blog can best be hosted by any of the following platforms. Looking through the platforms and taking into account the requirements to help you decide as earlier canvassed; you can easily make a choice from any of the following tested and reputable blogging platforms which I recommend.

WordPress.org – Best for Self-Hosted Blogs.
WordPress.com – Best for Free Blogs.
Wix.com – Best for Small Websites.
Joomla.com.
Medium.com. 
Ghost.org. 
Squarespace.com.
Weebly.com.
Blogger.com
Tumblr.com

Decide now, sign-up and host your blog. Happy and profitable blogging!

4 Digital Marketing Tips to Give Your Business a Boost

Digital marketing is hugely effective because of the internet. It takes some techniques and strategies for digital marketing to be effective though. Many digital marketers tend to do about the same things to promote their businesses but those who do these same things slightly differently tend to get the best results. What is paramount however is to make sure the digital marketing techniques you adopt help you to get the most out of your marketing budget while at the same time maximizing your results. The bottomline is to get as much traffic as possible 24/7 to your business. What helps to get this much needed traffic better is what is advisable to do.


 
Here are some basic techniques that have been proven to work well in this quest.

Build a Credible Mailing List

A mailing list is one very valuable asset in digital marketing. It may take quite a while to build up a credible mailing list of your own but once in place, it is worth the efforts. Even if you don’t have your own mailing list, you can sign up for credible mailing services like Aweber or Mail Chimp to set up your email marketing campaigns and you get good results too. That done, the next step is to write some good content in form of articles as well as promo materials which you can mail regularly to your email subscribers. This is one extremely powerful method you can use to build up traffic and leads for your business.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO

SEO techniques help your content to gain visibility on Search Engines. SEO is one technical way of using keywords on your content to attract the attention of Search Engines. If properly done, the Search Engines can rank the material high in their search results pages and that increases the visibility of these materials to internet search users. Ultimately, what that means is more organic traffic to your website. If you are unable to do it yourself, you can get the services of a professional webmaster for a small fee to help you out at optimizing your website content. It is well worth it when compared to the benefits your business will derive from these SEO techniques.

Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

Pay-per-click campaigns may be old school traffic methods but they are still very effective to help bring in new customers to your business. A careful use of search terms and keywords in your content helps to get very good results in PPC campaigns. If properly used, chances are good that you can always get your ads and promos right in front of your potential customers fairly easily. That is good for traffic, leads and even sales.

Use Articles Directories

The essence of submitting your articles to article directories is to create maximum visibility for the materials. The more visible your materials become, the better they attract traffic. This method is also one of the oldest online marketing methods digital marketers still like to use to attract traffic because it works. For optimal results, it is always advisable to submit your content to several reputable articles directories many of which may only require free submission. You may however need to pay a small fee to some top articles directories if you want to use specific keywords from their keyword lists. By submitting your articles to articles directories, and putting your website URL linked right into each article, you are making it possible to get linkback clicks to your website from the articles readers. That is good for traffic.