These days, I frequently make presentations about blogging.

Among the questions that come up most frequently are:

The three most popular blogging platforms are WordPress, TypePad, and Blogger.

Blogger is owned and managed by Google. It’s an entirely ‘free’ service, including hosting. It’s the simplest to set up. You can get started in a matter of minutes.

TypePad is paid service with five levels of subscription, offering different levels of features and capacity. TypePad includes hosting, as part of their service. TypePad offers many templates to get you going quickly.

WordPress is an open-source platform that is free to the user. Many hosting services offer a 1-click installation of WordPress. WordPress.com offers free hosting for a WordPress site; however, that comes with a variety of rules, which may or may not appeal to you.

As well, WordPress has a huge community of developers offering free and paid templates for almost any configuration of blog you might prefer.

OPINION AND RECOMMENDATION: One of the most important elements of a blog is driving traffic to your website. That is best done when your blog is hosted on your website server. Your website then gets ‘credit’ from search engines for traffic to your blog. Just having a link from your ‘Blogger-blog,’ for example, does not serve you as well as traffic to your WordPress blog, hosted on your website server.

My preferred set up is a WordPress blog, hosted on your website server. It requires a little bit of technical knowledge, but not much. Second choice is TypePad. Blogger works fine as training wheels, but doesn’t give you the benefit of sharing traffic to your website.

I would suggest using short, free trials for all three, and then make your own decision.

It may be a “three-bears situation.” Too hot, too cold, just right.

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written by Andy Ebon \\ tags: blogging, website traffic, wedding marketing